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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

People-Focused And Near-Term Public Transit Performance Analysis, Alex Karner Sep 2021

People-Focused And Near-Term Public Transit Performance Analysis, Alex Karner

Journal of Public Transportation

Public transit ridership forecasts have long played a role in understanding the potential success of a policy or investment, but their limitations have led researchers and practitioners to identify other performance analysis approaches. Accessibility, or the ease of reaching opportunities, has become very popular and widely used for this purpose. But commonly used accessibility measures also embody weaknesses that are seldom acknowledged; these limit their utility for truly understanding the benefits of transit investments. In this paper, we identify the pros and cons of these competing approaches and offer a third strategy. Specifically, we describe how revealed travel behavior data, …


Access To Secure Ballot Drop-Off Locations In Texas, Karner Alex, Dana Rowangould May 2021

Access To Secure Ballot Drop-Off Locations In Texas, Karner Alex, Dana Rowangould

University of Vermont Transportation Research Center

Safe access to voting during the Covid-19 pandemic was a concern across the US. In Texas, a push for mail-in voting during the November 2020 presidential election was significantly scaled back when the governor restricted each county to one secure ballot drop-off location. We evaluate the effect of this change, finding that it increased travel times to drop-off locations for drivers and public transit users by 18 and 32 minutes, respectively, in the most affected county. When evaluated across the state, the policy had a disproportionate effect on eligible Asian, Black, and Latinx voters.


The Legacy Of Car-Share And Light-Rail Transit For Mobility And Accessibility Improvements In Economically Marginalized Neighborhoods In The New York Metro Area, Kyeongsu Kim Feb 2021

The Legacy Of Car-Share And Light-Rail Transit For Mobility And Accessibility Improvements In Economically Marginalized Neighborhoods In The New York Metro Area, Kyeongsu Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the value of the car-share program and a new light rail system with respect to their impact on mobility and accessibility improvements in economically and transportation access-wise marginalized neighborhoods in NYC and its adjacent communities. It consists of three main essays that took deep dives into how each new service or system altered mobility or accessibility for those in need. The first essay (Chapter 2) investigates car-share vehicle utilization rates of the Zipcar across NYC. It assesses the utilization rates by vehicle type, service location, time period, and weekday usage compared to weekend activity. With a multivariate …


A Comprehensive Transit Accessibility And Equity Dashboard, Willem Klumpenhouwer, Jeff Allen, Lisa Li, Rick Liu, Mitchell Robinson, Diego Da Silva, Steven Farber, Alex Karner, Dana Rowangould, Amer Shalaby, Mary Buchanan, Steven Higashide Jan 2021

A Comprehensive Transit Accessibility And Equity Dashboard, Willem Klumpenhouwer, Jeff Allen, Lisa Li, Rick Liu, Mitchell Robinson, Diego Da Silva, Steven Farber, Alex Karner, Dana Rowangould, Amer Shalaby, Mary Buchanan, Steven Higashide

University of Vermont Transportation Research Center

The TransitCenter Equity Dashboard tracks how well public transit systems in seven densely populated urban regions in the United States serve their riders and how changes to transit service affect riders over space, time, and cost constraints. The dashboard presents a series of charts and interactive maps that can be used to evaluate variations in transit accessibility and equity. It was created using publicly available data and primarily open-source software. All measures can be accessed by users seeking to conduct their own analyses. Results demonstrate differences in agency responses to COVID-19 as well as baseline transit service levels provided to …