Transportation: The Single Greatest Factor to Drive Social Equity
Tens of millions of Americans are believed to be transportation insecure, lacking access to transportation systems that connect us to jobs and life essentials such as healthcare, food, and education. In addition to these acute problems, transportation insecurity has longer-lasting impacts that can perpetuate economic disadvantage – disadvantage that spreads, weighing on communities, and in turn impacting whole cities. In fact, research from Harvard has found transportation access is the single most important factor in the odds of escaping poverty.
Transportation systems provide economic mobility and access to essential goods and services, but are also the source of numerous harms: crash injuries and fatalities; emissions of both local and global pollutants; and have long been a major force in segregating and displacing communities.
These harms are not evenly distributed. Much of the transportation infrastructure in the United States has displaced and disproportionately impacted low-income and BIPOC residents, severing communities. Researchers have documented Black and Hispanic minorities disproportionately bear the burden of air pollution primarily generated by non-Hispanic white populations, and women and people who identify as Latinx, Black, or Asian are more likely to feel unsafe while using transportation systems.
We would be remiss not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it has further exacerbated problems. Low-income populations are disproportionately exposed to infection risk through first-responder jobs, and these populations are also less likely to have access to transportation alternatives.
To further the case, basic social protections like the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title II of the Civil Rights Act have not been comprehensively applied to modern mobility systems. Author Richard Rothstein calls out the transportation system as a source of “seemingly race-neutral programs [that] have reinforced the disadvantages of African Americans.” We must be particularly conscious of new transportation systems that may have disparate impact. While not intentionally discriminatory, such systems can propagate inequities nonetheless.
In a digitally-enabled commercial mobility ecosystem, inequity can unfortunately bedevil us in subtle ways. Previously overt discrimination has not been completely eliminated — and it is now accompanied by statistical discrimination. Seemingly innocuous decisions to offer service can systematically exclude minority populations. Algorithmic bias may be harder to observe than human bias, but we can still find evidence it’s happening in transportation systems today. And we have yet to understand the social impact of our widespread reliance on navigation aids and driver assistance systems.
What does this overwhelming evidence mean? We have work to do – one step at a time.
A comprehensive view of transportation equity must take into account both benefits and burdens associated with transportation systems: we must simultaneously improve transportation access for populations who have been historically repressed AND reduce the social costs these populations bear — and we must do so in a transportation ecosystem that is both undergoing profound changes in response to a pandemic and rapidly-evolving technological capabilities.
At Lacuna, we believe we must continue to elevate society’s expectations of what equitable transportation means and deliberately approach civic technology from a mindset that is focused on social equity as a major outcome. Otherwise, a mobility ecosystem informed and designed exclusively by the private sector will serve profit-seeking motives, not socially just ones.
Transportation regulators need easy access to tools that directly evaluate, in real-time, the degree to which commercial transportation operators serve or burden a community’s residents. This real-time requirement implies the need for new digital policy tools, as opposed to legacy analog tools in order to right these wrongs to reshape the mobility landscape into one that serves all.
The ecosystem in which these tools are developed must itself be sustainable. It’s for this reason Lacuna has long supported the development of open-source digital policy tools like the Mobility Data Specification (MDS). We believe an open source ecosystem serves several valuable functions:
First, as a society, we need the ability to shine a light of transparency on the way in which our cities and other forms of government operate and regulate transportation systems. We can do this by inviting other community members to critique our approaches.
Second, we need to learn from and challenge one another, engaging with a greater array of stakeholders, experimenting with new policies and comprehensively evaluating their impact.
Finally, open-source technology coupled with an open source foundation like the Open Mobility Foundation, makes it easy for cities to find competent technical partners in the private sector that can support critical transportation infrastructure.
The last decade has been one of unbridled technological innovation in the transportation ecosystem. Let’s devote the next decade to ensuring that technological innovation provides equitable access for economic growth across all socioeconomic statuses; imposes no undue burdens (including on the environment); and aligns private incentives with social ones. The result is a win-win-win for cities and the beautifully diverse humans that comprise them.
