Towards a More Realistic Evaluation of New Public Transit Services' Impacts on Healthcare Accessibility and Inequality
Abstract
Poor healthcare accessibility can lead to adverse health outcomes, particularly for socially disadvantaged populations, intensifying social and health disparities within urban areas. As cities worldwide introduce new public transit services to enhance healthcare accessibility and reduce inequality, the robust and scientific evaluation of these interventions becomes essential. However, transportation research often overlooks key factors such as supply-demand dynamics, distance decay, and travel time uncertainty when evaluating the impacts of transit innovations on healthcare accessibility and inequality. This oversight can misrepresent the impacts of new transit services on healthcare accessibility and inequalities, distort transit project appraisals, and mislead stakeholders such as planners and policymakers. To facilitate a more realistic and rigorous evaluation of transit projects, I undertake two studies in this thesis. The first study outlines methods for evaluating the impacts of new transit services on healthcare accessibility and inequality by considering supply-demand dynamics and distance decay effects. It also explores whether and how neglecting the supply-demand interactions and distance decay can lead to erroneous evaluation outcomes. Results reveal that ignoring supply-demand dynamics and distance decay effects can distort transit project evaluations and mislead stakeholders. In the second study, I introduce an easy-to-use framework for assessing the impacts of new transit systems on healthcare accessibility and its inequality by incorporating the effects of travel time uncertainty issues such as delays using real-time transit big data. Results demonstrate that overlooking travel time uncertainty can overestimate healthcare accessibility while underestimating the benefits of new transit services in alleviating inequality. This thesis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of new transit services on accessibility and inequality. It advocates for more scientific transit planning and provides valuable insights for urban transportation researchers and practitioners aiming to improve healthcare accessibility and reduce urban inequalities through transit interventions.