Civic Completeness Around Metro Stations: A Deficit Index and a Bootstrapped Efficiency Frontier for Station-Area Planning

Rapid-transit stations are usually judged as transport nodes, yet the walkable area around them decides whether residents can meet daily needs nearby. This study treats each station area as a service system and measures the supply of five civic dimensions (sports, commerce, health, green space and schools) within the 15 min walking catchments of the 126 operating stations of the Santiago Metro, Chile. Catchments were routed on a directed, slope-sensitive pedestrian network, and census counts were allocated by cadastral residential floor area. A Civic Deficit Index, defined against the network benchmark, was explored against census active-commuting shares, and a bias-corrected output-oriented data envelopment analysis frontier was estimated. One standard deviation of deficit went with a 1.3–2.6-point lower active-commuting share, an exploratory association sensitive to spatial dependence. Twenty station areas (15.9%) formed the frontier; mean efficiency was 0.650 (0.551 after bias correction) and mean scale efficiency 0.888. The two measures agreed partially (ρ = 0.307), and three station areas fell in the worst decile of both. Rankings were stable to weights, typology, frontier specification, peers, threshold, elevation error and missing records, whereas agreement with an order-m partial frontier was weak (ρ ≈ 0.35). A priority matrix links station area to land-use instruments.