United States Department of Transportation
i
Using General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) Data as a Basis for Evaluating and Improving Public Transit Equity
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2019-09-01
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[PDF-5.72 MB]
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Corporate Contributors:University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Center for Advanced Multimodal Mobility Solutions and Education ; United States. Department of Transportation. University Transportation Centers (UTC) Program ; United States. Department of Transportation. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology
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Edition:Final report
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Abstract:As a critical part of economic and social fabric of metropolitan areas, public transit is necessary to provide mobility for users. A crucial task of transit planning is to better assess the equity and accessibility of public transit. The basic concept of transit equity refers to the degree to which transportation systems enable people to reach desired activity locations with fair and appropriate distribution of impact (benefits and costs), which explains the complex relationship between transportation, human activity and land use. Although years of research efforts have been done for better quantifying, analyzing, and planning for transit accessibility and equity, they are still challenging due to many types of barriers (including spatial, temporal, financial, and social, etc.), all of which can limit accessibility and equity. Meanwhile, the development of General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), an open standard format, provides new opportunities for transit performance measurement, benchmarking and research, especially in the field of transit equity and accessibility assessment. This standard transit feed data format has been demonstrated to be extremely useful, due to its contents associated with spatial and temporal characteristics. However, the progress of studies combining those two together is still relatively slow and modest. To improve such studies, more spatially disaggregated, individualized and temporally-aware accessibility metrics, and more sophisticated spatial computational tools to operationalize such metrics and improve measurement of transit accessibility and equity in empirical research, are required. This research develops and recommends an advanced and practical method to better evaluate and improve the equity and accessibility of public transit for people. In such sense, the transit gap index (TGI) is developed by taking demographic features, spatial and temporal transit service characteristics into consideration. A case study in the city of Charlotte is conducted and the associating comprehensive gap analysis based on the proposed methodology is provided. This research also develops guidelines and recommends best practices for the use of GTFS data as a main data source to better understand and assess public transit equity and accessibility for public transportation planning and operation. Summary and conclusions are made, and further research directions are also given.
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