As part of network redesigns and service changes, questions naturally arise about the impacts on and benefits for a community’s most vulnerable members: lower-income residents, children, racial and ethnic minorities, and others.
JWA has developed analysis and visualization tools to help authorities and stakeholders understand the potential impacts of a bus network change, especially on vulnerable people.
Whether as part of a network redesign or for its own value, JWA also helps public transport authorities develop policies addressing equity.
What Can a Public Transport Authority Distribute Equitably?
In public transport planning conversations it helps to start by clarifying what, exactly, a community wants to distribute equitably.
There are three common answers to this question: Things, Services, and Access.
Many things need to be distributed equitably, like bus shelters, lighting, and other infrastructure. People benefit from those things being in their neighborhood or along their trip. But sometimes the right infrastructure improvement for one area isn’t useful in another, because the needs are different. For example, if a wealthy part of town has a streetcar, it’s easy to say that a disadvantaged area should have a streetcar too. But the streetcar may not be what the people there need or value. Jarrett explores this common problem here.
Service should also be distributed equitably, and to measure that we calculate how much public public transport an area has. How far is the nearest bus stop from you? What kind of vehicle serves the stop? When JWA does these analyses, we always include measures of how frequently service comes, and how many hours and days it is offered. But even with those additional considerations, the mere presence of service nearby doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s useful. You could have service that only goes in circles, or doesn’t connect with other routes, or doesn’t take you to job centers, health care or markets.
We must measure not only the equitable distribution of things and services, but also about of access. How many useful destinations can someone get to in a reasonable amount of time?
This describes people’s access to work, study, shopping, health care, worship, social connections, and the other actions that make a full life. When we measure this we’re not just measuring policy outcomes or feeding a forecast about public transport patronage. We’re measuring public transport’s ability to give people freedom and choice in their lives. More about this measure is explained on Jarrett’s blog here.
JWA has devised ways to use access analysis to evaluate public transport equity. We’ve done fine-grained studies of access to places people value: grocery stores, for example, or medical enters. To be sure we are describing access fairly for all kinds of trips, we capture details like timed connections between infrequent buses or different speeds for different public transport lines.
Public transport can be used to improve vulnerable people’s access to opportunity, counteracting decisions that have put those people farther from opportunities, such as in the case of Black Americans who have been prevented from settling in public-transport-efficient neighborhoods by past policies of racial discrimination. We’ve examined how public transport can contribute to improving equity despite spatial inequities. This has been an important part of our work in highly-segregated U.S. cities like Miami, Chicago, Richmond and Dallas.
In many of cities where we work, we are joining a conversation about historical or current injustice. People are demanding a more just or equitable city, and want the public transport system to be part of that change. We work from the question, “What can your public public transport authority do to address these problems, and how should we measure the results?” Public public transport authorities can provide things, services and access to improve equity outcomes, and JWA helps them plan and measure the results.
Measuring public transport’s results using access analysis is a fairly new technique, yet it often seems to be exactly what people are asking for – a description of how public transport could offer freedom and opportunity to vulnerable people across our unequal cities and societies.