No Ticket to Ride: A Systematic Definition of Transit Insecurity

While the concept of “transit insecurity” may seem self-explanatory, the phrase is not widely used in the current lexicon for city planning, or in policy research. Neither is there is neither a widely accepted definition, scale, or metric of assessment. Transit insecurity can and should be studied in order to [make policy recommendations, support decreasing inequality, etc. and so on]. Similarly to housing insecurity and food insecurity, transit insecurity must be operationalized to introduce a standardized way to study this issue. This research uses a mixed methods methodology, both qualitatively surveying the existing research on transit as a resource and identifying quantitative data sets to validate and test developed metrics of transit insecurity.

The goal of this project is to develop a list of metrics, constructs, and data sets to operationalize transit insecurity as a concept, and the impacts of this insecurity on access to other resources (jobs, food, healthcare, education, etc).