Assessing Transit Fare Equity in Utah Using a Geographic Information System

Transport policy is inherently spatial. Building new transit infrastructure, changing the level of service, or modifying transit fares will differentially impact the spatial distributions of costs and benefits associated with public transit. Despite this, few tools exist to aid researchers and planners with analyzing social equity, the fairness of cost/benefit distributions over space and across different social groups. This is particularly salient to the sustainable transportation paradigm which explicitly aims to balance environmental and economic concerns with those of a more social nature, such as justice and equity. Without the proper tools to perform them, social equity analyses have been…

Transport policy is inherently spatial. Building new transit infrastructure, changing the level of service, or modifying transit fares will differentially impact the spatial distributions of costs and benefits associated with public transit. Despite this, few tools exist to aid researchers and planners with analyzing social equity, the fairness of cost/benefit distributions over space and across different social groups. This is particularly salient to the sustainable transportation paradigm which explicitly aims to balance environmental and economic concerns with those of a more social nature, such as justice and equity. Without the proper tools to perform them, social equity analyses have been systematically underrepresented in transportation planning research and practice, or at least performed in an inconsistent, ad hoc manner across the country. This research aims to address this gap by developing a Geographic Information System based Decision Support System (GIS-DSS) for evaluating the social equity impacts of transit fare policy. The work will be performed in consultation with the Utah Transit Authority, a transit agency currently in the midst of reforming their transit fare strategy; they are considering a shift from a flat-rate fare to a distance-based fare structure. This research project will develop the GIS-DSS, use the GIS to spatially fuse data from multiple sources, and conduct a case study of social equity analysis of UTA transit fares using the GIS-DSS as a research tool. In preparation for future funding opportunities, this research will explore the best strategy to further develop and generalize the GIS-DSS into a geographically transportable research tool, thus fueling a new generation of systematic and comparable transit-oriented social equity analysis across the country.