The 17th World Conference on Transport Research | Toulouse, France
Three members of our lab were in Toulouse this July for WCTR 2026, the triennial meeting of the World Conference on Transport Research Society: Yihang Bai, Howard Wong, and Dr. Manon Prédhumeau.
Yihang Bai's paper received the Elsevier First Runner-up Best WCTRS-Y Paper Award, placing second of the 42 papers presented. WCTRS-Y is the society's day for early-career researchers, and the award recognises the strongest work by those under 35.
The paper asks a simple question: when the road network breaks down, who actually reroutes, and who just gets stuck? Using large-scale GPS trajectories from the West Midlands and a counterfactual Mixed Path Size Logit framework, we separate active behavioural adaptation from passive exposure, and uncover four distinct response archetypes - Habitual Followers, Strategic Avoiders, Constrained Stayers, and Unsuccessful Switchers. A key takeaway: navigational complexity itself may be a barrier to effective rerouting, so resilience isn't only about the traffic network, it's about who can cognitively access the alternatives. Co-authored with Dr. Yitao Yang and Dr. Manon Prédhumeau, supervised by Professor Ed Manley, and drawing on our ongoing work with Transport for West Midlands.
In the main conference programme, Howard Wong presented work on public transport centrality, asking what automated fare collection data can tell us once we stop looking only at the morning commute. Drawing on Santiago's multi-modal fare records, the paper introduces a total in-outflow proportion metric to capture how influential a given zone is, and maps how each zone's sphere of influence shifts across the day and the week. Some areas stay consistently central; others rise and fall with the hour. The implication for planning is direct: a network tuned to the morning peak and the city centre will misread how a city actually moves. Co-authored with Dr. Manon Prédhumeau.
Congratulations to Yihang and Howard, and thanks to the WCTR and WCTRS-Y organisers for a genuinely useful week.
References
Bai, Y., Yang, Y., Prédhumeau, M. (2026). Who Detours and Who Gets Stuck? Heterogeneous Behavioural Adaptation under Traffic Disruptions. World Conference on Transport Research — Young Researchers' Initiative, July 2026, Toulouse, France. Link
Wong, H., Prédhumeau, M. (2026). Rethinking Spatio-temporal Public Transport Centrality and Zone Interdependence Using Automated Fare Collection Data in Santiago. World Conference on Transport Research, July 2026, Toulouse, France. Link