Critical Transit Infrastructure in Smart Cities and Urban Air Quality: A Multi-City Seasonal Comparison of Ridership and PM2.5

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19937v1
• Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:57:59 GMT
• Title: Critical Transit Infrastructure in Smart Cities and Urban Air Quality: A Multi-City Seasonal Comparison of Ridership and PM2.5
• Authors: Sean Elliott, Sohini Roy,
• Abstract summary: This study develops a transparent, multi-source monitoring dataset that integrates agency-reported transit ridership with ambient fine particulate matter PM2.5.<n>Results show pronounced structural differences in transit scale and intensity, with consistent seasonal shifts in both ridership and PM2.5 that vary by urban context.
• Score: 0.09821874476902966
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Public transit is a critical component of urban mobility and equity, yet mobility and air-quality linkages are rarely operationalized in reproducible smart-city analytics workflows. This study develops a transparent, multi-source monitoring dataset that integrates agency-reported transit ridership with ambient fine particulate matter PM2.5 from the U.S. EPA Air Quality System (AQS) for four U.S. metropolitan areas - New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, using two seasonal snapshots (March and October 2024). We harmonize heterogeneous ridership feeds (daily and stop-level) to monthly system totals and pair them with monthly mean PM2.5 , reporting both absolute and per-capita metrics to enable cross-city comparability. Results show pronounced structural differences in transit scale and intensity, with consistent seasonal shifts in both ridership and PM2.5 that vary by urban context. A set of lightweight regression specifications is used as a descriptive sensitivity analysis, indicating that apparent mobility-PM2.5 relationships are not uniform across cities or seasons and are strongly shaped by baseline city effects. Overall, the paper positions integrated mobility and environment monitoring as a practical smart-city capability, offering a scalable framework for tracking infrastructure utilization alongside exposure-relevant air-quality indicators to support sustainable communities and public-health-aware urban resilience.

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