A network-based analysis to assess COVID-19 disruptions in the Bogotá BRT system

The global COVID-19 crisis has severely affected mass transit in the cities of the global south. Fear of widespread propagation in public spaces and the dramatic decrease in human mobility due to lockdowns have resulted in a significant reduction of public transport options. We analyze the case of TransMilenio in Bogotá, a massive Bus Rapid Transit system that is the main mode of transport for an urban area of roughly 10 million inhabitants. Concerns over social distancing and new health regulations reduced the number of trips to under 20% of its historical values during extended periods of time during the lockdowns. This has sparked a renewed interest in developing innovative data-driven responses to COVID-19 resulting in large corpora of TransMilenio data being made available to the public. In this paper we use a database updated daily with individual passenger card swipe validation microdata including entry time, entry station, and a hash of the card’s ID. The opportunity of having daily detailed minute-to-minute ridership information and the challenge of extracting useful insights from the massive amount of raw data (∼1,000,000 daily records) require the development of tailored data analysis approaches. Our objective is to use the natural representation of urban mobility offered by networks to make pairwise quantitative similarity measurements between daily commuting patterns and then use clustering techniques to reveal behavioral disruptions as well as the most affected geographical areas due to the different pandemic stages. This method proved to be efficient for the analysis of large amount of data and may be used in the future to make temporal analysis of similarly large datasets in urban contexts.