Exploring and Modeling the Level of Service of Public Transit in Urban Areas: An Application to the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA), Canada

Abstract

<p>The design of policies for increasing public transit ridership is integral for strategies leading to sustainable transportation in large metropolitan areas. Assessing the availability of public transit (i.e. supply) as a viable mode of transportation can help in the design of such policies. In this respect, this study examines transit service intensity at the census tract level by assembling and analyzing a suitable GIS database for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). This research utilizes an improved version of the 'Local Index of Transit Availability' (LITA), which derives service levels based on the coverage, capacity, and frequency of the transit system. Transit service levels as measured by LITA, are linked to a number of socio-economic and spatial characteristics via a simultaneous auto-regressive (SAR) model. Results indicate that the core areas of municipalities were not necessarily well serviced by public transit. Suburban peripheral tracts and those adjacent to the shoreline were characterized by average transit service at best, and tracts adjacent to municipal borders indicated discontinuity in transit service. Furthermore, previous studies often overlooked the impact of spatial effects by utilizing the conventional OLS regression modeling technique. The use of the SAR model in this study corrected for that and enhanced the overall explanatory power of the modeled data. The estimation results indicate that variables such as population density, income, percentage of recent immigrants, percentage of young adults and percentage of elderly population are key variables to explain transit availability in the GTHA.</p>