Neighborhood Crime and Travel Behavior: An Investigation of the Influence of Neighborhood Crime Rates on Mode Choice – Phase II, MTI Report 11-04

There are considerable environmental and public health benefits if people choose to walk, bicycle, or ride transit, instead of drive. However, little work has been done on the effects of neighborhood crimes on mode choice. Instinctively, we understand that the threats posed by possible criminal activity in one’s neighborhood can play a major role in the decision to drive, take transit, walk or ride a bicycle, but so far little empirical evidence supports this notion, let alone guides public infrastructure investments, land use planning, or the allocation of police services. This report--describing Phase 2 of a research study conducted for the Mineta Transportation Institute on crime and travel behavior – finds that high crime neighborhoods tend to discourage residents from walking or riding a bicycle. When comparing a high crime to a lower crime neighborhood the odds of walking over choosing auto decrease by 17.25 percent for work trips and 61 percent for non-work trips. For transit access to work trips, the odds of choosing walk/bike to a transit station over auto decrease by 48.1 percent. Transit trips, on the other hand, are affected by neighborhood crime levels in a similar way to auto trips, wherein high crime neighborhoods appear to encourage transit mode choice. The odds of taking transit over choosing auto increase by 17.25 percent for work trips and 164 percent for non-work trips. Surprised by this last finding, the research team tested two possible explanations for why high levels of neighborhood crime would increase transit use: 1) the mode choice models do not adequately account for the effects and interplay between urban form and crime levels and mode choice; and 2) people who ride in cars or take transit may feel more protected when riding in a vehicle (termed here, the “neighborhood exposure hypothesis”). To investigate the first explanation, the researchers tested a number of alternative urban form and crime interaction variables to no effect. Digging deeper into the second hypothesis, the researchers tested whether the access portion of transit trips (walking, bicycling, or driving to a transit stop) is sensitive to neighborhood crimes as well, wherein high crime neighborhoods discourage walking and bicycling and encourage driving to transit stations. The report provides evidence that high crime neighborhoods encourage driving to transit stops and discourage walking or bicycling, lending support to the neighborhood exposure hypothesis

Identifying public transport gaps using time-dependent accessibility levels

One of the concerns that has aroused much scholarly attention in transport geography lately is the extent to which public transport provision enables the less privileged population segments, especially those without privately owned motorized vehicles, to participate in activities that are deemed normal within the society they live in. This study contributes to this line of inquiry by proposing a methodology for identifying public transit gaps, a mismatch between the socially driven demand for transit and the supply provided by transit agencies. The methodology draws on the latest accomplishments in the field of modeling time-continuous, schedule-based public transport accessibility. Accessibility levels to key destinations are calculated at regular time intervals, and synoptic metrics of these levels over various peak and off-peak time windows are computed for weekdays and weekends. As a result, a temporally reliable picture of accessibility by public transport is constructed. The obtained index of public transport provision is compared to a public transport needs index based on the spatial distribution of various socio-demographics, in order to highlight spatial mismatches between these two indices. The study area consists of Flanders, which is the northern, Dutch-speaking region of Belgium. The results indicate that mainly suburban areas are characterized by high public transport gaps. Due to the time-variability of public transport frequencies, these gaps differ over time

Neighborhood Crime and Transit Station Access Mode choice - Phase III of Neighborhood Crime and Travel Behavior

This report provides the findings from the third phase of a three-part study about the influences of neighborhood crimes on travel mode choice. While previous phases found evidence that high levels of neighborhood crime discourage people from choosing to walk, bicycle and ride transit, consistent with the authors’ hypothesis, they also produced counterintuitive findings suggesting that in some cases, high crime neighborhoods encourage transit ridership at the expense of driving—the opposite of what common sense would suggest. Phase 3 tested possible explanations for these counterintuitive findings with a series of methodological improvements. These improvements were: Improvement 1: Used the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system‘s 2008 Station Profile Survey travel data set to replace the Bay Area Travel Survey (BATS) 2000 data used in previous phases. Improvement 2: Separated drop-off and drive-alone modes in logit models. Improvement 3: Variables at the corridor level replaced previous variables at the transportation analysis zone (TAZ) level. Improvement 4: Average parcel size (APS) variable replaced the intersection density measure of urban design. Improvement 5: Used nested logit modeling techniques. These yielded strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that high-crime neighborhoods encourage driving, and they generated none of the counterintuitive findings from previous phases

Concepts, reflections and applications of social equity: approaches to accessibility to primary goods and services in the region of Flanders, Belgium

Mobility presents a variety of opportunities as it allows users to access locations and services, and to meet people beyond their immediate surroundings. While the concept of mobility primarily focuses on the ease of moving, accessibility delineates the actual potential to participate in out-of-home activities. As a result, accessibility is a complex concept with a multitude of foci. This complexity is presented in the first section, which explains the general concept of accessibility, how it is defined and how it is related to the notion of transport-related exclusion. This section also gives an overview of the body of literature on the measures to determine area-based as well as personal accessibility levels and points out the important contrast between the simple, easy-to-interpret methods, adopted by policy makers and the complex methods preferred by experts. The second section clarifies how the dichotomous relationship between the urban and rural environment is reflected in transport policy that emphasizes on (especially car-based) mobility rather than on accessibility. Furthermore, the environmental and economic points of view are highlighted and the common policy strategies focused on sustainability are illustrated. Subsequently, the shortcomings in the way in which the contemporary debates concerning mobility, sustainability and the social implications of transport planning are conducted, are criticized. Finally, the last part of this section is dedicated to an extensive discussion on the ability of transport policies to, on the one hand, generate spatially as well as temporally uneven accessibility effects that give preference to certain population groups above others, and on the other hand, their ability to strive for a more equitable distribution of transport services amongst the population. The third section proposes two methodologies for measuring transport-related social exclusion implemented in a literature-based case study in Flanders. These studies comprise the following topics: measuring transport gaps by relating the social to the transport disadvantage and measuring modal disparities by comparing accessibility by private and public transport. The former investigates in which areas the provision of the public transport system is not tailored to specific public transport needs. The latter examines the disparity in access by private and public transport in order to highlight the car dependency. Both case studies incorporate the temporal variability in provision through the private and public transport network, as the time-of-day strongly influences accessibility levels

Neighborhood Crime and Travel Behavior: An Investigation of the Influence of Neighborhood Crime Rates on Mode Choice, MTI Report 07-02

While much attention has been given to the influence of urban form on travel behavior in recent years, little work has been done on how neighborhood crimes affect this dynamic. This research project studied seven San Francisco Bay Area cities, and found substantiation for the proposition that neighborhood crime rates have an influence on the propensity to choose non-automotive modes of transportation for home-based trips. Specifically, high vice and vagrancy crime rates were associated with a lowered probability of choosing transit in suburban cities for both work and non-work trips, high property crime rates were associated with a lower probability of walking for work trips in urban cities and inner-ring suburban cities, high violent crime rates with a lower probability of walking for work trips in suburban study cities, while higher property crime rates in San Francisco were associated with an increased probability of walking for non-work trips. While the signs of these significant relationships generally conformed to the author’s expectations—i.e., that high crime rates reduce the probability of choosing non-automotive modes of travel—the authors did not find statistically significant relationships for all city/trip model runs, suggesting that these relationships differ depending on the urban form and trip type contexts

Assessment of the Employment Accessibility Benefits of Shared Autonomous Mobility Services

The goal of this study is to assess and quantify the potential employment accessibility benefits of Shared Autonomous Mobility Service (SAMS) commute modes across a large diverse metropolitan region considering heterogeneity in the working population. To meet this goal, this study employs a welfare-based (i.e. logsum-based) measure of accessibility, obtained via estimating a hierarchical work destination-commute mode choice model. The employment accessibility logsum measure incorporates the spatial distribution of worker residences and employment opportunities, the attributes of the available commute modes, and the characteristics of individual workers. This research further captures heterogeneity of workers using latent class analysis (LCA). The LCA model inputs include the socio-demographic characteristics of workers to subsequently account for different worker clusters valuing different types of employment opportunities differently. The accessibility analysis results indicate: (i) the accessibility benefit differences across latent classes are modest but young workers and low-income workers do see higher benefits than high- and middle-income workers; (ii) there are substantial spatial differences in accessibility benefits with workers living in lower density areas benefiting more than workers living in high-density areas; (iii) nearly all the accessibility benefits come from the SAMS-only mode as opposed to the SAMS+Transit mode; and (iv) the SAMS cost per mile assumption significantly impacts the magnitude of the overall employment accessibility benefits