STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF PUBLIC TRANSPORT PASSENGER CONTACTS ON URBAN ROUTES

Abstract

During the outbreak of the global COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, urban mass passenger transport was considered one of the factors contributing to the spread of infection among the urban population. Moving in the limited space and volume of public transport cabins, passengers come into contact with each other directly or indirectly through the contact surfaces of cabin elements, which creates favorable conditions for the transmission of the disease from a sick person to a healthy person. In an attempt to reduce the risk of passenger disease, local authorities and transport operators have introduced various restrictions on passenger access to public transport services – from limiting the maximum number of passengers in the cabin to completely stopping passenger services on certain city routes. However, the effectiveness of these measures and their impact on the spread of infection remains unclear. The article is devoted to the statistical analysis of the indicators of passenger contacts among themselves while using the services of urban public transport in order to quantify them for use in passenger disease risk models and probabilistic models of the spread of infections, as well as to substantiate the effectiveness of the introduction of organizational and technological measures for the use of public transport during pandemics and epidemics. Based on the results of the survey of passenger flows on four bus routes of the city of Zaporizhzhia with rolling stock of different passenger capacity, performed by the tabular method, and modeling on their basis the route matrix of inter-stop passenger correspondences, statistical patterns of the dependence of the number of passenger contacts among themselves and the average number of contacts of one passenger during the trip on the volume of transportation on the routes per trip were established. It was established that the random variable of the average number of passenger contacts, attributed to the passenger capacity of the rolling stock, is satisfactorily described by the gamma distribution law, the main statistics and parameters of the gamma distribution of this random variable were obtained.