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 125 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 checked against census active-commuting shares, and an output-oriented data envelopment analysis frontier was estimated with bootstrap bias correction. One standard deviation of deficit was associated with a 2.65-percentage-point lower active-commuting share after controls. Seventeen station areas (13.6%) formed the frontier; mean efficiency was 0.623 (0.525 after bias correction) and mean scale efficiency 0.891. The two measures agreed partially (ρ = 0.446), and four station areas fell in the worst decile of both. Rankings were stable to weights, typology, frontier specification, peer removal, walking threshold and elevation error, whereas agreement with an order-m partial frontier was moderate (ρ ≈ 0.40). A priority matrix links station area to land-use instruments.