The acts of war by Russian troops on Ukrainian soil are also having an impact on the citizens’ transport behavior. As the pandemic already demonstrated in 2020, transport systems are extremely sensitive to external disruptions. Since the start of the war, there have been massive disruptions to road and rail traffic in the Ukraine. In the first five months of the invasion, routes in border areas were frequently affected as nearly 10 million Ukrainians left the country. The already poor preliminary conditions of Ukraine's main highways was exacerbated not only by the ongoing shelling, but also by the destruction of key infrastructure to slow down the advance of Russian troops.

To add to existing research on traffic behavior after disruptive events, Prof. Dr. S. Travis Waller examines Ukrainian traffic behavior using zone-based network models in his first paper at the "Friedrich List" Faculty of Transportation and Traffic Sciences at TU Dresden with the title: "Analyzing and modeling network travel patterns during the Ukraine invasion using crowd-sourced pervasive traffic data"

Since access to high quality data is especially limited in turbulent times, this paper uses data from selected cities approximately five weeks after the invasion from the navigation app "TomTom" in order to investigate traffic demands and congestion patterns. It does so by using observed traffic performance metrics from the population to derive traffic demand data, which reverses the traditional approach of estimating demand to assess potential impacts on a network model.

The methodology allows researchers to quickly compare different events and measures by evaluating travel data on different networks. It helps understand the aggregative and and time-based demand changes and analyze the impact of network and demand changes on key performance metrics.

You can download the PDF version of the paper here.