Examining Public Transportation in Healthy Food Access Research

ABSTRACT

This paper is among a handful of studies on food access that focus on the public transportation system. Starting from a stratified sample of households, we use GIS and specifically, network analysis, to measure household access to healthy food outlets via public transportation. We find that the complexities of public transit systems necessitates place-based, household-level analysis of healthy food access. Our study provides an example of this and lessons for incorporating public transportation into healthy food access research.

KEYWORDS:

• Food insecurity
• public transportation
• household accessibility to healthy food
• directionality
• gis

Acknowledgments

We wish to extend our gratitude, without implication, to Darren Ficklin, Hannah Davis, Hannah Wilson, Emma Freestone, John Diedrich, Marie O’Neill, and Belen Rogers for commenting on previous drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are ours.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. In keeping with the USDA focus on access to healthy food, we approach healthy food access from a household perspective as physical access to a healthy food outlet/full service grocery store, defined as a grocery outlet that carries all the food groups and a variety of fresh and frozen fruits and vegetables.

2. An unlinked trip is a trip measured from vehicle entry to vehicle exit. A person who completes a trip involving one transfer is counted as two unlinked trips.