04 / Research / Jan 2025 - Apr 2025
Evaluating Public Transit Accessibility and Commute Efficiency in Calgary
Mapping transit access and commute efficiency across more than 200 Calgary communities to find who the network leaves behind.
- Communities analyzed
- 200+
- Underserved neighbourhoods identified
- 15
- Transit bottleneck zones
- 10
- Final research paper grade
- 110%
Overview
How well does Calgary's transit system serve a growing city? I led a six-member team to analyze transit accessibility and efficiency across more than 200 Calgary communities, using open data from the City of Calgary, Statistics Canada and Calgary Transit. The final research paper earned 110%.
Approach
We collected, cleaned and combined the datasets for all 206 communities, then designed two custom evaluation metrics:
- Community Impact Score ranks how hard each community is hit by weak transit, weighting commute time (34%), population (33%) and frequency of service (33%) on a 1 to 4 scale.
- People-to-Route Ratio divides a community's population by the transit routes serving it, a fair way to spot areas where service exists but cannot keep up with demand.
Interactive spatial maps and graphs in Power BI, Tableau and ArcGIS made the gaps visible, including an ArcGIS buffer analysis that flagged homes more than 500 metres from any stop.
Outcome
The metrics identified 15 underserved neighbourhoods and 10 transit bottleneck zones. We checked whether Calgary's future infrastructure plans address those gaps and presented three policy-backed recommendations for more equitable transit expansion, grounded in official Calgary Transit roadmaps.