Research · Transit access and measurement
DC Student Travel
How do students reach school when no dataset observes the whole journey? This research combines passenger counts, synthetic home–school geography, and scheduled routing to study access across Washington, DC.
Three evidence layers
PASS generates a synthetic student population and home-school assignments from aggregate constraints. Event-APC measures changes in aggregate automatic passenger counts around school schedules. VIGO evaluates scheduled access for the modeled home-school obligations under stated transit networks.
Automatic fare collection supplies full-day totals for context; it is not used to identify passengers or normalize Event-APC counts.
What the current thesis finds
Across 237 school areas and 54 primary weekdays, mean dismissal counts exceed matched references by 6,771 boardings, and arrival counts by 8,780 alightings. These are all-rider differences around school bells, not identified student trips.
PASS reconstructs home–school geography from Census microdata, enrollment, disclosure-limited attendance counts, and grouped distance summaries. Scheduled routing evaluates 90,860 eligible modeled students in each of 31 realizations from one fitted model.
In the scheduled model, the implemented bus network reduces mean daily time commitment outside school by 0.57 minutes, yet 4,309 modeled students in the main realization add at least ten minutes. A targeted service-restoration experiment examines the tradeoff between time savings and the alternatives left when a first vehicle is canceled.