Willem Klumpenhouwer and Diego Silva present “Living on a fare: Dashboarding fare-sensitive access and equity in major U.S. urban areas”

While premium transit modes such as commuter rail can improve access to opportunities, the higher fares that accompany these services create barriers to their use.

Fare-sensitive access measures require accurate estimation of fare costs between origins and destinations. They are not often included in public transit access analyses because of data limitations and computational complexity.

We introduce a flexible and scalable fare calculator that encodes complex fare structures as permissions or “rules” and is able to estimate an origin-destination fare cost from a transit itinerary produced separately.

We leverage this fare calculator to examine how access and equity are impacted by fares across seven major urban areas in the United States and summarize our results on Transit Equity Dashboard, a public and online tool visualizing disparities in access to opportunities across demographic groups.

Dr. Willem Klumpenhouwer is an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Transit Analytics Lab. His research focuses on performance analysis and modelling of urban transit systems, regional and intercity rail, and emerging technologies in the transit sector. He also builds open-source data analytics and visualization tools to enable practitioners to manage, analyze, and evaluate their transportation systems more easily. You can find him on Twitter and Github at “wklumpen.”  Willem holds a PhD in Transportation Engineering from the University of Calgary, and an Honours BSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Guelph.

Dr. Diego Silva has a PhD in Computer Science, and currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at the Transit Analytics Lab, University of Toronto. His research bridges between Public Transit and Artificial Intelligence. He is interested in connecting the cutting-edge computational methods to build better and more reliable mobility in cities.

Presented by University of Toronto ITE Student Chapter, UT-ITE.

Free. All are welcome.

If any specific accommodations are needed, please contact ite@studentorg.utoronto.ca. Requests should be made as early as possible.

Join link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/s/81320181425. Please note that the same Zoom link will be used for all UT-ITE seminars this term.