2024/11/19 by Michael Manville, Hannah King, Juan Matute +1 · 2 voices · 2 citations
Chemistry · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Chemistry #Engineering #Geography #Orange (colour) #Public transport #Transit (satellite) #Transport engineering #Transportation Planning and Optimization #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Urban Transport and Accessibility
paper · doi:10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2024.104048
published in Journal of Transport Geography 121, 104048 (Elsevier BV)
openalex publication_date 2024/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/21
Using data from Southern California, we examine the idea that rising housing prices in transit-rich neighborhoods contributed to pre-COVID declines in transit use. We merge ridership data from the Los Angeles region’s two largest transit providers with tract-level Census data on housing costs and other socioeconomic attributes. We show descriptively that a small share of Census tracts account for a disproportionate share of both total transit ridership and total ridership losses, and that along multiple dimensions these neighborhoods changed in ways consistent with gentrification. We then estimate regressions showing a statistically and economically significant association between rising rent and less tract-level ridership between two periods, 2008 to 2012 and 2013 to 2017. Specifically, a one-standard deviation increase in median rent is associated with 22 percent fewer neighborhood transit boardings.