Assessing Transit-Orientation and Development in Freeway Corridor Light Rail Station Walksheds

Abstract

This thesis examines freeway-corridor light rail stations across five transit systems in the western United States to assess the measurable effects of freeway routing and three station design characteristics: adjacency to the freeway right-of-way, placement within or along the right-of-way, and pedestrian access across the freeway. It compares freeway-corridor stations with non-freeway stations using four primary metrics: pedestrian accessibility, measured through walkshed area; development potential, measured through zoning; development outcomes, measured through transit-oriented redevelopment; and ridership.Walkshed area was calculated in GIS using OpenStreetMap and right-of-way data. Development potential was assessed using zoning data, while redevelopment was estimated through remote sensing methods. Boarding datasets were obtained from transit agencies. The thesis also evaluates whether adjacency, placement, and cross-freeway pedestrian access are associated with differences in station performance. The results indicate a statistically significant 23% reduction in walkshed area for freeway -corridor stations compared with non-freeway stations. Pedestrian access was the most influential design characteristic. Stations without an ADA-accessible cross-freeway connection had walkshed areas 39% smaller than comparable non-freeway stations. Findings for transit-oriented development were mixed. Freeway-corridor stations produced, on average, one-eighth of an acre more transit-oriented redevelopment, a 33% increase; however, at the statistical level, redevelopment around freeway-corridor stations was lower than in the combined control group (p = .0267). Ridership results were also mixed. Freeway-corridor stations had higher average ridership but generated less than half the ridership per capita of the traditional control group, a statistically significant difference (p < .0001). These findings suggest that freeway-corridor light rail stations impose measurable accessibility costs, but that these costs vary depending on station design, especially the presence or absence of ADA-accessible cross-freeway pedestrian connections. The results also complicate the assumption that freeway -corridor stations necessarily underperform in redevelopment or total ridership. Important limitations include potential false negatives in the redevelopment analysis due to roofing materials, lack of controls for station age, edge cases in classifying station design characteristics, possible zoning data inaccuracies, and the coarse resolution of remote sensing data. Despite these limitations, the thesis provides a quantitative basis for evaluating the tradeoffs of freeway-corridor light rail alignments during the planning process.