Equity Analysis of Transit Service in Large Auto-Oriented Cities in the United States

Recent studies on transit service through an equity lens have captured broad trends from the literature and national-level data, or analyzed disaggregate data at the local level. This study integrates these methods by employing a geostatistical analysis of new transit access and income data compilations from the Environmental Protection Agency. By using a national data set spanning variables including income as an equity variable and transit service frequencies and locations at the block group level, this study demonstrates a method for equity analysis and provides results spanning nine large auto-oriented cities in the United States. Results demonstrate variability among cities’ transit services to low-income populations, with differing results when viewed at the regional and local levels. Regional-level analysis of transit service hides significant variation through spatial averaging, while the new data employed in this study demonstrates a block-group scale equity analysis that can be used on a national-scale data set. The regions included in this study with extensive rail and bus service are most likely to provide low income and all workers served by transit equitably. The methods used can be adapted for evaluation of transit and other modes’ transportation service in areas to evaluate equity at the regional level, and at the neighborhood scale, while controlling for spatial autocorrelation. Transit service equity planning can be enhanced by employing geostatistics to improve local analysis.