Crime around public transit: Analyzing spatio-temporal variations in crime rates near D.C. Bus Stops

Abstract

Public transportation is a cost-effective and sustainable alternative to driving. Yet, crime in large cities can discourage people from using public transit, especially in places like Washington, D.C. This project examines the spatiotemporal variations in crime rates around bus stops throughout the Washington, D.C. area. Crimes were grouped into four categories: assault, theft, homicide and sexual abuse. We explored which crime types were most prevalent around public transportation and how their occurrence patterns vary across time of the day. To study this, we collected location based crime data for 2024 from Opendata DC and bus stop locations from Mobility Database. We mapped all the bus stops and crime locations and created small zones, or “buffers,” of 0.25 miles around each bus stop and counted how many crimes occurred within each zone. We performed this analysis by crime types and time of day (day, evening and midnight). We also repeated this crime pattern analysis using 0.125 and 0.4 mile buffers to understand the sensitivity of our findings at various spatial scales. The analysis was performed using ArcGis Pro and Python. We found that assault was the most frequent crime and that more crimes occurred at night than during the day. We also found that certain crimes, such as theft, were more common downtown, while other crimes, such as homicide and sexual abuse, were more common near bus stops farther from central D.C. Specifically, we found that in the mornings there were zero homicide cases within 0.25 miles of a bus stop; however, in the night time, there were multiple bus stops with 10 or more homicides. This study shows how the time and location of crimes are connected to public transportation which in return could help city leaders make D.C. safer for the public.