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

ObjectivesTo assess the impact of rail transit on crime in neighborhoods near transit stations.MethodsWe 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.ResultsWe find no evidence that transit station openings or disruptions in transit due to strikes result in changes in crime in surrounding neighborhoods.ConclusionsThe 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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