Megan Waldo is one of three women graduating with an economics degree this year, 2018. Megan decided to conduct an empirical thesis using econometric methods. Her thesis was centered around analyzing the equity and accessibility of New York City’s bike share Citi Bike through an econometric regression that looked at the relationship between socio-economic characteristics of zip code tabulation areas and the density of bike share stations within them for 2016-2017. She used income, educational attainment levels, age, gender, and race compositions of each ZCTA to analyze the demographics and then a GIS system, carto, to count the number of bike shares per ZCTA. Her results showed that the data only allowed for a cross-sectional analysis so not many conclusions can be drawn about the trends of the equity and accessibility of the public transportation option. However, the regression analysis did show that income levels, age, and education were statistically significant.
Everyday economics from the University of Puget Sound