Achieving equity in public transit planning: A critical assessment of Markham, Ontario's Highway 7 rapid transit corridor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contrary to other research that critically assesses transit projects using an equity imperative, the primary intent of this research is not only an empirical assessment of physical barriers which contribute to diminished transit access, but also a critical assessment of the policies used to guide the Highway 7 vivaNext Rapidway and land use development across York Region and Markham. A review of broad policy frameworks, I argue, is necessary to begin addressing issues that transit equity experts continuously raise. My research reviews transit equity and social exclusion literature to provide readers with an understanding of how equity can be defined and why appropriate terminology is important when planning transit infrastructure projects. In forming a critical assessment of the Highway 7 rapid transit corridor, I use a political economy framework to examine the growth imperative used in justifying greater density on Highway 7, and the continually changing nature of governing regimes involving both public and private sector actors. With social vulnerability growing in both Markham and York Region, it becomes increasingly relevant to assess policy in order to determine how planning processes could produce more equitable outcomes. Equity should be a key component in planning public transit however, equitable outcomes will become more difficult to achieve if transit continues to be less of a "public" infrastructure, and more of a "private" responsibility.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.036 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".