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Decision making in a rapidly changing context, such as the development and progression of a pandemic, requires a dynamic assessment of multiple variable and competing factors. Seemingly beneficial courses of action can rapidly fail to deliver a positive outcome as the context changes. In this paper, we present a flexible data-driven agent-based simulation framework that considers multiple outcome criteria to increase opportunities for safe mobility and economic interactions on urban transit networks while reducing the potential for Covid-19 contagion in a dynamic setting. Using a case study of the Victoria line on the London Underground, we model a number of operational interventions with varied demand levels and social distancing constraints including: alterations to train headways, dwell times, signalling schemes, and train paths. Our model demonstrates that substantial performance gains ranging from 12.3–195.7% can be achieved in metro service provision when comparing the best performing operational scheme and headway with those realised on the Victoria line during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While economic inequality continues to rise within countries, efforts to address it have been largely ineffective, particularly those involving behavioral approaches. It is often implied but not tested that choice patterns among low-income individuals may be a factor impeding behavioral interventions aimed at improving upward economic mobility. To test this, we assessed rates of ten cognitive biases across nearly 5000 participants from 27 countries. Our analyses were primarily focused on 1458 individuals that were either low-income adults or individuals who grew up in disadvantaged households but had above-average financial well-being as adults, known as positive deviants. Using discrete and complex models, we find evidence of no differences within or between groups or countries. We therefore conclude that choices impeded by cognitive biases alone cannot explain why some individuals do not experience upward economic mobility. Policies must combine both behavioral and structural interventions to improve financial well-being across populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lockdowns implemented to address the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted human mobility flows around the globe to an unprecedented extent and with economic consequences which are unevenly distributed across territories, firms and individuals. Here we study socioeconomic determinants of mobility disruption during both the lockdown and the recovery phases in Italy. For this purpose, we analyze a massive data set on Italian mobility from February to October 2020 and we combine it with detailed data on pre-existing local socioeconomic features of Italian administrative units. Using a set of unsupervised and supervised learning techniques, we reliably show that the least and the most affected areas persistently belong to two different clusters. Notably, the former cluster features significantly higher income per capita and lower income inequality than the latter. This distinction persists once the lockdown is lifted. The least affected areas display a swift (V-shaped) recovery in mobility patterns, while poorer, most affected areas experience a much slower (U-shaped) recovery: as of October 2020, their mobility was still significantly lower than pre-lockdown levels. These results are then detailed and confirmed with a quantile regression analysis. Our findings show that economic segregation has, thus, strengthened during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent availability of data for cities has allowed scientists to exhibit scalings which present themselves in the form of a power-law dependence on population of various socio-economical and structural indicators. We propose here a stochastic theory of urban growth which accounts for some of the observed scalings and we confirm these predictions on US and OECD empirical data. In particular, we show that the dependence on population size of the total number of miles driven daily, the total length of the road network, the total traffic delay, the total consumption of gasoline, the quantity of CO2 emitted and the relation between area and population of cities, are all governed by a single parameter which characterizes the sensitivity to congestion. Our results suggest that diseconomies associated with congestion scale superlinearly with population size, implying that -despite polycentrism- cities whose transportation infrastructure rely heavily on traffic sensitive modes are unsustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]