Next steps in the march toward transit equity: essays on the relationship between public transit and our suite of possible life experiences

Rennert, Lindiwe (2024) Next steps in the march toward transit equity: essays on the relationship between public transit and our suite of possible life experiences. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

Transit is a means by which movement is facilitated. A way to get from here to there. This statement, though accurate, captures but a tiny fraction of the many things that transit truly is and has power over. Transit influences who we spend our time with, our health and wellbeing, whether or not we tend to try new things, our feelings of self-worth, the scale of our aspirations, our ability to amass wealth, and even the extent to which we view others as comrades or competitors. It has memorialized histories and erased them, drawn lines of both belonging and exclusion. Under the discipline umbrella of transportation equity, this fuller suite of transit-impacted life-quality elements is receiving a growing amount of research attention. As are the ways that these elements and their consequences vary by place, space, and personhood. This dissertation, consisting of four distinct projects and an introductory overview of the transportation equity scholarship landscape, contributes to this growth largely focusing attention at the intersection of transit – services, policies, behaviors, outcomes – and race. These combined works pull from literature related to infrastructure and land value capture, public health, enforcement and surveillance, civic trust, travel mode determination, and gentrification. The first of these four projects looks at the relationship between proximate positioning from rail stations and property pricing. By way of meta-analysis, the roles that the built environment, temporal factors, modelling techniques, socio-demographics, housing policy, and level of transit service play in shaping that relationship are measured. Findings reveal that factors of geography, data type, race, rent control policies, rail type, transit cost, and transit network expanse all significantly affect rail access uplift magnitude. The second, responding to the heavily transit-impacting historical moment we find ourselves in, asks the following: how do COVID-19 safety measures in transit spaces affect riders’ worry of infection? Using a photo-simulation approach to a randomized control trial, this study finds that safety measure type, level of compliance with those safety measures, and the conditions of transit spaces themselves significantly impact riders’ levels of travel-related worry. Through a series of focus groups, the third project is framed against the backdrop of an increased presence on the national political stage of public demand for police reform in the US. It explores how feelings toward camera technology stand among groups most marginalized by existing enforcement systems, and how those feelings vary by type of enforcement application? In particular, it asks how Black community leaders understand the potential use of automated camera enforcement for traffic and transit roadway violations. Receptiveness to a camera enforcement program exclusive to bus infrastructure that contributes to the eventual introduction of self-enforcing roadway design is found. This work culminates in a list of 11 Black-informed program design elements integral to any future program hoping to gain support. The final project concerns itself with evolutions in travel behavior related to changes in settlement patterns. It tackles the following: how have the predictive strength of age, income, and racial identity on transit mode selection changed against conditions of rapid gentrification, and how do those changes differ by trip purposes? This work finds that, in general, transit selection likelihood has deceased among Black and Latinx travelers and increased among Asian travelers as compared to White travelers, young adults slightly increased their transit use likelihood over older adults, and low and middle income travelers’ transit use likelihood has lessened compared to that of high income travelers. Each of these projects offer recommendations for practitioners interested in using an evidence-informed understanding of transit’s wide range of influence to operationalize values of inclusion, justice, repair, and collective wellbeing.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Lindiwe Rennert
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races
Sets:	Departments > Geography and Environment
Supervisor:	Holman, Nancy and Ahlfeldt, Gabriel M.
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4761

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