Analysis of spatiotemporal transit accessibility and transit inequity of essential services in low-density cities, a case study of Nashville, TN

Jing Guo and Candace Brakewood

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2024, vol. 179, issue C

Abstract: Evaluating the accessibility and equity of transit services to essential services that fulfill people’s fundamental needs is critical, especially in lower-density areas with limited transit services. Although numerous studies have analyzed the inequity of transit accessibility in dense, urban areas with robust transit networks, few of them evaluated transit inequity across multiple essential service categories (e.g., food stores, healthcare facilities, schools, etc.). This paper fills this research gap by focusing on a low-density, automobile-oriented city (Nashville, TN) to evaluate spatial transit inequities across essential service deserts and sociodemographic groups. The results of the case study show that many areas with higher transit-dependent demand (i.e., populations with limited personal vehicles, those living in poverty, and minority populations) tend to experience more restricted transit access to food, healthcare, school, and childcare facilities; interestingly, this is not the case for transit access to green space (specifically, parks). This study further identified essential service deserts by Local Indicator of Spatial Association (LISA) clustering and analyzed the correlation among them. The correlation results suggest that food deserts, healthcare deserts, school deserts, and childcare deserts are highly correlated with each other, while they have a lower correlation with park deserts. The findings of spatial transit inequity and the identification of essential service deserts provide crucial policy implications that can be used by transit agencies and local planning departments to prioritize their resources and target interventions to improve transit equity. This study contributes to the existing literature by proposing a systematic process that utilizes publicly available datasets to measure spatiotemporal transit supply, identify essential service deserts, and explore the correlation among these areas in a low-density city.

Keywords: Spatiotemporal transit accessibility; Transit inequity; Essential service deserts; LISA clustering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856423003518
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:179:y:2024:i:c:s0965856423003518

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2023.103931

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().