Abstract
People use various modes for travelling and interact with each other during their trips for business, shopping, education and tourism. The travel increases the risk of spreading communicable diseases and may escalate the spreading rate at a level that can make an endemic to become a pandemic. On the other hand, the measures, for example, lockdown, taken by governments to control the pandemic, negatively impact travels and, in the worst case, bring the transportation system to a standstill. Thus, it is important to understand this relationship between a pandemic and transportation to control the spread of a disease through transportation and to suppress the negative impacts of that disease on transportation. This book chapter explores this relationship using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Firstly, the chapter highlights the role of transportation in spreading any disease, including COVID-19. Secondly, it summarizes the immediate impacts of COVID-19 on transportation and puts forward ways to recover transport systems after a pandemic. Thirdly, the chapter provides insights into how policymakers can use the scenarios like lockdown to reshape transport systems. Finally, this chapter suggests some proactive approaches that transport agencies can adopt during and after a pandemic.
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Acknowledgement
The authors would like to acknowledge the precious time given by the following experts (in alphabetical order) in responding to a short survey on COVID-19 and transportation: Abdul Rawoof Pinjari (Associate Professor and Chairman, Centre for infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India), Ashish Bhaskar (Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia), Ashish Verma (President, Transportation Research Group of India (TRG) and Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India), Carlo Prato (Professor and Acting Head of School of Civil Engineering, The University of Queensland, Australia), Manorajan Parida (Professor and Deputy Director, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India), Muhammad Irfan (Professor and Dean, National University of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan), Satish Chandra (Professor and Director, CSIR-Central Road Research Institute, India). We also acknowledge various online resources that have helped us to write this chapter.
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Ali, Y., Sharma, A., Haque, M.M. (2020). Transportation and a Pandemic: A Case Study of COVID-19 Pandemic. In: Goyal, M.K., Gupta, A.K. (eds) Integrated Risk of Pandemic: Covid-19 Impacts, Resilience and Recommendations. Disaster Resilience and Green Growth. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7679-9_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7679-9_14
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