Webinar: Public Transit Service Equity: Definition and Measurement Considerations

06 / 28 / 2015

The Across Latitudes and Cultures BRT Centre of Excellence invites to its monthly webinar series to share timely public transit research and encourage ongoing collaboration. Our July webinar was:

Public Transit Service Equity: Definition and Measurement Considerations

Presented by Dr. Alex Karner, on Friday July 3rd, 11:00 GMT-03:00 (Santiago, Chile time zone). Dr. Karner is currently conducting postdoctoral research at CEDEUS. Beginning in fall 2015, he will be an assistant professor of transportation planning in the School of City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work critically engages with the practice of transportation planning with the goal of achieving progress towards equity and sustainability. To this end, he develops innovative methods for analyzing the performance of integrated transportation-land use systems in the areas of civil rights, environmental justice, public health, and climate change.

See summary, presentation and video below.

Summary:
Determining whether a public transit system provides equitable service to different demographic groups is an ongoing challenge. The Federal Transit Administration in the United States requires transit agencies to conduct specific equity-related analyses, but these rely largely upon measures of census demographics proximate to stops and stations rather than actual ridership or accessibility. In this webinar, the limitations of demographic measures are illustrated and an alternative is developed using publicly available transit route and schedule data. The resultant metric – a highly spatially and temporally resolved accessibility measure – demonstrates the necessity of incorporating information on actual transit service when evaluating the equity implications of service changes.

Presentation: slideshare

Video:

Please email Alejandra at alejandracuevas@uc.cl with any questions or future topic suggestions. The series is open to anyone and will address issues relevant to researchers and practitioners. Please share this announcement with your extended network