Are the Transit Fares Fair? Public Transit Fare Structures and Social Vulnerability in Montreal, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on social equity pertaining to transportation typically addresses how residents in a region have access to desirable destinations. Nonetheless, little is known about how public transit fare structures affect social equity. Some transit agencies charge more for fewer rides; often weekly fares cost more per ride than unlimited monthly passes, though monthly passes cost more up-front. For some social groups, in particular low-income earners, purchasing monthly passes may place a burden on their budget, and influence them to instead buy weekly passes. In this research, the authors analyze transit pass purchases of total monthly, weekly, and three or more weekly passes during the month of September 2014 in Montreal, Canada. They discovered that household income and a measure of social vulnerability are associated with higher purchases of weekly passes, compared to monthly passes. Moreover, using smartcard data to track individual fare cards, they found that recurring purchases of three or more weekly passes depend on income and a social indicator of the neighborhood. Their findings indicate that individuals residing in vulnerable neighborhoods are likely to spend more money on transit fares over the course of a month, compared to those residing in better-off neighborhoods. These findings raise concerns regarding the fairness of the existing fare structure in the region and the financial burden it imposes, especially on vulnerable groups. The methodology and findings from this study provide insight for transport planners, particularly those concerned with providing an equitable transit system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".