Neighborhood Crime and Transit Station Access Mode Choice \u2013 Phase III of Neighborhood Crime and Travel Behavior

2015PDFTech ReportCA-MTI-15-1107MTI Report 12-47DTRT12-G-UTC21Rail transit stationsMode choiceTravel behaviorRidershipViolent crimesAccessMultinomial logitsMethodologyResearch HubViolent crimesRail transit stationsTravel behaviorCaliforniaMineta Transportation InstituteFerrell, Christopher E.Mathur, ShishirAppleyard, Bruce S.Mineta Transportation InstituteUnited States. Dept. of Transportation. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and TechnologyCalifornia. Dept. of Transportation. Division of Research and InnovationUS Transportation CollectionThis report provides the findings from the third phase of a three-part study about the influences of neighborhood crimes on travel mode choice. While previous phases found evidence that high levels of neighborhood crime discourage people from choosing to walk, bicycle and ride transit, consistent with the authors\u2019 hypothesis, they also produced counterintuitive findings suggesting that in some cases, high crime neighborhoods encourage transit ridership at the expense of driving\u2014the opposite of what common sense would suggest. Phase 3 tested possible explanations for these counterintuitive findings with a series of methodological improvements. These improvements were: \u2022 Improvement 1: Used the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system\u2018s 2008 Station Profile Survey travel data set to replace the Bay Area Travel Survey (BATS) 2000 data used in previous phases. \u2022 Improvement 2: Separated drop-off and drive-alone modes in logit models. \u2022 Improvement 3: Variables at the corridor level replaced previous variables at the transportation analysis zone (TAZ) level. \u2022 Improvement 4: Average parcel size (APS) variable replaced the intersection density measure of urban design. \u2022 Improvement 5: Used nested logit modeling techniques. These yielded strong evidence supporting the hypothesis that high-crime neighborhoods encourage driving, and they generated none of the counterintuitive findings from previous phases