Research · Transit access and measurement
DC Student Travel
Three separate views of student travel: synthetic home-school demand, school-timed bus activity, and scheduled network access.
Three evidence layers
PASS generates a synthetic student population and home-school assignments from aggregate constraints. Event-APC measures changes in aggregate vehicle-door counts around school schedules. VIGO evaluates scheduled access for the modeled home-school obligations under stated transit networks.
Modeled demand, observed bus activity, and scheduled accessibility remain separate throughout the work.
The research asks what can be learned about access and school-timed transit activity when direct observation is incomplete and student privacy remains a hard constraint.
What each source supports
- PASS supports plausible home-school demand and accessibility analysis using synthetic rows.
- Event-APC supports school-timed changes in aggregate boardings and alightings.
- VIGO routing describes scheduled network opportunity under a stated service model.
- AFC supplies full-day aggregate context; it is not an APC denominator or passenger linkage.
Current evidence
The Event-APC work is listed in the TransitData 2026 program. Across 53 fall 2025 weekdays with comparable data, dismissal windows contain 6,180 more boardings and arrival windows 8,278 more alightings per weekday than their matched comparison medians.
PASS constructs 92,017 in-person home-school pairs. After excluding programs without a fixed daily clock, each of 30 validated realizations contributes 90,860 physical obligations at 237 schools.
VIGO evaluates those obligations in both directions under former, implemented, and Visionary bus packages. Under the implemented network, mean scheduled travel is 22.57 minutes in the morning and 26.09 minutes in the afternoon. Compared with the former network, the means fall by 0.38 and 0.25 minutes, while spatial paths change for 75.3% and 72.7% of obligations.
The higher-service Visionary package reduces mean time by a further 1.38 minutes in the morning and 1.55 minutes in the afternoon.
Evidence limits
PASS rows are synthetic. Event-APC estimates school-timed changes in aggregate bus counts, not student riders or complete trips. Accessibility results describe modeled scheduled opportunity under the network assumptions used, not delivered-service reliability.