Marked crosswalks, station area built environments, and transit ridership: Associations between changes in 877 US TOD stations, 2010–2018

Abstract

Transit ridership across the US has experienced a decline over the past decade. Researchers, policy-makers and advocates have suggested that transportation and land use policies be modified to encourage transit-friendly environments. Despite the importance of studying the relationship between built environment and transit use, previous research on this topic exhibits several limitations in terms of scope, resolution and robustness of research design, due to availability of built environment and ridership data. Using a historical marked crosswalk dataset generated from Google Street View along with longitudinal station-level ridership and built environment data, this paper examines the association between changes in percent of intersections with marked crosswalks, station area built environments, and ridership in 877 TOD stations in the US between 2010 and 2018. Although we confirm ridership is decreasing overall, we find that the addition of high-visibility crosswalks was positively associated with transit ridership changes. However, transit ridership decreased in areas where the proportion of low-income workers increased, whereas percent of zero-vehicle households decreased faster than the national average. The findings suggest that efforts by land use and transportation planners to modify station areas to support higher transit ridership are necessary but likely insufficient to achieve higher ridership. Planning and policy attention to auto ownership and use, and land use-transportation coordination such as providing more affordable housing in TOD station areas, is likely to have beneficial impacts on transit ridership.