Public Transportation Access and Food Insecurity

Public transportation networks connect poor urban households in food deserts to grocery options and nutritious food. This paper examines how the exit of public transit options in an urban food desert affects a household's access to and utilization of grocery stores over drug and dollar stores, as well as the healthfulness of the foods these households purchase. I create an original data set of all transportation network changes across 138 cities in the US over the period 2008–2019. I combine this with UPC codes of all consumer packaged goods bought by tens of thousands of urban households over the same period. The exit of public transportation options in an urban food desert is associated with a significant decrease in the number of yearly trips below median income households make to grocery stores and an increase in the number of yearly trips made to drug and dollar stores. Further, households that experience such an exit subsequently buy fewer healthy foods and more unhealthy foods. The results from this study suggest that maintaining public transit infrastructure is an important public policy concern and that cuts to public transit networks directly impact urban households' access to nutritious food.