No Ticket to Ride: A Systematic Definition of Transit Insecurity

The ability of persons and communities to reliably access transit is a pressing one that has not yet received significant attention in the literature on city planning, in public discourse, or in policy research. This scoping review focuses on factors that negatively impact a person or community’s ability to have reliable access to transit; we call such persons and communities ‘transit insecure’. Because of the lack of existing research in the area, the term lacks a widely accepted definition, scale, and metrics of assessment. To arrive at a definition and set of metrics, a systematic search was conducted in three electronic databases for studies pertaining to transit insecurity. Over 200 articles were initially identified and, after review and screening for relevance, a total of 15 articles were included in the analysis, ranging in publication date from 2005 to 2020. By analyzing common themes and concerns across these articles, four factors were found that affect transit insecurity: low income, long travel distance, long wait times, and limited accessibility.