Routing out the hot spots: toward using GIS and crime-place principles to examine criminal damage to bus shelters

This paper describes initial efforts to utilise GIS technology to cross reference crime data on one aspect of the public transport journey, bus shelter damage, with information on socio-demographic conditions, land use and infrastructure, covering the county of Merseyside in the North West of England. A GIS is used in conjunction with spatial statistical analysis to explore the nature, manifestation and patterns of damage to bus shelters. Evidence of clustering is found, and one fifth of all damage for a year is shown to occur at 2.5% of all bus shelters. The findings also suggest that particular neighbourhoods types, and certain characteristics of socio-demographic and physical environment, are more likely to experience shelter damage than others. This implies that bus shelter damage is related in a systematic and predictable way to known attributes of a shelter's location. This prompts discussion of the use of a combination of GIS and other crime mapping techniques developing our knowledge of the extent of, and the theoretical reasons underlying, crime and disorder on public transport.