Anthony Barranda (grad student), Christopher Upchurch (undergraduate), and I have recently submitted  two papers from a study of light rail ridership in the United States.

 

The first, Factors Influencing Light Rail Station Boardings in the United States, was submitted to Transportation Research A: Policy and Practice.  It discusses statistical results for the factors determining light rail station boardings. The paper was based on 268 stations in 9 cities, and found 10 significant independent variables including land use variables, network structure variables, socioeconomic variables, climate variables, city size variables, and intermodal access variables.

 

The second paper, Using GIS to Generate Mutually Exclusive Service Areas Linking Travel On and Off a Network, was submitted to Journal of Transport Geography. It developed an improved method Linked On-Off Network (LOON) method for generating half-mile walking distance service areas around light rail stations (or any other facilities), following street networks but also requiring that people off the network head straight to the closest network point before traveling their shortest path to the station. Click here to get the LOON method instructions and AML program.