Journal article
Unobserved heterogeneity in transportation equity analysis: Evidence from a bike-sharing system in southern Tampa
Journal of transport geography, v 91, p102956
01 Feb 2021
Featured in Collection : UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
Abstract
Assessing the equity impacts of transportation systems/policies has become a crucial component in transportation planning. Existing statistical modeling approaches for transportation equity analysis have typically assumed that parameter estimates are constant across all observations and used data aggregated to certain geographic units for the analysis. Such methods cannot capture unobserved factors that are not contained in the dataset, i.e., unobserved heterogeneity, which is likely to be present in the increasingly popular disaggregated datasets. To investigate whether there is unobserved heterogeneity in transportation equity impacts, this study carries out an empirical study focusing on the distribution of individual accessibility to activity locations via bike-sharing in southern Tampa. A disaggregated dataset containing information on individual bike-sharing accessibility and socio-economic factors is modeled with a random parameters logit model that allows for the investigation of possible unobserved heterogeneity. Further, models are estimated using data aggregated to parcel-and TAZ-levels to explore the impacts of data aggregation on model estimation results. The models unveil the unobserved heterogeneity in bike-sharing accessibility among populations in different groups defined by different sociodemographic factors in southern Tampa. These results shed insights into how the inconsistent disparity direction of transportation outcomes across individuals in a population group can be measured from the heterogeneity effects. Finally, a comparison between different models show that to capture such inconsistency, the use of disaggregated data with heterogeneity models is highly recommended for transportation equity analysis.
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Details
- Title
- Unobserved heterogeneity in transportation equity analysis: Evidence from a bike-sharing system in southern Tampa
- Creators
- Zhiwei Chen - University of South FloridaXiaopeng Li - University of South Florida
- Publication Details
- Journal of transport geography, v 91, p102956
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Number of pages
- 13
- Grant note
- 1634738; 1638355 / U.S. National Science Foundation; National Science Foundation (NSF)
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000632611000005
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85099554566
- Other Identifier
- 991021890007704721
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InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Economics
- Geography
- Transportation