Night Riders: Accessibility, Land Use, and Late-Night Transit

Abstract

Late-night transit service is an overlooked and underappreciated aspect of public transportation. Service is often unreliable and very often non-existent. When night service is available, routes are limited and circuitous, headways are long, and coverage is poor. The negative impacts of poor service are overwhelmingly born by those who have to work the late-shift. Late-night workers make less, travel farther, and are more likely to be non-white than their daytime counterparts, yet late-night service is rarely discussed in matters of transit equity. This paper seeks to situate the needs of late-night transit riders by conducting an analysis of King County Metro’s Night Owl bus service. First, the paper created and mapped an index of potential late-night transit riders based on demographic and household characteristics. Second, potential late-night destinations were identified based on late-night employment concentrations and land use data. Finally, an Origins/Destinations (O/D) analysis of the Night Owl bus network was performed between census block groups with high concentrations of potential late-night transit riders and late-night destinations. The results revealed high concentrations of late-night transit riders within the city of Seattle, as well as suburbs to the south like Kent, Auburn, and Federal Way. Late-night destinations were generally concentrated in industrial areas, the Duwamish Valley, and adjacent to arterial streets. The O/D analysis showed that late-night transit trip times are significantly longer than mid-day trips, service is generally at its best within the city of Seattle, and large swathes of the study area had little to no meaningful access to late-night transit.