In October 2020, Los Angeles’s Metro Board of Directors approved the NextGen Bus Plan after almost three years of planning and development. The proposed transit development plan was drafted with the goal of creating a bus network that was “faster, more frequent, reliable and accessible” than the existing system. Metro considered both physical and logistical factors and the anecdotal experiences and surveyed priorities of an estimated 20,000 LA county residents who contributed opinions during the project development stages (Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority [Metro], 2020). The final form of the NextGen Bus Plan included consolidation of bus stops, increased frequency on some lines, service time expansions, and waiting environment improvements.

Our project assessed the proposed NextGen Bus Plan through an equity lens, with particular focus on the first mile/last mile problem (as discussed in Boarnet, Giuliano, Hou, & Shin, 2017). The project identified six priority transit development regions in the Los Angeles County area based on a weighted combination of thirteen relevant socioeconomic and environmental factors. These regions were then compared with the transit growth regions found in the NextGen Bus Plan in order to evaluate the success of Metro’s proposed service changes in relation to the thirteen selected factors.