Megan Smirti Ryerson

Intercity bus providers have recently closed a number of downtown bus stations. We consider station relocation as an inferential opportunity to explore changes in accessibility to intercity bus services. Our case study is Cleveland, OH where the downtown Greyhound station recently moved near the region’s major airport. Using data from metro-Cleveland, we modify an extant air travel metric to explore how access to intercity bus changes by local access mode in tandem with station relocation. We also note the severe data limitations facing intercity bus research and the need for new data to improve future work.

Timely access to driver education and training is a critical, often overlooked factor in youth mobility and transportation equity in the United States. These programs support learning to drive safe...

The disproportionately high crash rates among young drivers in the U.S. stem from a complex interaction of individual maturity, driving skills, vehicle dynamics, social and financial backgrounds, and environmental factors. Research has found that some of these factors disproportionately affect economically disadvantaged groups in various rural/urban settings. Driver education and training have been employed in many states as mandatory for under-18-years-old drivers to secure junior licenses to equip them with safe driving skills. However, there is a gap in understanding how driver training, economic factors, and urbanicity correlate with developing specific driving skills among young drivers. This study leverages a unique dataset from Ohio, comprising Virtual Driving Assessment (VDA)-measured skills, driver licensing data, and home Census tract characteristics from 2017 to 2019 to analyze 22,490 young drivers aged under 25 years. We analyzed the data using visualization tools and inferential statistics to understand the differences in young drivers’ new skills by three separate variables: their completion of driver training and young driver licensure (DTYL) (licensed before 18 years old), urbanicity of residence, and home neighborhood income level. Results indicated that formal DTYL correlated with better adherence to traffic regulations, consistent braking, and lane position control. Young drivers from lower-income neighborhoods exhibited skill deficiencies in traffic rule compliance, throttle control, and lane management, potentially because of limited access to quality training and vehicle safety features. Conversely, rural young drivers excelled in consistent speed management and traffic rule adherence. These insights underscore the necessity to reevaluate driver education curricula and roadway design to align more closely with comprehensive safety outcomes, and to enhance young drivers’ safety awareness and skill proficiency.

Disruptions in the National Airspace System (NAS) lead to significant losses to air traffic system participants and raise public concerns. We apply two methods, cluster analysis and anomaly detection models, to identify operational disruptions with geographical patterns in the NAS since 2010. We identify four types and twelve categories of days of operations, distinguished according to air traffic system operational performance and geographical patterns of disruptions. Two clusters--NAS Disruption and East Super Disruption, accounting for 0.8% and 1.2% of the days respectively, represent the most disrupted days of operations in U.S. air traffic system. Another 16.5% of days feature less severe but still significant disruptions focused on certain regions of the NAS, while on the remaining 81.5% of days the NAS operates relatively smoothly. Anomaly detection results show good agreement with cluster results and further distinguish days in the same cluster by severity of disruptions. Results show an increasing trend in frequency of disruptions especially post-COVID. Additionally, disruptions happen most frequently in the summer and winter.

The role of engineering, through infrastructure design, is known to influence safe driving behavior generally, yet the areas of possible intervention that could improve safe outcomes for teens are less understood. It is critical to identify interventions specific to teens, as they have different driving risk factors than more seasoned drivers, and motor vehicle crashes are the second leading cause of death among teens in the United States. We examined 5,210 fatal crashes from 2015 to 2019 in Ohio using Fatality Analysis Reporting System data. We employed multinomial logistic regression to associate the likelihood of fatal crashes involving younger teens (16 to 17 years old) or older teens (18 to 19 years old) relative to adults (20 years and older) with built environment, socioeconomic, and roadway characteristics at crash locations. Separating crashes into the two groups of teens allowed us to distinguish the possible impact of training, as younger teens are mandated to undergo driving education and behind-the-wheel training under Ohio’s graduated driver licensing laws. We found that compared with neighborhood socioeconomics, built environment factors were more significant predictors of the likelihood of fatal crashes involving younger teens compared with adults. Specifically, fatal crashes at locations with lower road density and more diverse land use were more likely to involve younger teens. Although these results could be related to a mix of younger teen driver behavior and exposure factors, the finding highlights that improving the safety of local roads in urban and rural settings could help stem teen driving fatalities.

It remains unclear whether teens living in neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status and poorer access to driver training (i.e., Driver Training Deserts) have lower probabilities of taking training (DT) and securing a young driver's license. Using a teen driver dataset in the Columbus, OH MSA, we found teens residing in DTDs have on average 25% lower probabilities of DT and licensure than teens in non-DTDs. There is spatial clustering of the probabilities of DT and licensure. Our findings are helping to inform the distribution of a scholarship program in Ohio that aims to improve access to DT for lower-income teens.

The 2022 Southwest Airlines Scheduling Crisis, resulting in approximately 15 000 flight cancellations, demonstrates the challenges of structuring infrastructure systems and their knowledge-making processes for increasingly disruptive conditions. While the point-to-point configuration was the focus of immediate assessments of the failure, it became rapidly evident that the crew-assignment software was unable to operate effectively due to the scale of disruption. The airline failed to recognize environmental shifts associated with internal and external complexity, leaving operations vulnerable to a known potential risk: computer and telecommunications failures due to an extreme weather event resulting in knowledge systems failures. The cascading failures of the crisis emphasize the necessity to invest in adaptive capacity prior to catastrophic events and provide a lesson to other infrastructure managers pursuing resilience in the face of increasingly uncertain environments.