Rutgers Reopening Scenario Planning Tools
David served as the technical lead for a scenario planning toolset intended to enable Rutgers University to leverage its schedule and building database to engage with meaningful reopening scenarios during the COVID-19 pandemic. Developed under a rapid timeline, these scenarios leveraged previous parking studies and shuttle data to identify how changes in student, dorm, and faculty populations at the building level might strain the transportation system. This project used Jupyter Notebooks to create scenario-oriented dashboards of estimated parking occupancy and shuttle rider trip’s displaced under different campus population and social distancing scenarios. In addition to these dashboards, Fehr & Peers DC conducted further analysis to inform reopening scenarios by creating temporal building activity databases based on the schedule and providing transportation strategy recommendations to help enable the system to accommodate changing needs.
Shuttle Scenario Dashboard
The scenario-oriented shuttle analysis tool leverages Rutgers’ classroom schedule and building database to estimate how changes in building activity during a reopening scenario could influence demand. This shuttle demand analysis enables the dynamic evaluation of different capacity constraints on the shuttle system and estimates the number of displaced riders that would result from different assumptions (a 50% reduction in transit capacity or the maintenance of 6 feet in social distancing).
Parking Scenario Dashboard
This animation communicates key functionality of the how different classroom, resident, and administrative populations can be changed as a percentage of baseline to see how constrained Rutgers’s parking facilities might be given changes in campus population. The dashboard includes a toggle to add additional drivers under the assumption of reduced use of transit during pandemic conditions.