Transit Accessibility Research Articles

The Role of Smart Growth in Residential Location Choice: Heterogeneity of Location Preferences in the Chicago Region

We investigate the role of smart growth in household location choice in the Chicago region, using a discrete choice analysis. In the midst of continued region-wide suburbanization, households tend to move to neighborhoods with rich consumption amenities and high transit access. However, this study does not find evidence that the neighborhood’s physical compactness is a significant location factor. Location preference for compact, mixed-use, and transit-oriented neighborhoods is significantly affected by the life cycle stage and income level, but less influenced by generation and age. Millennial households show strong preference for amenities and transit access only before they marry and have children.

Can mobility on demand bridge the first-last mile transit gap? Equity implications of Los Angeles’ pilot program

Transit agencies and advocates see removing or bridging the first-last mile gap as an important way to increase transit ridership and reduce vehicle use. Some transit agencies see the advent of ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft as an opportunity for a nimble and flexible solution to first-last mile problems able to deliver more riders to and from transit stations. While agencies across the US have piloted such programs, limited evaluation to date means the outcomes of such partnerships remain unknown. Using just over a year of trip data from the Los Angeles Metro Mobility on Demand (MOD) pilot program, we answer two related questions about ride-hailing and transit access: first, do people use ride-hailing to go to and from transit stops? And second, what are the equity implications of such a program? In other words, do such programs boost access to transit among populations historically excluded or underserved by transportation systems? Our findings suggest that the MOD program successfully delivered thousands of riders to and from transit stations during its first year. Whether these rides were delivered to vulnerable groups with limited access to the transit system, however, is less clear. Survey results suggest that compared to transit riders as whole, program users overall were whiter and more likely to own smartphones and have bank accounts. Thus while people are clearly interested and willing to use subsidized ride-hail services to access transit, the program in its current design does not appear to meaningfully increase access for disadvantaged groups. This result may stem more from the design of the pilot itself, as opposed to suggesting the limited potential of ride-hailing more broadly to solve access problems.

Urban access across the globe: an international comparison of different transport modes

Access (the ease of reaching valued destinations) is underpinned by land use and transport infrastructure. The importance of access in transport, sustainability, and urban economics is increasingly recognized. In particular, access provides a universal unit of measurement to examine cities for the efficiency of transport and land-use systems. This paper examines the relationship between population-weighted access and metropolitan population in global metropolitan areas (cities) using 30-min cumulative access to jobs for 4 different modes of transport; 117 cities from 16 countries and 6 continents are included. Sprawling development with the intensive road network in American cities produces modest automobile access relative to their sizes, but American cities lag behind globally in transit and walking access; Australian and Canadian cities have lower automobile access, but better transit access than American cities; combining compact development with an intensive network produces the highest access in Chinese and European cities for their sizes. Hence density and mobility co-produce better access. This paper finds access to jobs increases with populations sublinearly, so doubling the metropolitan population results in less than double access to jobs. The relationship between population and access characterizes regions, countries, and cities, and significant similarities exist between cities from the same country.

Do personalized economic incentives work in promoting shared mobility? Examining customer churn using a time-varying Cox model

Shared mobility options have grown significantly in recent years. However, a major threat to the growing usage of shared-cars is customer churn. Despite companies continually providing rewards to attract customers, factors that contribute to customer churn are not well-understood in the existing literature. This study analyzed one-year transaction data of a one-way carsharing program and applied an extended Cox proportional hazards model to examine these effects. Our results show that: (1) A customer’s retention probability decreased over time with a decelerating rate. (2) Customers were less likely to churn when their frequently-visited shared-car stations were located in neighborhoods with low access to transit or in areas with colleges, railway hubs, or airports. (3) Elderly and male customers had a lower likelihood of churning. (4) The number of coupons was negatively associated with the likelihood of customer churn. (5) The effect of coupons generally increased at first and then decreased after the 130th day. These findings contribute to coupon design and the location choice of shared-car stations. Specifically, we suggest that large-denomination coupons should be split into multiple small-denomination coupons. We encourage companies to locate stations in areas with poor transit access. Meanwhile, coupon issuing strategies can be redeveloped. Offering more coupons to new customers can help maximize the profits of service providers. However, such a strategy is debatable because it invades personal privacy and is unfair for existing loyal customers.

Rider Perceptions of an On-Demand Microtransit Service in Salt Lake County, Utah

On-demand microtransit services are frequently seen as an important tool in supporting first and last mile operations surrounding fixed route high frequency transit facilities, but questions remain surrounding who will use these novel services and for what purposes. In November 2019, the Utah Transit Authority launched an on-demand microtransit service in south Salt Lake County in partnership with a private mobility operator. This paper reports the results of an expressed preferences survey of 130 transit riders in the microtransit service area that was collected before and immediately after the service launched. There is not a clear relationship between current transit access mode and expressed willingness to use microtransit, although some responses from new riders indicate the novel service competes most directly with commercial transportation network company operations. The survey responses also reveal younger passengers express a more than expected willingness to use microtransit, middle-aged passengers a less than expected willingness, and older passengers neutral or no expressed opinion. The results suggest additional relationships between household size and transit use frequency, but further research is necessary. The effect of other user characteristics, including income and automobile availability, is less statistically clear and requires further research.

Changes in Transit Accessibility to Food Banks in Toronto during COVID-19

Food banks provide an essential lifeline for those experiencing food insecurity. In Toronto, Canada, 21 new food bank locations opened between February, 2020 and May, 2021 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we measure and map how this has improved public transit accessibility to food banks, with a focus on improvements among low-income residents. We find that the percent of low-income residents that can reach a food bank within a 20 minute one-way transit trip improved from 50% to 60% during this time period.

Influence of Socioeconomic Factors on Transit Demand During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Bogotá’s BRT System

The COVID-19 pandemic restricted most economic and social activities, impacting travel demand for all transportation modes and especially for transit. We hypothesize that the shifts in travel demand varied by socioeconomic status, and we assess the differential impact of COVID-19 in the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) patronage across various socioeconomic groups in Bogotá. We built a database of frequent transit users with data collected by smartcards in Bogota’s BRT system between January and October 2020. For each user in the database, we labeled their home and work stations. Transactions at other stations are classified as “other.” The stratum (a government socioeconomic classification of residential units in Colombia) of a BRT station’s service area was assigned using an estimated probability vector for each user belonging to a specific stratum; this data is validated with aggregate strata distributions in the 2019 household travel survey. Our study found that the reduction in transactions for lower-strata users is significantly less than that of the middle and high strata. The magnitude of this difference varies over time but stabilizes after the end of the lockdown. The growth rate of “other” transactions per thousand people is greater than the growth for home and work locations, especially for the lowest strata. Other studies have shown that the radius of gyration (Rg) (a measure of how far individuals travel away from home) has decreased about 50% after the lockdowns. Our study shows that when measuring Rg only for users who continued using BRT, the Rg slightly decreased for lower and medium strata but increased for high strata. The contribution of this study is a method to classify BRT transactions of frequent users by strata, as well as a description of trends in BRT use by strata to expand our understanding of the COVID-19 lockdowns impacts in the Global South context. These results are a starting point to inform policy and decision-makers to guide the recovery efforts to improve transit accessibility and level of service for captive users such as low-stratum users.

Transit access and urban space-time structure of American cities

This study builds theoretical explanations and empirical examinations of transit access and urban form. It explains how transit access to jobs drops with network distance from the Central Business District (CBD), ceteris paribus, and introduces the urban space-time structure. This is empirically examined in the 45 most populated American cities. The analysis finds, regardless of the city, transit access declines as one moves out from the center, and in most cities, transit access decays from a surfeit of employment to relative scarcity. In this transition, the transit network acts as a “catalyst” to induce access to CBD employments centralization. The analysis also declares that urban structure defined by transit access is a fluid concept. This changes the traditional urban structure definition as it can make a CBD centric city dispersed and contrariwise. The strength of inverse relationship between the network distance from the center and transit access is a function of the travel-time threshold and follows the law of diminishing returns. The vertex point of the function indicates the absolute maximum CBD centricity. The urban structure, indeed, shifts from CBD decentralized to CBD centralized and begins shifting to CBD decentralized by an increase in the transit travel-time threshold. This is the product of mobility and place, and argues that the transport network has grown by a policy that permits CBD concentration, at least in the short run. While it is not clear, long-term considerations of equity may modify this growth to one of concentrated CBD decentralization. The concentration is typical of the take-off stage of the transport network, and that equalization takes place as the network matures.

Transit development and housing displacement: The case of the Chicago Red Line Extension

Chicago's South Side has long been characterized as a “transit desert” – an area with high transit inaccessibility and insufficient infrastructure to meet residents' needs (Jiao & Dillivan, 2013). Without adequate transit, residents cannot reach employment opportunities or regional amenities – contributing to economic, spatial, and social marginalization. The Chicago Transit Authority's proposed Red Line Extension (RLE) is designed to connect the city's far south side neighborhoods to Chicago's core. Given the scope of the RLE, 175 parcels have been chosen for demolition, meaning that a similar number of households face displacement to make room for the RLE right of way – which may have potentially negative consequences in realizing the subsequent benefits of improved transit access. In this article, we perform an ex-ante analysis of RLE induced displacement. Specifically, we: 1) predict potential location choices that transit displacees are most likely to choose; and 2) analyze these locations in relation to access to transit, amenities, employment, and housing affordability, among others. Within the context of transportation planning, ex-ante analysis is important because it can minimize unintended and negative consequences of transit-induced displacement – like decreased transit access and a loss of potential neighborhood improvements - by predicting potential relocation choices for displacees. Such predicted choices can help planners and decision-makers better understand the trade-offs for directly affected households and thereby allow planners and decision-makers to assist in relocation assistance that maximizes the benefits of the necessarily displaced.

Improving transit access measures in affordable housing funding criteria

Abstract The location of affordable housing in the United States is greatly influenced by how it is funded, and current funding criteria do not typically use comprehensive transit accessibility metrics. To show the benefits of using a comprehensive accessibility metric to locate affordable housing, this paper compares one such metric, the Transit Opportunity Index, to a simpler measure of transit access currently used by a housing agency. In this case study, the comprehensive metric showed qualitative improvements over the simpler transit access measure. It is recommended that affordable housing agencies use more comprehensive transit access metrics to evaluate the transit accessibility of affordable housing sites. These comprehensive access metrics should be incorporated directly into funding criteria, preferably as part of an objective scoring system that prioritizes accessibility.

Typological Differences in Railway Station Areas According to Locational Characteristics: A Nationwide Study of Korea

This study aims to explore whether railway station areas can be categorized according to locational characteristics on a nationwide level and whether the typological classification is valid for planning and development. Thirty-four railway station areas across Korea are analyzed and categorized using K-means clustering analysis. The results of the analysis prove that for all locational characteristics of land use, transit accessibility, and spatial form, station areas could be categorized into urban cores and suburbs. Moreover, the typological classification according to the location of urban cores and suburbs is valid in terms of development conditions and demand. This result implies that the role of the public and private sectors must be different in setting the space and size of areas of influence, and in forming and developing their use depending on the locational characteristics of station areas. This study contributes to the discussion on diversifying the planning and development of station areas as the heart of sustainable cities by verifying the types of station areas and their differences according to locational characteristics in East Asia, including Korea.

Preferences of urban rail users for first- and last-mile autonomous vehicles: Price and service elasticities of demand in a multimodal environment

Integrating autonomous vehicles (AVs) into transit networks is a critical problem for metropolitan areas worldwide. This study investigates the preferences of urban rail/rapid transit users for first- and last-mile AV services, which are not well understood. First, it develops an access mode choice model incorporating on-demand transit access enabled by AVs. Second, the model is estimated with stated choice data obtained from a survey of 2,300 residents living within 1–5 km of their nearest rail stations in the Tokyo metropolitan area, in which choice tasks are based on recent access to home-end stations. Finally, estimated models are used to compute elasticities of demand for access modes with respect to AV cost and wait time. The results show that price sensitivities of demand for AV services lie within a reasonable range of transit fare elasticities. AVs have diverse substitution patterns with existing modes. Riding in AV services is more likely to be a substitute for riding on buses/in slower modes of transit for all travel purposes, and for driving cars, particularly for leisure trips, but less likely for cycling and walking, particularly for work trips. The AV wait time elasticities might vary according to the waiting environment and conditions. The results also suggest that AVs may particularly benefit those who currently have restrictions in accessing transit.

Free Transit Passes and School Attendance among High School Students

In multiple U.S. cities, school districts and transit providers collaborate to provide students free public transit access, either replacing or supplementing the yellow school bus service. Although practitioners widely acknowledge these programs as a promising and innovative solution to absenteeism, there is no empirical research evidence to date confirming the benefits of these programs to individual students’ school attendance. We respond to this research gap by investigating the impacts of the Minneapolis Go-To Student Pass Program—a transportation program that began to provide student access to public transit in August 2013—on individual student school attendance. Using Poisson regression, we estimate both the traditional Difference-in-differences models and Two-Way Fixed Effects models to quantify effects of pass use and pass eligibility on student attendance. We find that student-reported pass use and pass eligibility reduce excused absences by 11.5% and 27.5%, respectively. Restricting our sample to students living in the School Walk Zone—the area within 2 mi of one’s school—we find that these effects are even more substantial, with pass use and pass eligibility reducing excused absences by 30.5% and 37.6% respectively. These findings imply that providing free access to public transit is broadly useful to improve student attendance, even for students who live within walking distance of the school and may not use transit passes regularly.

Measuring transit accessibility benefits and their implications on land value capture: a case study of the Bangkok Metropolitan Region

Infrastructure investments have long been a key factor driving the economic and urban development of a country. These investments usually require a large amount of funds, but funding for such investments is often limited to catching up with the growing urban population, especially for cities in emerging economies. As a result, finding alternative funding for infrastructure investment is increasingly important. Land value capture (LVC) is one of the mechanisms that can be used to fund infrastructure investment. An important policy question for the land value capture is determining how much of the increment land values are due to infrastructure investment. This research aims to assess the land value increment due to proximity to public transit, using Bangkok as a case study. The analysis employs hedonic regressions of low-rise residential real estate projects from 2009 to 2017 in the Bangkok Metropolitan Region. The results suggest that the proximity to the nearest mass transit stations has driven up the land values of residential lands in real estate development projects. In addition, the bid-rent coefficients over time have increased in magnitude in the latter years as more transit stations have opened, suggesting the presence of temporal effects from various stages of mass transit investments on land values. The analysis also assesses the value that can be captured through a tax-based LVC mechanism around a new mass transit station.

What factors influence ridership of station-based bike sharing and free-floating bike sharing at rail transit stations?

Integration between bike sharing and rail transit provides users with a more flexible travel pattern in an effort to address the “first/last mile” problem. This study aims to examine the determinants influencing the ridership of station-based bike sharing (SBBS) and free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) at rail transit stations. The empirical analysis is based on user transaction records of two bike sharing systems in Nanjing, China. We first apply the k-means cluster method to classify rail transit stations into five types according to the temporal profiles of bike sharing usage for rail transit access. Later, ordinary least squares (OLS) and partial least squares (PLS) regression models are developed respectively by differentiating SBBS and FFBS. Compared with the OLS models, PLS models could address the issue of multi-collinearity and generally have better interpretation abilities. The PLS results reveal that the usage of SBBS for rail transit access shares similarities with FFBS. For example, both of them are positively influenced by population density and the number of restaurants. Meanwhile, different types of rail transit stations exhibit different impacts on the ridership of the two bike sharing systems. Our results show that there exists a substitution effect for rail transit access between two bike sharing systems, that is, SBBS may be more frequently used for commuting trips than FFBS. The findings of this study provide a better understanding of the impact of various factors on the SBBS and FFBS ridership at rail transit stations, thereby helping to promote the integration of rail transit and bike sharing systems.

ESTIMATION OF TRANSPORT ACCESSIBILITY IN CASE OF RATIONAL TRANSPORT HUB LOCATION

The public transit accessibility has become an important attribute of social and economic activity of contemporary society. The shift to the sustainable paradigm of the current cities’ development has made public transport the basic mean for population travels execution. The spatial character of the travels in the megapolises supposes its implementation with the transfers. This may result in the travel time increase if the transport hubs are designed or located inefficiently. In some cases, the transport hub locations do not reflect the current demand for public transport services and require the fulfilment of the infrastructure measures. The paper presents the Hub Location Problem (HLP) solving in the case of rapid transit and trolleybus lines interaction. It has been proposed the combined criterion for the HLP solving based on the two-dimensional coordinate system with the estimation of passenger walk turnover. The simulation procedure to estimate the transport hub relocation has been made in the PTV VISUM software in the case of the Industrial District of Kharkiv City (Ukraine). The results of the economic effect available from the transport hub rational location have been estimated.

Transit to parks: An environmental justice study of transit access to large parks in the U.S. West

Large parks—including regional parks, state parks, and national forests and parks—have particular health, social, and environmental benefits. Thus, promoting equal access to large parks is increasingly becoming a goal of environmental justice activists, planners, and policymakers. Disadvantaged populations (e.g., low-income people of color) have worse walking access to large parks than more privileged groups and might rely on public transportation to access such parks. But empirical studies on whether access to large parks via public transit is justly distributed are lacking. In this paper, we examine the relationship between a novel measure of public transit access to large parks (the T2P index) and neighborhood-level disadvantage (income, race/ethnicity, and age). Using network analysis with public transit feed data and park location data, we calculate the T2P index for every census block group in the 15 largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. West. We find some evidence of environmental injustice. A spatial filtering model shows that T2P access increases when a neighborhood has a larger share of non-Hispanic Whites and a smaller share of older adults, but that median household income is not associated with T2P in the entire sample. We also find that some regions present significant environmental injustices in T2P whereas others have fewer to no injustices. Transit agencies and park planners could use our T2P index and findings to prioritize transit investment for disadvantaged populations and promote healthy living.

Transit Accessibility Measurement Considering Behavioral Adaptations to Reliability

Accessibility measures are necessary for evaluating the benefits of proposed transportation improvements. However, they often do not account for travel time unreliability, but instead incorporate deterministic and time-invariant travel times. This approach risks mischaracterizing the accessibility experienced by travelers. In this paper, we review recent literature on accessibility and travel time reliability with a focus on transit and introduce an approach to joint accessibility-reliability measurement that relies on a behavioral perspective. Using this behavioral perspective, we propose that existing accessibility measures be implemented using travelers’ total travel time budget as a measure of travel time, and that varying departure time strategies depending on service characteristics be considered. The total travel time budget can reasonably be quantified with a high percentile of the total travel time distribution. However, we note that different percentiles may be more appropriate for different traveler types, as these percentiles correspond to varying tolerances for late arrivals. This behavioral perspective can be operationalized with commonly used accessibility measures, such as the cumulative opportunity measure, and with real-time vehicle location data. We include a demonstration of the potential changes in accessibility estimates when accounting for travel time unreliability, with a simplified case study of a transit route in San Francisco. The results show a considerable reduction of the number of opportunities available to travelers when the calculation is based on the latter—between 5.9% and 37.9% less, depending on various factors. Such differences have the potential to significantly affect the accessibility benefits of transit capital investments.

Optimizing Transit Equity and Accessibility of the City of Charlotte, North Carolina, by Integrating Transit Gap Index, a General Transit Feed Specification Data-Relevant Performance Metric

AbstractPublic transit is a critical component of transportation planning. One important task is to optimize the public transit service for people by improving current service or having new investm...

A flexible framework for measuring accessibility with destination bundling

A transit system's usefulness is governed by the freedom it provides to those who use it. This freedom, typically quantified as accessibility, is proportional to the amount and variety of destinations available to a potential transit user. Often, transit systems are designed with the commuter in mind; employment is a typical stand-in measure for all destinations when measuring accessibility in a city. This paper proposes a framework to “bundle” destination types into a more comprehensive profile of accessibility. The framework is flexible enough to adapt to local conditions and data availability, and provides a potential planner with the ability to tell a more nuanced story of transit accessibility in a city. Using population, employment, and crowd-sourced destination data in Calgary, Canada, we perform a comparison of destination bundling approach to find that the relative level of access to destinations varies greatly with the bundle of destinations used. We also analyze correlations between quality of access to destinations, suggesting that certain destinations can act as substitutes for others, and that using destinations with low correlations in their quality of access increases the results' sensitivity to the transit network. As this approach uses open data sources available in most jurisdictions, it can be easily applied to different urban areas, destination sets, and accessibility measures to tell a more comprehensive story of transit accessibility in cities.