Changing the Transportation Equity Conversation
In July, ClearRoad responded to USDOT’s Request for Information on Transportation Equity Data. As a company committed to creating more equitable transportation, ClearRoad sent the following recommendations for the department’s consideration. Many thanks to Nadine Gutierrez for this lightly edited version of the submitted response.
Our transportation systems play an unparalleled role in advancing social and racial equity, impacting housing choices, access to economic opportunity, and quality of life. For generations, the levers of government shaping transportation and land use have erected and perpetuated structures that maintain societal barriers, economic exclusion, and environmental inequity.
The Equity E.O. and RFI are exciting steps towards rectifying historical injustices by integrating equity into transportation planning and design. However, given transportation infrastructure’s longevity and traditional immutability, we see a need for radical openness in our USDOT leaders to new planning, engagement, and modification approaches. We offer the following key ideas as USDOT embarks on making U.S. transportation more equitable:
The checkbox equity fallacy
The record of past attempts to incorporate non-traditional engineering concerns into transportation planning is mixed at best. FHWA’s Context Sensitive Solutions (CSS) program is a case in point. State DOT interpretations of the interdisciplinary approach varied widely from months-long public engagement to figurative lipstick on a pig — indigenous community-inspired designs on a highway overpass. At the time, highway planners indeed checked the Context-Sensitive “box,” but today, it would be considered insensitive, at best!
The CSS example illustrates the risk that integrating equity in transportation projects will be reduced to a checkbox, i.e., a form of token public engagement. Unfortunately, current transportation project delivery in the U.S. lends itself to lower forms of participation on Arnstein’s Ladder. Massive, expensive projects require years of design work, from engineers not trained in community-led processes, followed by impact analysis, where equity is only one of many analyses. Meanwhile, federal funding and approval processes are not flexible enough to support the community-led processes and outcomes associated with more citizen power.
The notion that equity can be achieved in transportation projects and policy decisions via specific requirements or as a “checkbox” is a fallacy.
We risk project outcomes that fall far short of intentions by focusing on achieving equity measures without an overarching equity approach or prioritization. Governments must first tackle the higher-level tasks, including where equity should be integrated into the planning process, who decides projects’ equity measures and priorities, and how to balance disparate equity impacts. They then should be prepared to make the hard choices between incompatible transportation goals and societal demands — e.g., geographic coverage vs. network efficiency or environmental benefits vs. costs of mitigation measures. Transportation equity is a mission; pursuing it demands that projects be measured against clearly defined goals for near-, medium-, and long-term outcomes.
The urgency of action and the implications of delay
Though it will take decades to reverse the historical injustice of U.S. transportation systems, there is immediate need for action. When it comes to remediating transportation equity, to borrow from Alex Steffen, speed is everything. Every day of delay translates to widening economic gaps, worsening environmental conditions, lost economic opportunities, and continued inaccessibility to services for those in need.
Current transportation planning and decision-making efforts are subjected to years-long approvals and frequent delays before getting shovels in the ground. Our home of New York City has seen its original Congestion Pricing implementation date of January 1st, 2021, come and go, now targeting 2022 or 2023. While we celebrate how close implementation is to realization, the delays are not without cost. In addition to one-and-a-half billion dollars or more of missed revenue directed to city transit improvements, over the course of 18 months, these delays translate to thousands of years of extra trips for drivers and transit riders worth upwards of $5 billion, $130.5 million in CO2 emission damages, $255 million of health costs associated with air pollution, and an additional 2,158 traffic crash injuries and 11 deaths.
Though these costs and losses are tremendous, they pale in comparison to those accumulated over the 50 years it has taken for New York City and State to get to this point. Of course, the implications and costs of these delays are not limited to congestion pricing. Each day that the provision of a transit line is delayed translates to lost opportunities for whole neighborhoods and communities. A car purchase that may have been avoided today instead locks in a decade or more of driving.
These delays are even more consequential in the face of climate change, where winning slowly is the same as losing. The recently published IPCC report, declaring a ‘code red for humanity,’ disabuses us of the notion that patient and orderly cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are compatible with avoiding catastrophic warming. Climate change’s many impacts will fall disproportionately on historically underserved communities and should be viewed as the most immediate equity concern. Therefore it is of utmost importance that equity concerns do not merely become another delaying tool or tactic for those bent on postponing action of any sort.
Immediate action is made more feasible if we take advantage of today’s innovations in V2X & 5G connectivity, connected cars, and IoT that can help to accelerate all aspects of project delivery, from conception to engagement, analysis, mitigation, and implementation, while achieving superior outcomes. For example, ClearRoad recently conducted a road pricing demonstration for a major European city. We were able to replicate existing and planned policies, deploy lightweight, flexible hardware, calculate road charges on actual car trips, and receive feedback in just two weeks. While this was a small demonstration, it speaks to the awesome potential for project deployments that can be rapidly scaled, augmented, and adjusted.
Static data and projections in a changing world
The 30-year time horizon has long been the purview of transportation and infrastructure planners, including population growth projections, transportation usage & demand, and a wide range of impacts. While these projections and estimations are presented as factual or neutral inevitabilities, they are based on the preparers’ implicit assumptions and biases. Blind reliance on these projections will impede transportation equity efforts as the status quo is biased towards business-as-usual.
Nowhere has long-range planning been more disrupted than in transportation, with 30-year plans from across the country requiring revisions as soon as five years after publication. Though now commonplace, it’s easy to forget that Uber and Lyft are only a decade old, and within the span of 6 years, made up two-thirds of the growth in congestion in cities like San Francisco, replacing transit, walk, and bike travel.
The transportation zeitgeist is rapidly shifting, whether it’s ride-hailing, EVs, micromobility, BRT, high-speed rail, hyperloops, drones, or the biggest disruptor of all, AVs. The trajectory of each of these transportation innovations is unclear and ultimately unknowable. Still, the success or failure of each will depend on our societal priorities rather than the inherent capabilities of each technology. Combining static projections and lengthy, unwieldy processes means that transportation projects are outdated before construction begins.
The agile response to dynamic goals
Disruptive technology companies now operate on the principle that products cannot be perfected straight away, no matter how much time spent developing them. Instead, imperfection is assumed, and it is only through getting the product to the real-world market that its shortcomings and bugs are realized. At that point, the company shifts into improvement mode, fine-tuning, adjusting, and updating the product where necessary. These approaches draw from agile methodology, the standard for growing tech companies.
For implementing innovative and pioneering solutions, perfect is the enemy of good.
While agile implementations in government, such as the famous FBI Sentinel program, have yet to be fully embraced, governments can learn from tech industry agile practices to adopt systems that allow for adaptability. Transportation agencies can approach problem-solving and decision-making from the perspective that it is impossible to get policies and solutions “right” the first time around. Instead, they should aim for an imperfect implementation that can be deployed quickly, corrected, and tweaked over time.
This imperfect-first mindset dramatically expands the opportunities and frequency for incorporating feedback from the community and project performance drawn from on-the-ground results. This mindset allows for a total rethinking of transportation project selection and delivery: decision-making can be guided by the goals and priorities of communities and different levels of government. Projects should proceed only where transportation intersects and can help solve those goals — whether to improve health outcomes, fight climate change, or increase access.
Conclusion
Rapid advancements in transportation must be met with nimble processes to best leverage and shape those advancements for the public benefit.
It is long past time for transportation agencies to stop viewing projects solely through a transportation lens. Just as Uber adjusts pricing in near real-time to meet rapidly-changing demands on its services, so too must our future transportation management platforms integrate dynamic mobility, social, environmental, and equity needs.
This potential for the transportation sector to take a leading role in confronting and addressing the most complex and “wicked” societal challenges inspires our work at ClearRoad and defines how we have architected our solutions. Our Road Pricing & Management platforms are designed to scale to meet communities’ unique goals, contexts, and demands while being flexible enough to accommodate them when they invariably change.
We urge USDOT leaders to maintain a comprehensive scope for interrogating where transportation equity can be addressed, recognize the urgency for action, and explore new agile methods for project delivery that take advantage of newer technologies and innovations. We look forward to collaborating with governments at all levels and continuing to create dynamic solutions for achieving transportation equity goals and managing the transportation sector’s countless impacts on our communities and society.
Learn more about the solutions we’re creating to build more equitable transportation at www.clearroad.io.
ClearRoad applauds the leading role USDOT is taking in transportation equity with the Equity E.O. and the RFI. We urge USDOT leaders to maintain a comprehensive scope for interrogating where transportation equity can be addressed, recognize the urgency for action, and explore new agile methods for project delivery that take advantage of newer technologies and innovations. We look forward to collaborating with governments at all levels and continue creating dynamic solutions that address transportation equity goals alongside the countless impacts that transportation has on our communities and society.
