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Effect of Rail Transit on Crime: A Study of Los Angeles from 1988 to 2014

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Abstract

Objectives

To assess the impact of rail transit on crime in neighborhoods near transit stations.

Methods

We use data on the location and date of all rail station openings in Los Angeles between 1990 and 2012 and crimes reported to the Los Angeles Police Department from 1988 to 2014. We estimate the effect of transit on crime using a stepped-wedge design estimated with Poisson regression with permutation tests to assess statistical significance. Two labor strikes during the study period created a natural experiment for which we assessed the short-term effect of transit on crime.

Results

We find no evidence that transit station openings or disruptions in transit due to strikes result in changes in crime in surrounding neighborhoods.

Conclusions

The results suggest that rail transit may produce no major consequence for overall neighborhood crime patterns. Future research should examine other cities and more fine-grained geocoded data on crime at the street segment level and by land-use characteristics that generate foot traffic, as this approach could assess under what conditions transit may generate crime increases or reductions in highly localized areas.

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Notes

  1. MacDonald (2015) provides a thorough review of this literature. Here we summarize this review.

  2. http://media.metro.net/projects_studies/research/images/reports/mta_bus_regional_weekday_travel_patterns.pdf.

  3. Grand theft person is a misdemeanor listed under California PC 487(c) and involves the stealing of property of any value directly off of another person without force or threat of force.

  4. 2009 was the first year that we had good address data that we could reliably geocode into the 2005 RD map.

  5. All of the data, including the scanned archival data, historical RD maps, RD crosswalks, station maps and timelines are available from this study’s GitHub site, https://github.com/gregridgeway/LAPDcrimedata.

  6. 200 m from the boundary was selected so that the majority of residents in the RD would be within a typical walking distance to the Metro Rail station.

  7. ns 15(t) represents a set of 15 natural spline basis functions.

  8. For some RDs, this will be from a period in the mid-1990s while for other RDs this will be a sequence from the late 2000s.

  9. Specifically, August 14, 2000 through November 11, 2000 and September 12, 2003 through December 19, 2003.

  10. http://media.metro.net/projects_studies/funding/images/2012_funding_sources_guide.pdf.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Criminology and Statistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Greg Ridgeway

  2. Department of Criminology and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    John M. MacDonald

Authors
  1. Greg Ridgeway
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  2. John M. MacDonald
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Correspondence to Greg Ridgeway.

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Ridgeway, G., MacDonald, J.M. Effect of Rail Transit on Crime: A Study of Los Angeles from 1988 to 2014. J Quant Criminol 33, 277–291 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-016-9296-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-016-9296-7

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