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Transit Turning Inside Out: Federal Transportation Policy and Inner-City Accessibility During the ISTEA Years Author: Joe Grengs Dissertation School: Cornell University Pages: 182 Publication Date: August 2002 Availability: Access Number: 10798 Abstract: Land-use dispersion at the metropolitan fringe combined with deepening poverty at the urban core is intensifying the division between two discrete constituencies of mass transit. Public officials may not be capable of simultaneously luring suburban commuters out of their cards while maintaining good access to dispersing metropolitan jobs and other opportunities for transit-dependent people. This dissertation examines in four essays the influence of federal mass transit policy on carless residents of poor neighborhoods. The primary objective is to directly measure changes in transit accessibility between metropolitan jobs and census tracts with high proportions of people who are dependent on good transit. Steps include formulating a gravity model using GIS, calculating an accessibility index at two times during the 1990s at the census tract level, and disaggregating the accessibility change into sub-components of land-use and transit-service change. A key feature of the model is that it captures the small-scale effect of transit riders being restricted to jobs reachable on foot from a transit stop. Through focused analysis of transit routes serving one neighborhood in Buffalo and one in Rochester, New York, this research addresses two main questions: 1) Did transit-dependent poor people who live in inner-city neighborhoods lose capacity to access jobs by transit during the 1990s? 2) If so, how much of the reduction in accessibility is due to changes in transit service rather than to land-use dispersion? First, results offer no support for the hypothesis of lost accessibility. In both cases, the model suggests that inner-city neighborhoods gained access to jobs by transit. Another finding, however, is that serious data deficiencies prevent accurate measure of transit accessibility at a small geographic scale, making these results highly unreliable. The study reveals that planners need improved data and methods to accurately measure changes in transit accessibility. Second, findings suggest that different effects in the two cases caused the observed change in accessibility. In Buffalo, accessibility improved primarily because of changes in transit service. In Rochester, accessibility improved mainly because of land-use change in the form of job growth at existing transit stops, not because of transit changes. |
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