Reducing public transit compounds social vulnerabilities during COVID-19

Armita Kar, Andre L. Carrel, Harvey J. Miller and Huyen T. K. Le
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Huyen T. K. Le: The Ohio State University

No 5xerm, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted public transit services through a combination of plummeting ridership during the lockdown and subsequent budget cuts. This study investigates the equity impacts of reductions in accessibility due to public transit service cuts during COVID-19 and their association with urban sprawl. We evaluated accessibility to essential services such as grocery stores and both urgent and non-urgent health care across 22 cities across the United States in three phases during 2020: pre-lockdown, lockdown, and post-lockdown. We estimated the spatio-temporal coverage of transit service during the peak and off-peak periods in each phase. We found stark disparities in food and health care access for various socio-economic groups. Economically disadvantaged and suburban neighborhoods were more likely to lose food and health care access by public transit during COVID-19. In particular, transit service cuts worsened accessibility for population groups with multiple social vulnerabilities, such as low-income workers with zero vehicle ownership, poor households living in urban neighborhoods, and non-white populations residing in suburban neighborhoods. Moreover, our study suggests that sprawled cities experienced greater losses in access to food and health care during COVID-19 than compact cities, highlighting the influence of urban form on the functionality of transit services during crises.

Date: 2021-09-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-isf and nep-ure
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DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/5xerm

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