It is widely suggested that population and density increase in neighborhoods close to transit, and this is one of the most attractive arguments for improved transit service. After all, if building a new rail line can increase property value and promote sustainable development patterns, why not do it?
But a bigger question might be how long this trend continues. After all, if policies are not changed to discourage sprawl, the long-term investment in rail transit might be overstated. The red histogram below shows the change in density over all census tracts in Atlanta from 2000 to 2009 (see thelast post). The blue histogram is the change in density for census tracts with a MARTA station.
So, is there a difference between the two? Not really. A statistical analysis reveals that the probability of the means being equal is about 30%. This fails the significance test. But this should be a relief for the transit supporters, because the mean, median, and skew of the MARTA station data all indicate that rail stations actually had a negative impact on density from 2000 to 2009.
Is this the end of the story? Not really. I will do this again using a more robust method for selecting the census tracts where MARTA stations lie. As it is, sometimes the tracts have a considerable amount of activity away from the station, whereas the most natural activity centers from the stations are actually in a different tract.
But still, the preliminary data seem to indicate that Atlanta has not pursued strategies to take advantage of the benefits of MARTA.
Data in this analysis came from the Atlanta Regional Council website.
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