Crime in Ottawa: An Analysis of Crime & Public Transit in Canada's Capital City

Abstract

“The link between the social and physical environment and transit crime is an important one, but it is not well understood or explored” (Loukaitou-Sideris, Ligget, Iseki 2002 – see ‘References’).  In our project we sought to do exactly this: better understand the relationship between crime occurring near transit stations and the socio-economic nature of that physical environment through GIS analysis. We focused on criminal activity occurring in the neighborhoods surrounding transit stops, rather than on the transit system itself, in order to explore the effect of transit stations on crime and thus on its surrounding area.  Our case study for this project was the city of Ottawa with its O-Train, a light-rail line similar to Vancouver’s SkyTrain (with 5 stations), and Transitway, its high service rapid bus system (47 stations).  We performed multiple regression analyses using point crime data collected between January 2005 and March 2006 and socio-economic data from the 2001 Census by Statistics Canada.  We then used GIS to analyze whether or not the residuals were spatial autocorrelated, in order to determine how well the regression models described the relationships between our variables.