Designing Equitable Transit Networks

Transit systems often disproportionately serve some populations while under-serving others, perpetuating social inequities. Traditional optimization focuses purely on efficiency without considering fairness implications. This work is innovative because it provides a rigorous framework for explicitly incorporating fairness into transit design decisions, enabling transit agencies to balance efficiency with equity. The inclusion of priority profiles allows different user groups to be weighted differently in the optimization.

This paper develops a mathematical programming framework for designing equitable transportation networks that explicitly consider fairness in access and service quality across different populations. The work formulates the transit design problem with multiple fairness objectives including utilitarian welfare and egalitarian service guarantees. The approach enables policymakers to make explicit trade-offs between different fairness metrics and provides solutions that can accommodate diverse populations with varying transit needs and constraints.

The mixed-integer linear programming formulations successfully compute transit networks that achieve different fairness objectives, with Pareto-optimal trade-offs between utilitarian and egalitarian goals. Experimental results on the Chattanooga transit network demonstrate how the framework can be used to design routes that serve diverse populations more equitably while maintaining operational efficiency. The work provides transit agencies with tools to evaluate and improve equity in their service.