2023/10/11 by Nan Zhang, Dániel Hörcher, Zhang, Nan +5
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Applications (stat.AP) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis #Traffic Prediction and Management Techniques #Transportation Planning and Optimization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.07514
openalex publication_date 2023/10/11 · openalex created_date 2023/10/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Urban metro systems move vast numbers of passengers with a high level of efficiency in resource use, but frequently experience disruptions that result in delays, crowding, and deterioration in passenger satisfaction and patronage. To quantify these adverse consequences, this paper presents a novel, data-driven causal inference framework to measure metro resilience by estimating both the direct and spillover effects of service disruptions on passenger demand, journey time, travel speed and on-board crowding. By integrating high-frequency smart card data into a synthetic control design, we use weighted non-disrupted days to construct unbiased counterfactuals, which resolves confounding factors and accurately captures disruption propagation across the network. The impact estimates are further translated into station-level causal resilience curves that reveal spatial heterogeneity in the temporal patterns of degradation and recovery across locations, providing metro operators with actionable insights for targeted interventions and resource allocation. A case study of the Hong Kong MTR demonstrates the framework's superiority over naive typical-day comparisons and machine-learning benchmarks in delivering unbiased resilience curves. This paper is the first to derive causal estimates of dynamic metro resilience. This practical tool can be generalised to evaluate resilience in a broad range of public transport systems.