Assessing Travel, Health, and Equity Impacts of a New Light Rail Transit Investment During the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Transit Opportunities for Heath, Livability, Exercise and Equity (TROLLEY) Study
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: August 2, 2022
This journal article describes a planned study of the opening of a new light rail line in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Primary Takeaways
“The TROLLEY study will utilize rigorous methods to advance our understanding of health, welljbeing, and equity-oriented outcomes of new light rail transit infrastructure through the COVID-19 recovery period, in a sample of demographically diverse adult workers whose employment location is accessed by new transit,” the authors write. “Results will inform land use, transportation and health investments, and workplace interventions.”
Overview and Objectives
Public transit, the authors write, has the potential to improve people’s health by helping them get to jobs, education, and health care; keeping them active; and reducing air pollution. But during the pandemic, people’s concerns about infection led to public transit ridership going down.
The authors wanted to use the opening of a light rail line at University of California San Diego as an opportunity to study whether using public transit helped people exercise more, get where they needed to go, and enjoy better quality of life and mental health.
Hypothesis or Approach
The authors planned to follow 465 employees of UC San Diego, checking in with them three times in two years. They planned to collect information about participant’s travel, health, and spending habits before COVID-19 and before the rapid transit line opened; they would then compare that information with what they learned about participants while they were using the transit line. Participants would live at different distances from the line’s stations.
The TROLLEY (TRansit Opportunities for HeaLth, Livability, Exercise and EquitY) study will prospectively investigate a diverse cohort of university employees after the opening of a new light rail transit (LRT) line and the easing of campus COVID-19 restrictions. Participants are current staff who live either < 1 mile, 1–2 miles, or > 2 miles from LRT, with equal distribution across economic and racial/ethnic strata. The primary aim is to assess change in physical activity, travel mode, and vehicle miles travelled using accelerometer and GPS devices. Equity outcomes include household transportation and health-related expenditures. Change in health outcomes, including depressive symptoms, stress, quality of life, body mass index and behavior change constructs related to transit use will be assessed via self-report. Pre-pandemic variables will be retrospectively collected. Participants will be measured at 3 times over 2 years of follow up. Longitudinal changes in outcomes will be assessed using multilevel mixed effects models. Analyses will evaluate whether proximity to LRT, sociodemographic, and environmental factors modify change in outcomes over time.
The authors expected to find that participants’ trips via bike, walking, and transit increased after the rail line opened and that people who lived closer to the line had fewer car trips than those who lived farther away.
How This Influences Change
The authors say their study, once complete, could show that light rail transit should be prioritized to help advance public health and help policymakers and transit officials meet riders’ needs, even during pandemics.
Research: Go Deeper
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted life in extraordinary ways impacting health and daily mobility. Public transit provides a strategy to improve individual and population health through increased active travel and reduced vehicle dependency, while ensuring equitable access to jobs, healthcare, education, and mitigating climate change. However, health safety concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic eroded ridership, which could have longstanding negative consequences. Research is needed to understand how mobility and health change as the pandemic recedes and how transit investments impact health and equity outcomes.
The TROLLEY study will utilize rigorous methods to advance our understanding of health, well-being, and equity-oriented outcomes of new LRT infrastructure through the COVID-19 recovery period, in a sample of demographically diverse adult workers whose employment location is accessed by new transit. Results will inform land use, transportation and health investments, and workplace interventions. Findings have the potential to elevate LRT as a public health priority and provide insight on how to ensure public transit meets the needs of vulnerable users and is more resilient in the face of future health pandemics.
BMC Public Health, August 2022. https://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13834-1
Research Team
This study and report was conducted and created by the following people.
- Crist K
- Benmarhnia T
- Frank LD
- Song D
- Zunshine E
- Sallis JF
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