Athithja Arunagiri

Post-secondary students are more likely to use public transit than other demographic groups. As a result of dangerous occurrences, they are seen as a specific demographic group that may become victims of crime because of public transit trips. This paper depicts the research that will allow us to take a deeper look at how students integrate public transit trips into their lives and better understand the possible dangers they face in Toronto. The StudentMoveTO 2019 survey contains 18,513 post-secondary student responses, including trips taken where students used public transit to travel to a destination in Toronto. It also uses 2019 crime and injury variables including Assaults, Robberies, Shootings, and Traffic Accidents and socio-economic and demographic variables. Spatial autocorrelation techniques were used to examine spatial autocorrelation and hotspots for public transit trip and risk locations. An Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression and a Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) were performed to assess risk and public transit trip hotspots and were used to determine how socio-economic and demographic variables, in combination with the assumed spatial risk of crime and injury, are connected to public transit trips. The GWR indicated that students are more likely to be robbed since it had the greatest R² value of 0.844 whereas the OLS regression had a lower R² value of 0.616. According to the findings, students who took public transit trips are more vulnerable when they travel in the evening, particularly in the northern section of North York and Downtown, Toronto. Using the discovered results, it is possible to raise awareness among post-secondary students who take public transit trips by informing them about less secure census tracts.