Designing Equitable Transit Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new formulation for designing public transit networks that explicitly incorporates various notions of equity and welfare, aiming to improve systemic fairness and accessibility.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to transit network design that integrates equity considerations directly into the optimization process, unlike previous methods.

Findings

Trade-offs between efficiency and equity are demonstrated.

Real-world data validates the effectiveness of the proposed formulation.

Different notions of equity impact network design outcomes.

Abstract

Public transit is an essential infrastructure enabling access to employment, healthcare, education, and recreational facilities. While accessibility to transit is important in general, some sections of the population depend critically on transit. However, existing public transit is often not designed equitably, and often, equity is only considered as an additional objective post hoc, which hampers systemic changes. We present a formulation for transit network design that considers different notions of equity and welfare explicitly. We study the interaction between network design and various concepts of equity and present trade-offs and results based on real-world data from a large metropolitan area in the United States of America.