Robbin Deboosere’s research while affiliated with McGill University and other places

Introduction The ability to access healthcare services has long been considered a ‘right’ by Canadian citizens and is protected as such under the Canada Health Act. However, socio-spatial factors can limit access to healthcare services, especially for vulnerable populations. This paper aims to quantify the spatial accessibility to healthcare services by public transport across eight major Canadian metropolitan areas and compare accessibility to healthcare across vulnerable population groups. This is the first study, to the authors’ knowledge, to conduct an assessment of accessibility to hospitals by public transport across multiple metropolitan regions in Canada, thereby allowing to identify common trends, challenges, as well as knowledge gaps. Methods Spatial accessibility to general medical and surgical hospitals by public transport was measured through a two-step floating catchment area method, considering both service-to-population ratios and travel time to these health services. For each metropolitan area, the average accessibility of all census tracts and the average accessibility of the 20% most vulnerable census tracts were calculated. To quantify vertical equity, an indicator was subsequently developed using the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient between accessibility and vulnerability. Main findings Within metropolitan areas (except for Vancouver), residents of vulnerable census tracts generally have greater access to hospitals by public transport. Yet, larger metropolitan areas (Calgary, Toronto-Hamilton, and Vancouver) tend to underperform in terms of vertical equity and average accessibility. In line with this, vulnerable census tracts in these metropolitan areas are characterized by the lowest levels of accessibility compared to vulnerable census tracts in the other metropolitan areas. Conclusion This research highlights the challenges associated with the suburbanization of poverty in large Canadian metropolitan regions and the need to provide efficient public transport services to reach hospitals located in the periphery. It also shed lights on the necessity to conduct more empirical research to inform the implementation of guidelines in terms of accessibility to healthcare in Canada. This study is of relevance to researchers, planners and policy-makers wishing to improve accessibility to healthcare, especially for vulnerable populations.

Hedonic modelling techniques have frequently been used to examine real estate valuation, and they have recently started to be applied to short-term rental valuation. Relying on a web-scraped data set of all Airbnb transactions in New York City (NYC) between August 2014 and September 2016, this paper presents the first hedonic regression model of Airbnb to take into account neighbourhood effects and to predict both average price per night and revenue generated by each listing. The model demonstrates that locational factors – above all, transit accessibility to jobs – and neighbourhood variation have a large impact on both price per night and monthly revenue, and further reveals how professionalization of the short-term rental market is driving more revenue to a narrower segment of hosts. Further, the findings suggest that Airbnb hosts earn a significant premium by converting long-term housing in accessible residential neighbourhoods into de facto Airbnb hotels. This premium incentivizes landlords and hosts with properties in accessible neighbourhoods to replace long-term tenants with short-term guests, forcing those in search of housing to less accessible neighbourhoods.

Accessibility, or the ease of reaching destinations, is increasingly being used and examined in both literature and practice. The most common accessibility metric, the cumulative opportunity measure, is often computed as the number of jobs that can be reached within a certain time frame. Aggregating all jobs, however, often inflates the opportunities that can be reached by socially vulnerable residents, which could feed into and/or generate inadequate policy decisions. This study therefore develops the measure of accessibility to low-income jobs for vulnerable residents by public transport, specifically taking into account realized travel times by these vulnerable individuals. This fine-grained measure, computed across 11 major Canadian cities, is a modified place-based accessibility metric that incorporates facets of person-based metrics, allowing planners and policy makers to propose more targeted interventions to improve the quality of life of their cities' most vulnerable populations. The study further allows for direct comparisons between the impacts of variation in accessibility levels between different regions to help create best practices in land use and transport planning.

Public transport ridership has been steadily increasing since the early 2000s in many urban areas in North America. However, many cities have more recently seen their transit ridership plateaued, if not decreased. This trend in transit ridership has produced a lot of discussion on which factors contributed the most to this new trend. While no recent study has been conducted on this matter, understanding the levers that can be used to sustain and/or increase transit ridership is essential. The aim of this study is, therefore, to explore the determinants of public transport ridership from 2002 to 2015 for 25 transit authorities in Canada and the United States using a longitudinal multilevel mixed-effect regression approach. Our analysis demonstrates that vehicle revenue kilometers (VRK) and car ownership are the main determinants of transit ridership. More specifically, the results suggest that the reduction in bus VRK likely explains the reduction in ridership observed in recent years in many North American cities. Furthermore, external factors such as the presence of ridesourcing services (Uber) and bicycle sharing, although not statistically significant in our models, are associated with higher levels of transit ridership, which contradicts some of the experts’ hypotheses. From a policy perspective, this research suggests that investments in public transport operations, especially bus services, can be a key factor to mitigate the decline in transit ridership or sustain and increase it. While the results of this study emphasize that fare revenues cannot support such investments without deterring ridership, additional sources of revenues are required. This study is of relevance to public transport engineers, planners, researchers, and policy-makers wishing to understand the factors leading to an increase in transit ridership.

Walking to and from public transport can form a seamless way to integrate physical activity into our daily lives, thereby helping us achieve the recommended minutes of physical activity. To measure the link between physical activity and public transport use, it is critical to determine how far individuals are walking, and are willing to walk, to different modes of transit. Few planners, however, have access to detailed information on the exact public transport lines used by individuals, and therefore need to estimate distances by making use of only home and work locations. This study therefore compared two methods of calculating walking distances: one method using widely available home and work locations and a fastest route algorithm leveraging general transit feed specification data, and a second employing a detailed travel survey containing information on the real routes used by each respondent from Montreal, Canada, to generate more robust estimates of the distances individuals are walking to public transport stops. Results show that walking distances calculated from commonly available origin and destination information tend to underestimate real walking distances by 10%. Multilevel mixed-effect regression models indicate these differing results are mainly attributable to differences in travel behaviour and mode choice. Findings from this study provide a better understanding of how modelled and real walking routes to public transport stops differ, which could be of interest to professionals and urban decision makers wishing to correctly model walking to transit in their region when only limited information is available.

Local authorities worldwide have been pursuing transit-oriented development (TOD) strategies in order to increase transit ridership, curb traffic congestion, and rejuvenate urban neighborhoods. In many cities, however, development of planned sites around transit stations has been close to non-existent, due to, among other reasons, a lack of coordination between transit investments and land use at a broader spatial scale. Furthermore, while TOD considers access to transit, it often neglects the access to destinations that is provided by transit. We contend that accessibility-oriented development (AOD) can overcome these drawbacks of transit-oriented development. The AOD strategy fosters an environment conducive to development by balancing access to both jobs and workers. As such, AOD explicitly considers the connections between TOD locations and destinations that matter, both locally and regionally. Where markets are free to take advantage of accessibility levels, AOD is a naturally occurring process. Planners could therefore use the various tools at their disposal to influence accessibility levels (to jobs and workers) in order to attract urban development in potential AOD areas. To test the assumptions that guide AOD strategies, access to jobs and workers are calculated in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, Canada in 2001 and 2011. Cross-sectional and temporal regressions are then performed to analyze average commute times and urban development occurring across the region. Results show that residents in neighborhoods with high access to jobs and low access to competing workers experience the shortest commute times in the region, while the relationship also holds for changes in average commute times between the studied time periods. In addition, both access to jobs and access to workers are associated with changes in residential, commercial and industrial development: high labor force accessibility is associated with increases in job density, and high access to jobs is related to increases in population density between 2001 and 2011. Planners can thus leverage accessibility as a tool to direct development in their cities and to strategically adjust commute times, thereby realizing the full benefits of planned transit investments.