Transit-Oriented Development (TOD), coordinating dense and diverse land uses and a walkable built environment around transit services, has been found to promote transit ridership. However, there is a lack of research into the effects of TOD on ridership recovery following a steep decline in the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in comparison to research on a variety of improvements in transit service itself (including frequency, span, and speed). This project aims to assess the impact of various land use factors associated with TOD, as well as measures of transit service quality, on the post-pandemic ridership recovery of Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains. Utilizing granular internal CTA data on bus ridership, as well as publicly available data on rail ridership, transit schedules, population and employment density, housing types, and zoning, I build predictive models of ridership recovery from land use and transit service variables and determine the relative importance of these variables through statistical analysis of the models. The results of this analysis suggest that TOD does not have substantial bearing on post-pandemic ridership recovery, and that planners and policymakers should first and foremost focus on improving frequency of transit service to promote transit ridership in Chicago and across the country.
Benjamin Kreiswirth (Sun,) studied this question.