Transit-related crime affects people’s decisions to use public transportation. While transit operators have long monitored crime and are cognizant of high incident locations, they lack data-driven tools to readily match crime events spatially with the locations of individual transit facilities, and temporally with transit service periods and their associated transit ridership characteristics. The overall goal of this project is to provide transit agency planners with new data and tools for crime surveillance and prevention and to help them better protect transit riders on their way to and from the transit systems and while waiting for transit. To do so, the project will develop and test data-driven tools to identify hotspots of criminal activity near and around each transit facility by using the results of models that estimate environmental and socioeconomic predictors of crime near transit facilities. The tools will incorporate two novel data sets: location-specific, police-reported crime incidents by type and individual ORCA payment card transaction records that yield origin-destination transit trip data. The tools will assist transit agencies in making better decisions regarding the selection of countermeasures and the allocation of future safety investments.
Principal Investigators:
Anne Vernez Moudon, Urban Design and Planning, UW
Mark E. Hallenbeck, Washington State Transportation Center, UW
Sponsor: WSDOT
WSDOT Technical Monitor: Alan Soicher
WSDOT Project Manager: Jon Peterson
Scheduled completion: June 2018