Boarnet, with co-investigator Doug Houston, is leading a multi-year, longitudinal evaluation of the travel and transportation impacts of the Expo light rail line. The research group collected baseline data for 285 households in and near the Expo Line corridor. Each household logged trips and vehicle odometer readings for all household vehicles and for all household members (ages 12 and up) during seven-day periods in fall, 2011, before the Expo line opened.
In 143 of the households an adult carried a geographic positioning system device (GPS, which tracks location) and an accelerometer (which measures physical activity) during the seven day survey period. Households are divided into two groups – an experimental group, within ½ mile of the Expo Line stations, and a control group, distant enough from the new stations that, based on estimates from the literature, household travel will not respond to the new rail line.
Over 200 of the baseline households were re-surveyed after the Expo Line opened, and those households repeated the full trip log, GPS, and accelerometer protocol. The results allow one of the first controlled, before-after studies of the impact of new rail transit on travel and physical activity.
