Where are language access improvements for public transportation riders most needed in NYC?
As New York City continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, stories and data suggest that residents in working-class neighborhoods, often those with large immigrant populations, have gotten back to riding public transportation. Or in many cases, they never had a choice to stop doing so, unlike residents of wealthier neighborhoods with more white-collar workers.
That apparent disproportionate reliance on public transportation should put a spotlight on an overlooked aspect of NYC’s transit systems in need of improvement: language access. While perhaps not as crucial as, say, increased service frequency or reliability, better language access could tangibly improve the passenger experience for many transit riders at a relatively low cost to the MTA. Even though the MTA translates some notices, like service change advisories, into other languages, announcements within trains and most permanent signage remain stubbornly English-only.
Anecdotally, I’ve been asked many times to help transit users who do not speak English as their first language navigate the subway or bus. On a larger scale, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to suggest that this lack of language access could be causing lost economic productivity (from people taking the wrong train or being late to work, for example) or dampening what could be even higher ridership by New Yorkers who need translation.
So: if the MTA wanted to improve language access, where should they focus their efforts, given limited resources? How would they know where public transportation riders need language access improvements, and what languages should be the top priorities for translation?
Where are Limited English Proficiency residents in NYC?
With the above questions in mind, I first set out to analyze the distribution of Limited English Proficiency (LEP) residents in NYC. While I started my research thinking about the immigrant residents of NYC, I used the US Census’s count of LEP residents (people age 5 or older who indicate they speak English less than “very well”) because that’s a more direct measure of English language ability than foreign-born or immigration status. In other words, preconceived notions of “immigrant” neighborhoods may or may not align with places with more LEP residents.
LEP residents in NYC are highly concentrated in a relatively small portion of neighborhoods. Almost half of NYC’s LEP residents live in just 40 residential neighborhood tabulation areas (NTAs, which are approximations of NYC neighborhoods composed of census tracts created by the NYC Department of City Planning). Those 40 NTAs (out of 197) contain just 27% of the total NYC population — in other words, they do tend to be more populous than the typical neighborhood, but still have a disproportionate number of LEP residents.
Yet there’s another piece of the puzzle: are the neighborhoods with the most LEP residents also more public transportation-dependent? By one measure, yes. For those 40 NTAs with the most LEP residents, the median percentage of workers commuting with public transportation is 58.1%. The citywide median is 52.6%. By contrast, the three-fifths of neighborhoods with the fewest LEP residents have median percentages under 50%. It should be noted that the American Community Survey datasets I used are 5-year estimates from 2016–2020, which means they do not fully reflect the pandemic’s impacts on commuting patterns.
While I’m not looking at actual ridership numbers in this study, the numbers above seem to confirm that neighborhoods where LEP residents are most concentrated are more reliant upon public transportation, on average.
The concentration of LEP residents in “LEP-heavy” neighborhoods with high rates of public transportation use is important to establish because it helps to inform how the MTA should distribute its resources if it were to pursue language access improvements. That is, if resources are limited, should language access efforts be spread comprehensively across the city, or focused on areas with the most LEP residents?
To consider the alternative comprehensive approach, I divided NTAs into quintiles based on their public transportation usage (in terms of both percentages and raw counts of commuters using public transportation). Divided this way, LEP residents are not more concentrated in the neighborhoods with the highest transit usage rates than the general population. This may seem to contradict the earlier data about “LEP-heavy” neighborhoods being transit-dependent, but it makes sense because NYC has high-transit-use neighborhoods with many LEP residents as well as those with very few (Park Slope being one example of the latter). While it may seem obvious, this data confirms it would not be an effective approach to simply target the lines or stations in neighborhoods with the highest transit usage rates regardless of language needs.
What are the rates of public transportation use in the neighborhoods with the most LEP residents?
After establishing that it is probably worthwhile to focus on the NTAs with the greatest LEP populations when considering public transportation language access, I examined an even smaller subset of neighborhoods: the 10 neighborhoods with the most LEP residents in NYC. These 10 NTAs in fact contain 19% of NYC’s total LEP population, making them valuable starting points for both studying and potentially launching language access improvements.
Elmhurst has the most LEP residents, followed by Bensonhurst and then Flushing-Willets Point. Overall, five of the top 10 NTAs are in Queens, three are in Brooklyn, and two are in Manhattan. All of them have more workers commuting with public transportation than the median NYC NTA, though all of them also contain more residents overall than the median neighborhood, which partially explains the greater amount of transit users.
Looking at public transportation usage as a percentage of working commuters instead, eight of the NTAs have a percentage of commuters using public transportation greater than that of the citywide median NTA (52.6%). Flushing-Willets Point and Murray Hill-Broadway Flushing — NTAs at the edge of and beyond the subway’s reach — are the exceptions.
These statistics do not guarantee that the LEP residents of the neighborhoods are the ones taking public transportation (or not), especially since the LEP population counts include children and non-working adults, while the commuting figures are based on working adult populations. And public transportation is used for many purposes other than work. But they do begin to confirm above-median public transportation usage rates in many, if not all, neighborhoods with the most LEP residents. Even the two neighborhoods (Flushing and Murray Hill, Queens) with below-median rates of transit usage nonetheless have lots of public transportation users by virtue of their population, so they would likely still warrant language access resources as well.
Which languages are most commonly spoken by LEP residents?
If the neighborhoods with the most LEP residents indeed use public transportation, which languages should language access efforts focus on? Unsurprisingly, the answer depends on the neighborhood, but two languages stand out. Over 60% of the LEP residents in each of the top 10 neighborhoods in terms of LEP population speak Spanish or Chinese (including Mandarin, Cantonese, and other varieties) as their primary language. Other languages (or language groups) that account for significant portions of LEP residents’ primary languages include Korean; Russian, Polish, and other Slavic languages; and other Indo-European languages (including Bengali, Urdu, and French).
Given that the MTA already translates temporary signage (like service change notices) into languages based on neighborhood demographics, it likely already has such data. Yet the high number of LEP residents who speak a few select languages in these “LEP-heavy” neighborhoods raises the question of why more translation is not already being done. While I could foresee it becoming an equity issue if translations are made into certain languages and not others without reason, the data shows that a large proportion of LEP residents could benefit from translations into just a couple of languages, especially if that translation is being done using a targeted (rather than city-wide) approach.
For example, recent custom subway announcements prove that on newer trains, it would be technically possible to record announcements tailored for individual stations’ demographics and language needs. That’s just one possible low-cost improvement that could benefit many riders in the neighborhoods that have been, in terms of continued ridership, keeping the public transportation system afloat.
Lastly, the number and proportion of LEP residents in these “LEP-heavy” neighborhoods who speak popular languages like Spanish and Chinese and who likely use public transportation should raise questions about the MTA’s fulfillment of its obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Though I’m sure there are legal arguments both ways, it would seem that not all “reasonable steps to ensure meaningful access” are being taken to provide adequate language access to LEP transit riders in NYC, given the above data about their concentration, transit use, and language needs.
Conclusion
There are several limitations to my analysis. It doesn’t establish causality of public transportation usage in relation to LEP population — the former is likely a function of income and/or job type. Regardless, language access for LEP public transportation riders matters even if those LEP riders use transit for some reason other than their language ability. I also did not analyze recorded transit ridership data (e.g. turnstile data) from stations or services associated with NTAs with large LEP populations. It would be worth doing so to compare current ridership to pre-pandemic ridership and to see whether the amount of change relates to LEP population.
That said, this analysis helps to establish or confirm some patterns related to LEP New Yorkers and public transportation use. It may be “common knowledge” that LEP residents are concentrated in relatively few neighborhoods, that people in those neighborhoods use public transportation at relatively high rates, and that certain languages are commonly spoken by LEP residents. But it is nonetheless important for policy-makers to have the data showing that improvements to language access for public transportation are necessary, and that focusing on top languages in the neighborhoods with the most LEP residents would be a worthwhile way to begin making improvements with limited resources.
Whenever I’m asked to help a fellow New Yorker navigate public transportation, I’m happy to do so when I can. (I speak Mandarin, but have gotten questions in Cantonese, Korean, and other languages!) Yet I believe that a diverse, well-resourced city like NYC can and should do better to make the kindness of strangers unnecessary for LEP riders to get around using public transportation.
