Station-level ridership on Mexico City's subway and BRT

Abstract

The Mexico City Metropolitan Area (MCMA) faces pressing mobility and environmental challenges. A growing group of academics, NGOs, international institutions, and government agencies point to the need to expand and improve the public transportation system, as well as move towards more sustainable urban development patterns. Transit-oriented development (TOD), an urban planning concept based on the coordination of transit infrastructure with dense, compact, and mixed-use neighborhoods, has been identified as a potential tool to address critical mobility, environmental, accessibility, and equity issues in the MCMAj. Yet, an effective TOD policy will require an understanding of the factors associated with transit ridership, particularly those related to the built-environment and land use. Traditional ridership estimation methods are data-intensive and prohibitively costly for many developing-world cities. In addition, they are not designed to analyze the influence pf station-level characteristics. Direct ridership modelling (DRM), a "sketch-planning" tool that uses multivariate regressions to predict station-level ridership, is a viable alternative that allows planners to achieve reasonable estimates quickly and economically, while also enabling the analysis of the relationship between the station-area built environment and transit ridership. In this thesis, I use data from a variety of public and open data sources to estimate direct ridership models for Mexico City's Metro and BRT systems, including sociodemographic, land use, built environment, transit system, and relative location characteristics. I find that some of the variables included have different effects on BRT and Metro, suggesting that the two systems play different roles within the public transportation network. Mainly, Metro ridership is driven by employment, while station-area population drives BRT ridership. Colectivos, a privately owned and operated semi-formal network of vans and microbuses -which had been hard to analyze due to lack of data- are important determinants of ridership in the mass-transit system. Interestingly, I also find evidence that built environment characteristics, such as well-Fonnected street grids, influence transit ridership. I discuss the implications of these results for a TOD policy in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area. The results point to the need of further research concerning travel and the built environment in developing-world cities, and support the claim that "sketch-planning" tools estimated with public and open data sources are useful to complement demand forecasts.