To build more equitable and accessible transportation systems, it is critical to understand the travel needs of residents in equity-priority communities. These groups have been historically underrepresented in the data sources that drive our planning processes. New passively collected locational datasets from smartphone apps have high penetration rates across socio-demographic categories. These data, used to power LOCUS Person, have shown great promise in capturing more representative travel patterns.
LOCUS data allows users to filter for trips made exclusively by equity travelers. Unlike traditional approaches, we assign the equity label based on their home locations. Hence, all trips made by residents of these communities – including ones that traverse non-equity zones – reflect in our measures of equity travel.
This holistic picture of travel by equity communities has proven to be very helpful to our clients, especially when looking at changes in post-pandemic travel patterns. In this piece, we share an example from an ongoing project with the largest transit agency in the Seattle area: King County Metro.
Our travel trends study with King County Metro answered key questions about pandemic impacts on travel patterns of residents in “Equity Priority Areas” (EPAs) and other non-EPA communities. This shed light on the effectiveness of the transit service in catering to the travel needs of these residents.
We incorporated two datasets in these analyses: LOCUS data for an overview of total travel, and farecard/APC data (ORCA card) for transit travel. The image below shows the differences in the spatial distribution of origins of all daily trips (shown as trips/sqmi) made by EPA and non-EPA residents.
Trip Origins for EPA (left) and non-EPA (right) residents
While EPA trips comprise only 37% of all trips in the region, they make up a staggering 68% of total transit trips.
Equity Total Trip Share vs. Regional Average
We measure competitiveness as the ratio of transit to auto travel times. A key finding of our analysis showed that equity travelers chose transit at a significantly higher rate, even where transit service was far less competitive than driving, indicating transit reliance. Our work found that improving transit service for equity travelers is one of the most effective ways to regain and increase ridership, and revealed the origin-destination market pairs where such improvements would likely have the most impact.
This is where we used LOCUS Transit Insights to compare travel market classifications based on market share and competitiveness for equity and non-equity travelers. Let’s look at commute (work/school) travel markets. Each bubble in the chart represents an Origin-Destination pair, colored based on their competitiveness (good or poor) and transit market share (good or poor).
Market Classification by O-D Pairs for EPA and non-EPA Residents
Examining the “Good Market Share, Poor Competitiveness” quadrant (purple, top right) shows that equity travelers are far more likely to use transit for commute trips, even when the travel time for these trips is far higher than auto alternatives (14% of the OD pairs for EPA vs 5% for non-equity). This sheds light on the need for reliable transit services for equity populations, many of which are reliant on transit for their transportation needs.
Additionally, our analysis found that, following the initial surge of the pandemic, travel markets with EPA populations were able to retain a higher transit market share in 2022 vs 2019 – further reinforcing the need for providing competitive transit options to these communities.
Transit Mode Share for EPA Residents 2022 vs. 2019
A key outcome of this study was to guide bus service planning changes around the extensions of the Sound Transit’s Link Light Rail system, as well as bus service changes aimed at recovering ridership after pandemic era service cuts.
As cities recover from unprecedented impacts of the pandemic, it is important to focus on providing effective, reliable, and competitive transit service to all travelers – but especially transit reliant equity-travelers. With persistent resource constraints, agencies need to be more intentional and data-driven in how they design and deliver transportation services, and provide access to jobs, schools, hospitals, and other destinations.
Interested in knowing more about our equity work? Reach out to us.