Historically, questions about transit equity have been pretty difficult to answer. That’s because the opportunity gaps that exist across race, income, and other characteristics were beyond the computational capabilities of transit agencies. But advances in how agencies report service information have finally made it possible to quantify these access-to-opportunity metrics.
Insert the TransitCenter Equity Dashboard.
According to TransitCenter’s website, their new transit equity dashboard is a, “first-of-its-kind tool which measures how well transit networks in six U.S. cities connect people who’ve been marginalized by segregation and discrimination to the jobs, services, and amenities they need to thrive. Using data from transit agencies and the U.S. Census, the dashboard illuminates disparities in transit access.”
“This dashboard measures how well transit networks in seven U.S. cities connect people who’ve been marginalized within those metro areas to the jobs, services, and amenities they need to thrive . . . Using February 2020 as a baseline, the dashboard looks at metrics like the number of jobs people can reach within a limited timeframe or budget, travel times to hospitals and grocery stores, and service frequency, and tracks how these measures have changed in each region.”
Six of the seven cities are live on the site with maps, stories, and data. That includes: Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco-Oakland (Boston appears to be next).
As an example of what the tool is capable of, open the Chicago map and you’ll notice that their transit service is less accessible to black and Latinx residents, healthcare trips are timely endeavors, and even grocery shopping trips are effected by development patterns.
To read more, click this article for Bloomberg CityLab by Laura Bliss where she highlights the unique findings of the dashboard and her main takeaways.
Or, to start exploring the TransitCenter Equity Dashboard tool, click here.
And as always, click here to find other Transportation-related tools and web mapping applications.