Whose express access? Assessing the equity implications of bus express routes in Montreal, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Express buses—characterized by limited stops and sometimes higher frequencies or priority traffic measures—offer a cost-effective and efficient way to boost service convenience and reliability for riders. This paper assesses how the accessibility benefits of express bus route policy are distributed in Montreal, Canada, while providing a pathway for public transportation agencies to assess their policies and plans. To isolate the impact of bus express routes, we use General Transit Speed Specification (GTFS) data, the Open Trip Planner multimodal routing engine, and the 2013 edition of Montreal’s origin-destination survey to contrast travel time and accessibility at the trip and census-tract levels under two scenarios: one with the existing, complete network and the second a counterfactual scenario with no express bus routes. Our results indicate that bus express routes enable an overall increase in accessibility for the overall population. However, the accessibility benefits do not accrue evenly, as expected, but also tend to benefit a more significant number of higher incomes. This occurs despite the location of low-income populations in some outlying areas of the city, which express bus routes are supposed to serve. This paper closes with policy recommendations that help planners balance economic, environmental, and equity goals, perhaps one of the most complex challenges they face nowadays.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".