A Glimpse into the Users of LA Metro
Neighborhoods in Central Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley
Introduction
Our Research Question
Given Los Angeles's auto-centric nature, who uses LA Metro and why?
Purpose
We hope to gain insights on how race, income, and geographic mobility influence one’s mode of travel. Though mobility is one dimension within transportation that's dependent on a broader fabric of social determinants, it's important for us as planners to understand how these spatial inequalities reverberate across Los Angeles.
Background
There is ample evidence that having access to a personal vehicle is a key factor in upward socioeconomic mobility (Blumenberg 2017). While they come with their own costs, having access to a vehicle allows residents to travel farther for work, effectively increasing the size of the labor pool for both employees and employers. This is crucial in Los Angeles, with expansive sprawl and severe residential segregation, often separating the most disadvantaged communities from jobs that pay a living wage.
Most of LA’s most robust transit connectivity is concentrated in Downtown, Central LA, and the San Fernando Valley. Over time, these neighborhoods are becoming increasingly white and affluent, pushing vulnerable populations further from transit, thereby reducing their access to jobs. However, connections between gentrification, displacement, and transit projects like transit-oriented development (TOD) are complex and current empirical evidence is mixed. Yet TODs in LA tend to house educated, higher income, white residents (Chapple & Loukaitou-Sideris 2018). While the City and region are aggressively expanding the transit service network, it will take more than increased bus service and new trains to fix historical land use issues and decades of segregation. Therefore, it is important to understand the populations that take transit, and create effective policy solutions that are directed at improving their mobility and quality of life.
Methods
This project focuses on the boundaries of the City of Los Angeles. While the City borders several other municipalities in the County with diverse populations, robust job centers, and transit access, we limit our investigation to the City of LA to provide a more clear and targeted analysis of mobility and travel trends. We recognize that this is a shortfall of our analysis, given the interconnectedness of the LA region. Residents who live adjacent to neighborhoods with high transit usage, but outside of the city limits, are excluded from our analysis, meaning that we are unable to capture the true scale of the demographics of transit usage in LA. However, we do not anticipate this alter our results, and suggest that all of our findings for the City of LA are applicable to the region as a whole. Given the scale and scope of our project, there are considerations and variables we did not include in our analysis. This includes adding more neighborhoods and using data at census block level. Other variables, such as the five-D variables, density, diversity of uses, urban design, destination accessibility, and distance to transit, could provide another perspective and supplement our findings as well.
We follow the City boundaries as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, and compile several variables for our analysis. These include race, ethnicity, median household income, means of travel to work, commute time, bus frequency, percent of population without cars, and jobs. Data on race, income, means to work, and commute time is compiled from the American Community Survey (ACS). We use shape files of both transit density and frequency from Los Angeles Metro. We then select neighborhoods with high transit usage for our analysis, choosing Downtown, Pico-Union, North Hollywood, and Panorama City. We use Mid-City as our control neighborhood. These neighborhoods are both geographically and racially diverse, and will provide a more holistic understanding of who rides transit in Los Angeles.
Our analysis also includes a spatial autocorrelation in order to understand if there are any inconsistent geographies when examining spatial trends in public transit use. To do this, we normalized public transportation users per 1000 residents, then conducted a global spatial autocorrelation using Moran’s I, and then conducted a local spatial autocorrelation using Logic Indicators of Spatial Association. However, future work would benefit from the addition of a multivariate regression model to show how much variation within our variables explains why LA residents use public transit.
Results
Autocorrelation
A Moran I score of 0.73 gives a p-value of 0.001. Our chosen alpha is 0.05, thus we reject our null hypothesis that our map is random. Public transit use by workers is not random. Further, there is a positive spatial autocorrelation between public transit use and their census tracts. We use Local Indicators of Spatial Association to determine the location of clusters. These clusters are located in Central LA, and in parts of the San Fernando Valley. These clusters largely fall into our chosen neighborhoods of analysis minus North Hollywood and Mid-City, which is our control. This gives us confidence that the neighborhoods we chose are representative of high transit users.
- HH: high transit rate geographies near other high transit rate tracts
- LL: low transit rate geographies near other low transit rate tracts
- LH (donuts): low transit rate geographies surrounded by high transit tracts
- HL (diamonds): high transit rate geographies surrounded by low transit tracts
Control Neighborhood: Mid-City
Mid-City is chosen as the control neighborhood because of its low percentage of public transit users, while maintaining large populations of Black and Hispanic residents. Income in the neighborhood ranges widely, but it is solidly middle-class. The median use of public transit across all census tracts in Mid-City was 9%. At the tract level, transit usage tends to skew towards rail trips rather than bus trips. When used to commute to work, the majority of those trips take longer than 45 minutes, with very few public transit riders in the neighborhood having a commute time of less than 20 minutes. Given the neighborhood’s low use of public transit, car usage is widespread. Across census tracts in Mid-City, the highest percentage of residents without access to a car is 13%
Downtown LA
Downtown LA is a diverse neighborhood, with no racial or ethnic group accounting for more than 25% of the population. The neighborhood has a fairly evenly distributed mix of Hispanic, White, Asian, and Black residents. Downtown LA has heavy concentrations of both rail and bus transit, and the census tracts with the most public transit usage have dominant Black or Hispanic populations. The median income is $39,517, with a wide range of $9,000 to $100,000. The relationship between transit access and income is complicated: most census tracts with high public transit usage had incomes lower than the median, but there were a few outliers. The wealthiest tract, for example, had some of the highest transit usage as well. While we do not directly account for this, it is likely due to Downtown LA being a commuter hub, as well as an influx of luxury residential units that attract higher income residents.
Residents who do commute via transit have commute times of upwards of one hour. This long travel time could be a result of distance or congestion, and we are unable to account for this in our analysis. Again, like with income, there are a few outliers in the neighborhood who had transit commutes of less than 25 minutes. Downtown LA has a relatively large population without access to a car compared to the rest of the City, with the largest concentrations of car-less residents occurring in Black neighborhoods with median incomes below the neighborhood median. Notably, nearly half of the population that uses transit in one tract in Downtown LA does not have access to a car.
Job type varies widely across the neighborhood, regardless of commute mode. There is, however, a notably large population of public transit riders who work in finance, insurance, and/or real estate, which is further indication that some of the highest earners moving into luxury residential units in Downtown LA are also taking transit.
Pico-Union
Pico-Union is a majority Hispanic neighborhood, with some census tracts having a nearly 100% Hispanic population. Income is relatively constant across the neighborhood, with a median of $34,018. Similarly, transit use is constant across tracts at roughly 26%, and does not significantly fluctuate with income. While Pico-Union maintains a majority of residents commuting more than 45 minutes on public transit, nearly 25% of transit riders across tracts have commutes that average 30 minutes. This is notably different from both Mid-City and Downtown LA, both of which boast very long commute times on public transit. Nearly 20% of Pico-Union’s population does not have access to a car, including the 13% of regular public transit riders who do not have a car. Public transit is heavily concentrated in manufacturing, arts, and service jobs, with a very small number of people working in finance taking public transit, unlike Downtown LA.
North Hollywood
North Hollywood is a majority Hispanic and White neighborhood. Public transit use in the neighborhood is quite low, and does not fluctuate across tracts, despite having heavy-rail and bus service. Incomes fluctuate across the neighborhood, which is solidly middle-class, but there are no correlations between income and public transit use. In unison with Downtown LA and Pico-Union, the majority of transit users in North Hollywood have commute times of longer than 45 minutes, but is the first of our neighborhoods to show a significant population of commuters with commute times of less than 30 minutes. Car access in the neighborhood is nearly universal, with just 3% of the population not having access to a vehicle. Like Downtown LA, finance, insurance, and real estate are a significant portion of transit commuters, but other sectors have strong showings.
Panorama City
Panorama City is a majority Hispanic neighborhood, with significant portions of Asian and White residents. Like North Hollywood, public transit usage remains low, which can be attributed in part to the neighborhood’s limited access to public transportation. Public transit users in the neighborhood are predominantly Hispanic. Incomes in Panorama City follow those of Downtown LA and North Hollywood, but is the first of our sample neighborhoods to show that, across a wide range of incomes, transit usage remains concentrated to those earning below $50,000. The neighborhood’s limited transit options result in many riders having commutes over 60 minutes, with a small but notable population with commutes under 30 minutes. Similar to Downtown and Pico-Union, this might suggest more centrally located job centers. Less than 5% of Panorama City’s population does not have access to a car. Like most of our sample neighborhoods, more than 10% of those using public transit do not have access to a car. Unlike our other neighborhoods, Panorama City does not show a strong relationship between any one job sector and public transit usage.
Discussion
LA Metro ridership across census tracts in our chosen neighborhoods reveal a complicated and uneven pattern, but a few trends stand out. In terms of race, high transit tracts are predominantly Hispanic or Latino, though there are significant portions of Asian and Black populations, and to a lesser extent White populations. However, each neighborhood is distinct and does not directly mirror the demographic composition of one another. Median income across census tracts ranges widely. Some tracts with lower median-incomes have higher relative ridership while some high-income tracts also experience heavy transit use. Though median income is usually under $50,000 for higher transit use census tracts. In short, commute times for public transit users, much like auto travel, are long and commute times are often 45 minutes or longer. There are a few exceptions, notably North Hollywood which may be an indication of its relatively higher subway use compared to the rest of LA. There are wide ranging results for car access across all neighborhoods. Areas with higher transit use compared to the rest of LA, Downtown, Pico-Union, and Panorama City, have significant portions of their public transit users without car access. This indicates that transit use could be lower if populations in these neighborhoods had the means to own and operate a car. The lack of car access may be a further indication of other socioeconomic conditions for Angelenos - race, income, access to endowments. Car access deserves more attention given the large disparities found within transit use. Jobs vary widely across census tracts, more so than any other variable. There were some jobs that used transit more so than others: arts, entertainment, and food services, finance, insurance and real estate, and retail trade. Given the general nature of each job description, more detail is needed to parse out patterns between workers and transit use.
Bus use remains the most significant mode of public transportation and will likely remain so given the interconnectivity of LA Metro’s bus system. Rail will continue to be underutilized which is a function of access, job location, and larger built environment conditions that make auto use more amenable. It is our view that high ridership throughout LA is produced by a lack of options, rather than preferences for bus or heavy or light rail use. As stated previously, LA is built for auto use and will continue to rely on auto use. Increasing transit ridership could be incentivized through other programs that are beyond the scope of this project: Wider and more extensive use of bus lanes, more metro access in higher-income areas, gradual changes to the built environment, and more centrally located job centers are pathways that could be further explored. Altnerativerly, another option could mean improving car access for low-income populations so they can have a better means to rise from their economic position. This may be counterproductive for LA Metro in the short-run, but would significantly alter wellbeing.