A productive public transit system is one that serves everyone's access to places that matter. Access to grocery stores is an essential destination that matters to all, and accessibility measures can be used to quantify this idea. However, how the public transit system provides access to destinations is a question of equity: what populations are better-off, from before- and within the COVID years, and how does accessibility compare across urban regions is an important task in benchmarking public transit service and identifying areas that fall short. In this study, we apply balancing factors (similar to those used in trip gravity modelling) to calculate public transit spatial accessibility in the 12 most populous CMAs in Canada and benchmark how accessibility has changed between 2019 and 2023. This work is done using an open and reproducible database, with methods based in R. Additionally, the methods applied are more interpretable than conventional accessibility measures, making them better suited for temporal and spatial interpretation. Our hope is that this approach will facilitate the mainstreaming of open and reproducible practices and accessibility analysis in transportation planning practice in Canada.
