Measuring Access to Public Transportation Services

(PI: Chandra Bhat, CoPIs: Prof. Bob Paterson, Lisa Weston, Stacey Bricka, and Jessica Guo)

Accessible and effective services are vital features of a well-utilized public transit system. Also important is the equitable distribution of the services to all people, whether or not they own a car and regardless of age, ability, ethnicity, or income. These policy goals place transit service delivery in the context of accessibility. The objective of this project is to develop measures of accessibility that would address the spatial, temporal and other dimensions of transit demand and supply. Separate indices are proposed to measure four specific aspects of this demand and supply interaction: access to transit, trip origin-destination connectivity, temporal transit availability, and transit capacity. The indices will be population subgroup-specific and purpose-specific, so that differentiation can be made in the levels of service provided to different population subgroups and trip purposes. The four indices will further be consolidated into successively more aggregate indices and ultimately into a single generalized measure that represents the overall accessibility for a region. The measures will be implemented in an analysis tool that runs on a GIS platform. The tool can be used to identify areas in need of transit improvement by recognizing the special accessibility needs of various customer groups and matching services to both existing and emergent travel patterns.