Steven Farber

• BA, MSA, PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Toronto

We put forward a method for measuring the social interaction potential of a metropolitan region based on the time-geographic concept of joint accessibility. The metric is sensitive to prevailing land use patterns and commuter flows in the metropolitan region, time budgets, and the spatial distribution of joint activity locations. It is calculated v...

A fundamental role of an urban transportation system is to provide a means for individuals in society to access locations and participate in activities. This paper investigates how automobility, a system of land-use and mobility, imposes on the ability to participate in discretionary activities. A theoretical argument couched in time-geography is u...

Population segregation measurement is a topic of broad interest in the social sciences. In this paper we draw from recent advances in the spatial analysis literature to derive individualized measures of clustering and exposure. Recent research on accessibility has seen a shift from place-based measures to person-based ones. Similarly, the notion of...

Background: We model the use of public transit to reach grocery stores and the use of online delivery services to get groceries, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic among people who used transit regularly prior to the crisis. Methods: We draw upon a panel survey of pre-pandemic transit riders in Vancouver and Toronto. We conduct multivariabl...

This study analyses shift work commuting. We ask: who works evening and night shifts, how do they commute, and how does working these shifts impact activity participation and wellbeing? We answer these questions using two national datasets. Our results offer four overarching findings. First, we find significant demographic differences along lines o...

Several Canadian cities observed a shift from public transit use to private cars and active transport modes during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a moment where pre-pandemic public transit users are reconsidering their travel options, studies describing their attitudes toward cycling are lacking. Because most trips in urban areas involve short- and mid-...

Geographers and health researchers routinely analyze data on food-related behaviors to understand potential relationships between the food environment and diet. Analytical uncertainties arise, however, from discounting the sequential connections and household coordination of various food tasks. This study employed the time-geographic construct of t...

Public transit agencies face a transformed landscape of rider demand and political support as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. We explore people's motivations for returning to or avoiding public transit a year into the pandemic. We draw on a March 2021 follow-up survey of over 1,900 people who rode transit regularly prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in...

There is growing body of research and practice assessing transportation equity and justice. Commuting is an especially important dimension to study since such frequent, non-discretionary travel, can come at the expense of time for other activities and therefore negatively impact mental health and well-being. An ”extreme commuter” is a worker who ha...

Socioeconomic and place-based factors contribute to grocery shopping patterns which may be important for diet and health. Big data provide the opportunity to explore behaviours at the population level. We used data collected from Flipp, a free all-in-one savings and deals content app, to identify visitation to grocery stores and estimate home-to-st...

There is growing body of research and practice assessing transportation equity and justice. Commuting is an especially important dimension to study since such frequent, non-discretionary travel, can come at the expense of time for other activities and therefore negatively impact mental health and well-being. An "extreme commuter" is a worker who ha...

Understanding how coupled adults arrange food-related labor in relation to their daily time allocation is of great importance because different arrangements may have implications for diet-related health and gender equity. Studies from the time-use perspective argue that daily activities such as work, caregiving, and non-food-related housework can p...

Public transit agencies face a transformed landscape of rider demand and political support as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. We explore people’s motivations for returning to or avoiding public transit a year into the pandemic. We draw on a March 2021 follow up survey of over 1,900 people who rode transit regularly prior to the COVID-19 pandemic i...

To capture the complex relationships between transportation and land use, researchers and practitioners are increasingly utilizing place-based measures of transportation accessibility to support of a broad range of planning goals. This research reviews the state-of-the-art in applied transportation accessibility measurement and performs a comparati...

Geographic access to food retailers has long been considered an important determinant of food-related behaviors. Despite methodological improvements in assessing food environments, their associations with food behaviors have remained inconsistent. We argue that one possible reason for these inconsistencies is the lack of information about how an in...

Public transit is immensely important among recent immigrants for enabling daily travel and activity participation. The objectives of this study are to examine whether immigrants settle in areas of high or low transit accessibility and how this affects transit mode share. This is analyzed via a novel comparison of two gateway cities: Sydney, Austra...

Public transit is immensely important among recent immigrants for enabling daily travel and activity participation. The objectives of this study are to examine whether immigrants settle in areas of high or low transit accessibility and how this affects transit mode share. This is analyzed via a novel comparison of two gateway cities: Sydney, Austra...

Geographers and public health researchers have long been interested in social, spatial, and economic factors that drive access and exposure to food retail. A growing body of evidence draws on mobility data to capture locations accessed by individuals beyond the home address. Given that food-related activities are shared by household members and oft...

The TransitCenter Equity Dashboard tracks how well public transit systems in seven densely populated urban regions in the United States serve their riders and how changes to transit service affect riders over space, time, and cost constraints. The dashboard presents a series of charts and interactive maps that can be used to evaluate variations in...

In rapidly-growing metropolitan regions, it is crucial that transportation-related policies and infrastructure are designed to ensure that everyone can participate equitably in economic, social, and civil opportunities. Ridehailing services are touted to improve mobility options, but there is scant research that incorporates this mode within an acc...

Problem, research strategy, and findings Millions of North Americans stopped riding public transit in response to COVID-19. We treat this crisis as a natural experiment to illustrate the importance of public transit in riders’ abilities to access essential destinations. We measured the impacts of riders forgoing transit through a survey of transpor...

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, many urban residents stopped riding public transit despite their reliance on it to reach essential services like healthcare. Few studies have examined the implications of public transit reliance on riders’ ability to reach healthcare when transit is disrupted. To understand how shocks to transportation syste...

Assessing whether the benefits of proposed public transit projects are fairly distributed across population groups is increasingly becoming an important part of transit planning practice. In this paper, we outline and exemplify a procedure for evaluating the equity impacts of a new transit line. Specifically, this procedure incorporates census-base...

We compare the results of a survey of transit riders during COVID-19 against a regional household travel survey. The Facebook sample over-represents women and car-less respondents compared to the household survey. We also compare the demographics of a subset of Facebook survey respondents, those still riding transit during COVID-19, against a simil...

Many cities have undergone spatial re-distributions of low-income populations from central to suburban neighborhoods over the past several decades. A potential negative impact of these trends is that low-income populations are concentrating in more automobile oriented areas and thus resulting in increased barriers to daily travel and activity parti...

During subway disruptions, commuters are often left stranded while they wait for bus bridging services. Some are able to change their mode of transport midway through their trip, often by requesting a ride-hailing service like Uber or Lyft if they are affordable. Many agencies use in-service buses to provide bus bridging services during subway disr...

Pooled ride-hailing services such as UberPool are believed to contribute towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions and traffic congestion, and have caught the attention of policymakers, as they align much closer to sustainable transport objectives. The relative sustainability of these services depends on their ability to successfully match riders f...

Transit agencies in multiple countries have started piloting the integration of new mobility technologies (NMTs) into their transit services. This article reviews the emerging evidence from NMT-based transit pilots to identify the social equity impacts of NMT–transit integration. We focus on ride-hailing, on-demand transit, microtransit, and active...

We examine the wait-time of Uber’s wheelchair accessible service (UberWAV) in Toronto, to determine whether it meets the City’s 11-minutes average wait-time requirement. Using a 12-million record dataset of every ride-hailing trip conducted in Toronto between September 2016 and March 2017, we show that wait-times for UberWAV services were, on avera...

We examine the wait-time of Uber’s wheelchair accessible service (UberWAV) in Toronto, to determine whether it meets the City’s 11-minutes average wait-time requirement. Using a 12-million record dataset of every ride-hailing trip conducted in Toronto between September 2016 and March 2017, we show that wait-times for UberWAV services were, on avera...

Vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) has been widely used in regional planning as a key sustainability performance indicator. Many regional growth plans for reducing work trip VKT have been proposed, with a focus on land use development in employment centers. Despite the potential impact of urban form on the reduction of VKT, the fundamentals of how t...

Convenience and low prices have enabled ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, to position themselves amongst the most valuable companies within the transportation sector. They now account for the lion share of activities in the platform economy and play an increasing role within our cities. Despite this, very little is known about the type...

Social equity is increasingly becoming an important objective in transport planning and project evaluation. This paper provides a framework and an empirical investigation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) examining the links between public transit accessibility and the risks of social exclusion, simply understood as the suppressed abi...

Policymakers in cities worldwide are trying to determine how ride-hailing services affect the ridership of traditional forms of public transportation. The level of convenience and comfort that these services provide is bound to take riders away from transit, but by operating in areas, or at times, when transit is less frequent, they may also be fil...

Social equity is increasingly becoming an important objective in transport planning and project evaluation. This paper provides a framework and an empirical investigation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) examining the links between public transit accessibility and the risks of social exclusion, simply understood as the suppressed abi...

Policymakers in cities worldwide are trying to determine how ride-hailing services affect the ridership of traditional forms of public transportation. The level of convenience and comfort that these services provide is bound to take riders away from transit, but by operating in areas, or at times, when transit is less frequent, they may also be fil...

Policymakers in cities worldwide are trying to determine how ride-hailing services affect the ridership of traditional forms of public transportation. The level of convenience and comfort that these services provide is bound to take riders away from transit, but by operating in areas, or at times, when transit is less frequent, they may also be fil...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Bike lane projects on retail streets have proved contentious among merchant associations in North America, especially when they reduce on-street parking. A limited but growing number of studies, however, detect neutral to positive consequences for merchants following bike lane implementation. In 2016, the C...

We compute a series of benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) that describe the state of transport equity in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA). These measures are designed to be simple to interpret, have clear normative interpretations, and be easily replicable in future survey waves or for other regions.

Urban intensification is believed to result in a modal shift away from automobiles to more active forms of transportation. This study extended the understanding of bicycle mode choice and the influence of built form through an analysis of dwelling type, density, and mode choice. Apartment dwelling and active transportation are related to intensific...

The equitability of a transport system and, therefore, the fairness of the distribution of its benefits, is assessed by clearly defining all aspects that influence an individual user’s ability to reach daily life destinations in the region. This ability can be enhanced or restricted by the environment travelled through, the chosen transport mode, t...

Millions of Canadians rely on public transportation to conduct daily activities and participate in the labour force. However, many low-income households are disadvantaged because existing public transit service does not provide them with sufficient access to destinations. Limited transit options, compounded with socioeconomic disadvantage, can resu...

Accessibility is now a common way to measure the benefits provided by transportation–land use systems. Despite its widespread use, few measurement options allow for the comparison of accessibility across multiple urban systems, and most do not adequately control for market competition between demand‐side actors and supply‐side facilities in localiz...

Millions of Canadians rely on public transportation to conduct daily activities and participate in the labour force. However, many low-income households are disadvantaged because existing public transit service does not provide them with sufficient access to destinations. Limited transit options, compounded with socioeconomic disadvantage, can resu...

The spatial structure of a region is known to affect the degree of face-to-face interaction opportunities for a city’s residents. These interaction opportunities are important building blocks in aspects of economic production. To date, though, there is scant empirical evidence linking interaction opportunities to worker locations. In this article,...

Success in postsecondary education is related to the amount of time spent on campus. The more often students attend class and access on-campus learning resources, the better their grades and the lower their dropout rates. Despite the importance of on-campus participation in student outcomes, some students living in large cities face tremendous tran...

Studies employing 'activity space' measures of the built environment do not always account for how individuals self-select into different residential and non-residential environments when testing associations with physical activity. To date, no study has examined whether preferences for walkable residential neighborhoods predict exposure to other w...

We create and release a publicly available dataset of neighbourhood level measures of access to employment for the eight largest urban regions in Canada. Measures of access to employment are key indicators for analyzing the characteristics of transport networks and urban form. Specifically, we generate cumulative measures (number of jobs reachable...

Racial segregation is a pervasive social feature of American cities responsible for social, economic and health disparities. Conventional measures of segregation have been criticised for ignoring the spatial and temporal dynamics of everyday life, which are theorized to influence the ease of interaction between people. In this paper we explore a So...

Success in postsecondary education is related to the amount of time spent on campus. The more often students attend class and access on-campus learning resources, the better their grades and the lower their dropout rates. Despite the importance of on-campus participation in student outcomes, some students living in large cities face tremendous tran...

The recent United States housing market crisis resulted in a significant decline in housing market values. Yet, the extent to which urban amenities such as rail stations moderated the market impacts has not been entirely recognised. This study undertakes a repeat sales analysis to understand the impact of station proximity on housing values before,...

This paper reports on the effects of inaccessibility on Syrian refugees in Durham Region, a municipality abutting the City of Toronto. The transport and social exclusion framework is applied to determine whether transport poverty leads to inaccessibility, and how this impacts participation in daily activities and the wellbeing of recently landed re...

Assessing the performance of public transit services has long been an important yet challenging issue for transportation agencies and researchers. Transit service performance measurement reflects a very first step towards an efficient and proactive management, where public transit agencies are increasingly pressured to provide high-quality services...

Background The walkability of individuals’ neighbourhoods is believed to positively contribute to their participation in physical activity. Reported associations between walkability and physical activity, however, are highly variable. One explanation is that many studies only assess individuals’ home environments and do not account for their exposu...

Examination of mode choice behavior is an important step in accurately predicting future travel demand. Despite having somewhat unique travel needs and challenges, there is a lack of knowledge in understanding the mode use behavior of university student population. The existing studies on university populations relied on a relatively smaller sample...

Background The walkability of an individual's neighbourhood of residence is positively associated with their participation in physical activity. Reported associations between walkability and physical activity, however, are highly variable. One explanation is that many studies only assess individuals’ home environments and do not account for their e...

Accessibility is a key indicator for the number of opportunities experienced by an individual, and it is generally assumed that higher levels of accessibility lead to higher levels of activity participation and satisfaction. Despite the fact that this relationship has been tested in preceding studies, no clear pattern of correlation has been found...

Improving our understanding of cycling behaviors in urban areas is an important step in producing a more sustainable transportation system. Based on a hybrid stated and revealed preference survey (n = 132) in Salt Lake City, Utah, this paper studies the influence of attitudes and demographics on cycling frequency. A factor analysis of stated prefer...

The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area is in the process of implementing a wide array of transit expansion projects. Despite being an important evaluator of transit efficacy, accessibility is not a typical variable included in the business cases of the local planning authorities. We address this shortcoming by computing current and future accessibil...

A healthy food environment is an important component in helping people access and maintain healthy diets, which may reduce the prevalence of chronic disease. With few exceptions, studies on healthy food access in urban regions typically ignore how time of day impacts access to food. Similarly, most extant research ignores the complexities of accoun...

We describe a method for retroactively improving the accuracy of a General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) package by using a real-time vehicle location data set provided by the transit agency. Once modified, the GTFS package contains the observed rather than the scheduled transit operations and can be used in research assessing network performan...

We put forward a new data object called the public transit travel time cube and demonstrate how the cube can be used in the analysis of transit travel time changes over space and time. The travel time cube contains the shortest path transit travel time between sets of origins and destinations in the city, at all times of day. Once computed, a wide...

Urban intensification is believed to result in a modal shift away from automobiles to more active forms of transportation. This study extended the understanding of bicycle mode choice and the influence of built form through an analysis of dwelling type, density, and mode choice. Apartment dwelling and active transportation are related to intensific...

The social interaction potential (SIP) metric measures urban structural constraints on social interaction opportunities of a metropolitan region based on the time geographic concept of joint accessibility. Previous implementations of the metric used an interaction surface based on census tracts and the locations of their centroids. This has been sh...

In the absence of other alternatives, people who rely on public transportation to conduct their daily activities have travel patterns that differ from discretionary transit users, especially those who choose to use transit for work trips. At the same time, in many regions around the world, public transportation is primarily designed to accommodate...

Local governments and non-profit organizations fund and operate many services and programs throughout the city including those which are specifically for the benefit of homeless, low-income or otherwise socially disadvantaged people. Accessing these services can sometimes be difficult, especially for those who do not have access to private automobi...

Recent advances in transportation geography demonstrate the ability to compute a metropolitan scale metric of social interaction opportunities based on the time-geographic concept of joint accessibility. The method we put forward in this article decomposes the social interaction potential (SIP) metric into interactions within and between social gro...

The potential path area (PPA) and activity space (AS) concepts play a central role in the substantial amount of applied research focusing on the quantitative analysis and description of people's spatial behaviour. Given this large literature, and the surprising lack of a formal review of the research, the time is ripe for a systematic review. This...

Improving nutrition in urban regions involves understanding which neighborhoods and populations lack access to stores that sell healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables. To this end, recent work has focused on mapping regions without access to places like supermarkets, often terming them ‘food deserts’. Until recently, this work has not conside...

The success of compact development depends in part on accurately gauging its public demand and understanding residents’ preferences towards it. Drawing upon a stated-preference survey in the Wasatch Front region in Utah, this paper estimates preferences for compact, walkable and transit-friendly neighbourhoods through the application of a discrete...

This paper investigates the spatial distribution of social activity locations. The research makes use of a social interaction potential (SIP) metric to estimate the potential for an individual to participate in a face-to-face social activity at any particular location in the city. The metric is shown to constitute a contact probability field that i...

The goal of this study is to develop and apply a new method for assessing social equity impacts of distance-based public transit fares. Shifting to a distance-based fare structure can disproportionately favor or penalize different subgroups of a population based on variations in settlement patterns, travel needs, and most importantly, transit use....

In this article, we construct new, simple, and nonparametric tests for spatial independence using symbolic analysis. An important aspect is that the tests are free of a priori assumptions about the functional form of dependence, making them especially suitable in situations where the dependence is nonlinear. We define the concept of a similarity re...

Empirical evidence is mounting that good urban design fosters the formation of social fabric. Existing evidence is however limited in at least two respects. First, empirical studies have focused largely on social interactions taking place within the residential neighborhood, while leaving social encounters near the workplace unconsidered. Second, w...

In this article, we undertake an analysis of accessibility to jobs from the perspective of single-parent household members. Individuals in this demographic segment are of interest due to the fact they often face the double burden of household and employment responsibilities. A case study of the city of Toronto in Canada, an urban area that has seen...

This study evaluated independent and joint effects of census tract (CT) poverty and geographic access to mammography on stage at diagnosis for breast cancer. The study included 161,619 women 40+ years old diagnosed with breast cancer between 2004 -2006 in ten participating US states. Multilevel logistic regression was used to estimate the odds of l...

Improving spatial access to healthy foods in urban regions is recognized as an important component of reducing the prevalence of chronic illness and achieving better health outcomes. Previously, researchers exploring this domain have calculated accessibility measures derived from the travel cost from home locations to nearby food stores. This appro...

As a signatory of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Canada has assumed the obligation to foster the fundamental right of individuals with impairments to participate in all normal activities and relationships of society. Currently, however, relatively little is known about the extent to which Canadians with disabilities are...

This article contributes to the growing research and policy interest on the challenges of achieving socially sustainable transportation. It analyses the determinants of transport mode use for journey to work among population groups considered as vulnerable to mobility and accessibility limitations. Using the 2001 Census of Canada, multilevel multin...

Large variability and correlations among the coefficients obtained from the method of geographically weighted regression (GWR) have been identified in previous research. This is an issue that poses a serious challenge for the utility of the method as a tool to investigate multivariate relationships. The objectives of this paper are to assess: (1) t...