Analysis of spatiotemporal transit accessibility and transit inequity of essential services in low-density cities, a case study of Nashville, TN

Evaluating the accessibility and equity of transit services to essential services that fulfill people’s fundamental needs is critical, especially in lower-density areas with limited transit services. Although numerous studies have analyzed the inequity of transit accessibility in dense, urban areas with robust transit networks, few of them evaluated transit inequity across multiple essential service categories (e.g., food stores, healthcare facilities, schools, etc.). This paper fills this research gap by focusing on a low-density, automobile-oriented city (Nashville, TN) to evaluate spatial transit inequities across essential service deserts and sociodemographic groups. The results of the case study show that many areas with higher transit-dependent demand (i.e., populations with limited personal vehicles, those living in poverty, and minority populations) tend to experience more restricted transit access to food, healthcare, school, and childcare facilities; interestingly, this is not the case for transit access to green space (specifically, parks). This study further identified essential service deserts by Local Indicator of Spatial Association (LISA) clustering and analyzed the correlation among them. The correlation results suggest that food deserts, healthcare deserts, school deserts, and childcare deserts are highly correlated with each other, while they have a lower correlation with park deserts. The findings of spatial transit inequity and the identification of essential service deserts provide crucial policy implications that can be used by transit agencies and local planning departments to prioritize their resources and target interventions to improve transit equity. This study contributes to the existing literature by proposing a systematic process that utilizes publicly available datasets to measure spatiotemporal transit supply, identify essential service deserts, and explore the correlation among these areas in a low-density city.