Evaluating Longitudinal Impacts of Transit Investments on Transit Demand

Land use and transportation (LUT) policies have lasting impact on the sustainability of cities. Therefore, these should be examined longitudinally to assess the long-term effects on travel behaviour. Specifically, trends of transit accessibility and transit-oriented developments are considered of the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area from 2001 to 2016. Most of the data used comes from the Transportation Tomorrow Survey and augmented by other sources. At a disaggregate level, location choice models are developed to estimate person accessibility. Generally, people living in highly-mixed areas are more sensitive to transit-walk-access wait time. Regarding the population, several regression models are developed to determine the effect of the considered transit variables on the number of household transit trips. It is found that the variables’ effects increase over time in a positive manner. These results show that these policies have consequences in the long-term and should be considered for future policy.M.A.S