  During the COVID-19 pandemic, the collapse of the public transit ridership
led to significant budget deficits due to dramatic decreases in fare revenues.
Additionally, public transit agencies are facing challenges of reduced vehicle
capacity due to social distancing requirements, additional costs of cleaning
and protective equipment, and increased downtime for vehicle cleaning. Due to
these constraints on resources and budgets, many transit agencies have adopted
essential service plans with reduced service hours, number of routes, or
frequencies.
  This paper studies the resiliency during a pandemic of On-Demand Multimodal
Transit Systems (ODMTS), a new generation of transit systems that combine a
network of high-frequency trains and buses with on-demand shuttles to serve the
first and last miles and act as feeders to the fixed network. It presents a
case study for the city of Atlanta and evaluates ODMTS for multiple scenarios
of depressed demand and social distancing representing various stages of the
pandemic. The case study relies on a real data from the Metropolitan Atlanta
Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), an optimization pipeline for the design of
ODMTS, and a detailed simulation of these designs. The case study demonstrates
how ODMTS provide a resilient solution in terms of cost, convenience, and
accessibility for this wide range of scenarios.
