The Impact of Weather on Daily Ridership of the Urban Rail Transportation System

Understanding the impact of the severe weather condition on travel behavior is crucial to the better design of rail transportation systems. This paper aims to evaluate the travel behavior and the demand characteristics of the rail transportation system under different weather conditions. For this purpose, two different data sources were used: i.) a one-year smart card data of the metro system (20 km in length with 17 stations) located in Izmir, Turkey providing the daily ridership data of the different user groups such as students, teachers, adults, and the elderly, ii.) the meteorological parameters (including temperature (degrees C), precipitation (mm), wind (m/s)) taken from the General Directorate of Meteorology in Turkey. An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test was conducted to statistically investigate the effect of meteorological parameters on different user groups. The results indicated that the elderly groups are more sensitive to severe weather conditions, for whom significant variations in ridership level were observed and it was found to be significantly different from the other users. However, fewer fluctuations in student ridership level were observed. This study proved the significant effect of meteorological parameters on the ridership level of different user groups.