Code Shift: Data, Governance, and Equity in Los Angeles’s Shared Mobility Pilots
By
Emmett Z. McKinney
BA in Public Policy and French Vanderbilt University Nashville, Tennessee (2016)
Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master in City Planning
at the
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
May 2020
© 2020 Emmett McKinney. All Rights Reserved
The author here by grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.
Author______Department of Urban Studies and Planning May 20, 2020
Certified by ______Lawrence E. Susskind Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning Thesis Supervisor
Accepted by______Ceasar McDowell Professor of the Practice Chair, MCP Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Code Shift: Data, Governance, and Equity in Los Angeles’s Shared Mobility Pilots
By
Emmett Z. McKinney
Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 20, 2020, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master in City Planning
ABSTRACT
Transportation planners suggest that smart mobility systems – cars, bikes, scooters and other vehicles connected to the internet – can advance social equity. While smart mobility systems can help address transport poverty, new technologies may also reproduce power asymmetries between communities, government, and mobility service providers. Through case studies of several of Los Angeles’s shared mobility pilots, I argue that mobility equity demands the fair distribution of power (i.e. the right to co-design new systems and a role in adapting their operations), not only of resources. Designing mobility systems that are both equitable and smart, therefore, requires transportation planners to better integrate the lived experiences of residents, especially the poor and the disadvantaged, into data-driven planning efforts. Open data frameworks such as MDS (i.e. Mobility Data Specification) enhance the possibility for co-design and increased mobility equity – while also presenting new obstacles to overcome. To advance mobility equity, transportation planners should begin with inclusive data governance.
Thesis Supervisor: Lawrence E. Susskind Title: Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning
Reader: Karilyn Crockett Title: Lecturer of Public Policy and Urban Planning
Reader: Eric Huntley Title: Lecturer of Urban Science and Planning
2 Acknowledgements
I arrived at the end of this journey with help from many along the way. I’d like to share my deepest gratitude with:
My committee – for their thoughtful feedback, patience as I tried out new ideas, and support until the very end.
Community activists – who, after decades of working for justice, took the time to help me grow. People for Mobility Justice, Alliance for Community Transit-LA, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and the Labor/Community Strategy Center were particularly instrumental.
Transportation planners – who sharpened my ideas and lent a helping hand to set up interviews. Jascha-Franklin Hodge, Andrew Salzberg, Joshua Schank, and Natalia Barbour deserve particular thanks.
CoLab – for inspiring me to think deeply about equity, affirmed me as I took intellectual risks, and offering me a home within DUSP.
My fellow DUSPers – who awe me with their compassion, intellect, and creativity. I am grateful to Hannah Hunt Moeller, Dylan Halpern, Ian Ollis, Dan Powers, Max Arnell, Alex Acuña, Ayushi Roy and many others who reassured me when my confidence wavered, and shared many laughs along the way.
Finally, none of this would be possible without Zach and Zoë, who taught me to live with empathy and a sense of adventure – or Mom and Dad, who have always said ‘yes’ to my curiosities. I love you all so much.
3 Author’s Note
This research started, as many projects do, on Twitter. While transit experts increasingly signaled commitments to equity, other commentators – and women of color in particular – questioned the veracity of these claims. I set out to understand where the conflicts emerged, and what role new technologies might play in addressing them.
Among my favorite discoveries was the term ‘Fakequity,’ coined to describe “when you think you’re doing equity work but you’re really passing off a project as equity and perpetuating the same power dynamics with no community accountability.” Fakequity practices range from ‘Potlucks and Fake Community Engagement’ and ‘Awareness Raising But Doing All the Talking’, to, at the high end of the spectrum, being ‘Equity Brave’ or an ‘Equity Champion.’ The advanced user can play ‘Entitlement Bingo,’ which helps them listen for phrases that hint their colleagues may only be giving lip service to ‘equity’(Okuna et al., 2015).
This portmanteau is a tongue-in-cheek framing of a larger and more serious debate in urban planning as to how ‘equity’ should be defined, measured, and implemented. I used this thesis as an opportunity to delve into this debate, and consider my own role. I first attempted this computationally, trying out Gini coefficients and measurements of spatial accessibility to assess equity. I soon learned that equity is complex – not easily reducible to an algorithm. It depends much on the history of a place, and one’s personal experiences, which invariably shape the statistical models we use to describe the world.
I am a male, white, cis straight man who has the privilege to study at MIT. I cannot speak to what ‘transportation equity’ means from personal experience of having been marginalized. What I can do is use my power as a graduate student to amplify the voices of people doing the work on the front lines. I can listen, and make room for these experiences in spaces where enthusiasm for cutting edge technology often overpowers personal reflection on the problems we are trying to solve.
My hope is for this thesis to leave readers feeling challenged; that it will push transportation planners to consider deeply what they mean by the term ‘equity,’ and reflect on how their practice and methods reflect their values and experiences. I hope that this will fortify the ability of community groups to intervene in tech spaces, and amplify marginalized voices in mainstream planning discussions. Finally, as urban planning schools (including my own) develop new curricula in urban science and analytics, I hope this research prompts scholars to place cutting edge technology in conversation with urban history.
In engaging these topics, I joined a conversation that started long before I wrote the first word, and which will continue long after the final footnote. Community activists, planning professionals, and various scholars generously offered their perspectives for this project. I have done my best to organize their views here, in a way that is engaging and clear. In so doing I imposed my own lens, and could not include all that I learned. This is a starting point – and I would encourage you to continue straight to the source. Communities can recount their own experiences far better than I ever could.
4 Table of Contents ABSTRACT ...... 2 Acknowledgements ...... 3 Author’s Note ...... 4 Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 6 Motivation ...... 8 Chapter 2: Code Shift ...... 18 Case Study: The Mobility Data Specification ...... 25 Conclusion ...... 39 Chapter 3: History of Transportation (in)equity in Los Angeles ...... 41 From Rail to Roads ...... 42 Los Angeles Today ...... 45 Conclusions ...... 66 Chapter 4: Shared Mobility as Civic Technology -- A Case Study of LA’s Shared Mobility Pilots ...... 68 Potential Benefits to Low-Income Riders from Shared Mobility ...... 70 Case Study: BlueLA, Dockless Mobility Pilot, and Metro Bike Share...... 78 Spatial Access ...... 82 Technological Access ...... 83 Economic Access ...... 84 Shared Mobility as Civic Technology ...... 89 Discussion ...... 102 Conclusion ...... 105 Chapter 5: Conclusions & Recommendations for Practice ...... 107 Recommendations for Practice ...... 109 Government ...... 113 Private Mobility Providers ...... 118 Conclusion ...... 121 References ...... 123
5 Chapter 1: Introduction
“Through daily mobility, we socialize or seek solitude, negotiate our identity and perform a range of social roles; through mobility we may contest power relationships and claim our right to participate in society or we may be excluded and ignored.”- Marco Brömmelstroet
Transportation systems are not, and have never been, neutral. People experience them differently based on gender, color of their skin, socioeconomic status, disability status, sexual orientation, and many other facets of identity. This complexity should give us pause when we hear ‘data-driven’ and ‘equitable’ invoked alongside one another. As “three revolutions” unfold toward shared, autonomous and electric mobility (Sperling, 2018), transportation planners increasingly declare a commitment to both data-driven and equitable planning practices. Data-driven implies efficiency, standardization, and scale. Equity implies history, complexity, attention to physical space and personal experience. These two sets of principles are not inherently at odds – indeed, establishing equity metrics and outcomes is key to addressing historical inequalities. Realizing transportation systems that are both ‘smart’ and ‘equitable’ demands that planners engage with the potential conflict between these ideas – and modify planning practice accordingly. This thesis calls attention to the discord between the way that 'equity' is talked about in the private sector, and how communities understand it. New mobility technologies are not likely to be silver-bullets for historically inequality -- but by changing the relationship between communities and government, they may be able to facilitate the rebalance of power that is essential to more just cities. In the context of data-driven governance, this implies that planners must look past the operation of mobility services, to consider the data systems that define the basis for discussion – an idea I call code shift.
code shift /kōd/ /SHift/ 1. noun : a refocusing, by professional planners, private service providers, and communities, on data governance as an essential domain of equity.
2. verb: to facilitate the implementation of community-defined transportation equity strategies through inclusive data governance.
6 Code shift' proposes that in order for smart mobility systems to be equitable, community representatives must be present in the room in order to decide how data is collected, interpreted, applied, and shared. It may not be the case that a community advocate is the one writing the actual code; indeed, co-design implies that technical experts also offer their own abilities. But the governance of MDS extends far beyond just the design of the specification; it also gets combined with other datasets, packaged and sold, and generally used as the basis for policymaking. In the rooms where MDS is being designed, it is not only a way of packaging data; it is an entirely new system of governance. This system of governance, 'open' as it is, holds promising possibilities for participation and equity. However, the accountability structures that surround MDS are rather unclear; thus it is not certain who has power in this new, quasi-open environment, and if that individual is responsive to community needs. As these new technologies are deployed in a context of structural inequality, it is not at all clear that, absent community participation, that 'smart mobility' tech will, in fact, produce the equitable cities they propose to. The central argument is that equity demands the fair distribution of power; not only of resources. Smart mobility technologies hold potential to serve unmet mobility needs – yet, without concerted efforts to correct historical power imbalances, these technologies are not likely to serve the needs of marginalized groups. Realizing mobility equity in the future, therefore, demands meaningful community engagement in governance of smart mobility devices – and specifically in the digital infrastructures that define what information is considered a valid input for policymaking. I introduce the idea of code shift, to assert that transportation planners, community advocates, and private mobility service providers ought to focus on inclusive data governance as a key strategy for ‘mobility’ equity. This high-level assertion unfolds through three more specific arguments about Los Angeles. First is that the open data systems developed in LA are creating a fundamentally novel relationship between governments, private mobility providers, and the public -- which creates both opportunities and hazards from the vantage point of equity. Data systems being developed now offer the potential for more responsive service provision, but also raise questions about accountability and present tradeoffs between transparency and privacy. The outcome of these debates will shape mobility systems long into the future; as such, it is critical that communities play a role in data governance.
7 Second, the history of transportation planning in Los Angeles reveals severe power imbalances, which have not been reflected in the official assessments, or data sources conventionally used to measure 'equity.' Moreover; transportation (in) equity in Los Angeles is complex. The fact that low-income and minority communities are under-served results not only from transportation technologies and infrastructure, but also in housing discrimination, police brutality, and the geography of the Los Angeles region. Amending these inequities will require far more than the introduction of new technology; rather, it will take prolonged coordinated effort between communities and government – which, in turn, will require the equitable sharing of power. However, historical power imbalances are likely to permeate into today’s mobility systems, absent intervention from planners that aim to create a more even playing field. The high-tech nature of smart mobility systems poses a particular barrier to meaningful participation – which will requires particular attention from planners to enable more effective participation. The third key argument is that just placing a new mobility technology in an under-served community is not enough for people to use it and derive benefit from it; it also matters how people are engaged. Case studies of electric vehicle, bicycle, and scooter-sharing pilots in Los Angeles reveal that the methods of sharing power community representatives shapes has an important impact on the efficacy of other policies aimed at reaching under-served groups, such as price discounts and unbanked access options. These arguments – that data is changing governance, that transportation systems have never been equal, and that engagement matters – point to the need to re-think planning practice. . The final chapter draws on principles of participatory action research (Greenwood and Levin, 2007), Data Feminism (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) and Design Justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020) – as well as various frameworks offered by communities – to outline implications for practice.
Motivation
Since the 1991 Rio Declaration introduced the idea of sustainability, equity has been invoked as a guiding principle in all kinds of interventions aimed at mitigating climate change (Alcock, 2008). Yet – as scholars of the “just transition” have argued, the global environmental movement has often deepened inequalities, or at the very least failed to engage with the ones that exist (Evans & Phelan, 2016; NEWELL & MULVANEY, 2013). Transportation planners must
8 reckon with how transportation systems have failed to serve some groups in the past. Despite talking about “sustainability” and “equity,” but they have often failed to add new transport technologies in ways that have addressed existing inequities caused by non-transport related decisions (Mullen & Marsden, 2016). Recent calls for climate justice have renewed public discourse around how efforts to minimize greenhouse gas emissions intersect with historical inequality (Goh, 2020). As the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, transportation is a key field to consider this tension. By emphasizing “equity” as a concern, smart mobility providers are making some claim to this unjust history. There is a sound argument to be made for increasing the availability of non-automobile transportation options on economic and environmental grounds alone. The addition of this 3rd “E” signals that through interventions that are both profitable and produce lower greenhouse gas emissions, transportation planners can simultaneously address the forces that have systematically denied mobility opportunities to communities of color, low-income groups, indigenous populations, and gender non-conforming groups (as well as the many others that have been excluded or short-changed). Equity, however, is a contested and complex term. I adopt the stance offered by the Greenlining Institute’s Making Equity Real in Mobility Pilots Toolkit (2019).
Equity is transforming the behaviors, institutions, and systems that disproportionately harm people of color. Equity means increasing access to power, redistributing and providing additional resources, and eliminating barriers to opportunity, in order to empower low-income communities of color to thrive and reach full potential.
While this definition focuses on racial and economic notions of justice, the most important element is its focus on power. Important equity discussions must also be had with respect to gender, age, disability status, and other personal features that impact one’s ability to move safely and comfortably. Similarly, I acknowledge that there are many notions, sometimes in tension with one another, about how equity ought to be measured, which groups should receive preferential treatment, and which indicators ought to be used to assess outcomes. Many scholars have offered high-level philosophical frameworks for assessing transportation equity (Banister, 2019; Golub & Martens, 2014; Martens et al., 2012; Pereira et al., 2017; Soja, 2013). This discourse has translated into debates over how philosophical judgments ought to be
9 embedded in transportation models, and other digital systems (Bertolaccini, n.d.; Bills & Walker, 2017; Karner & Golub, n.d.; Karner & Niemeier, 2013). In parallel, a significant group of thinkers have considered equity through a community-based lens, questioning whether the historical methods for assessing equity have adequately addressed the needs of marginalized groups (Larson, 2018; Mann, 1996). This school tends to emphasize differences in lived experiences among different travelers to underscore a complex reality, which may not be readily captured in datasets fed into the models – regardless of how those models are calibrated (Barajas, 2019; Lugo, 2018; Sheller, 2018). It is this diversity of viewpoints on the meaning of ‘equity’ means that makes it so important to consider how power distributed. It matters great who gets to decide how equity is defined, and what tools are being used to carry it out and measure outcomes. To label a given technology as ‘equitable’ vastly over-simplifies an unjust history, and overstates the ability of any one technology to address all facets of it. Indeed, a growing body of literature documents new equity concerns of racial discrimination and economic exclusion in smart mobility technologies (Brown, 2018; Fleming, 2018; Groth, 2019; Kim et al., 2019; Marsden & Reardon, 2018; Shaheen et al., 2017). This complexity is not disqualifying to new technologies. Technological innovation can and should make contributions to people that have been underserved in the past. However, this discourse reveals that such an outcome is not inevitable; and implies that in order for new technologies to advance social equity, they must engage with the historical context in which they are conceived.
Why Los Angeles?
In City of Quartz, Mike Davis suggests that ‘the ultimate world-history significance – and oddity – of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism” (Davis, 1990, p. 18). Indeed, LA looms large in the public mind about ‘cities,’ and wields outsize influence in conversation about mobility innovation. However, the city is itself deeply complex and divided. Thus it offers a microcosm for how tech innovations interact with structural inequality. The auto-oriented metropolis has recently set ambitious goals to overhaul the regional transportation system. Measure M – a ½ cent sales tax ballot measure passed in 2016 – will
10 provide $860 million per year, to 40 major transit projects over the next 40 years, county-wide (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2019a). The City of Los Angeles’ Green New Deal is similarly ambitious, aiming to increase the share of zero-emission vehicles on the city’s streets to 25% by 2025, 80% 2035, and 100% by 2050 – part of a larger plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 (L.A.’s Green New Deal | Sustainability PLAn, 2019). Shared, autonomous, and electric mobility systems – collectively referred to here as ‘smart mobility systems’ – will play a central role in reaching these goals. Moreover, a central plank of the city’s plan is “a promise to deliver environmental justice and equity through an inclusive green economy.” Such a prominent commitment to equity, combined with the scale of transformation the city envisions, make it a key place to examine how climate justice goals are being implemented in practice. Likewise, Los Angeles is a key place to see what role technological innovation in bringing about this transformation. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s 2019 Technology Action Plan acknowledges that emerging mobility technologies “are changing the foundational assumptions of how we build and manage transportation systems” (LADOT, 2019). Indeed, LA has taken a proactive stance to tech innovation, creating new forms of governing disruptive mobility technologies such as shared, bikes, scooters, and cars. As these new technologies have rolled out, public debate has renewed over what mobility equity means and how it ought to be measured. Los Angeles does not fit neatly into the ‘spatial mismatch’ hypothesis that has often been used to describe transportation (in)equity (Blumenberg & Manville, 2004). The low-income communities clustered in a dense halo around downtown, such as South LA, Little Tokyo, and Boyle Heights have been underserved by infrequent and unreliable transit service. Car ownership rates in the central city are much lower than those in more peripheral communities (SUMC | Mapping Shared Mobility, n.d.). These communities’ needs and the prospects for better serving them are fundamentally different than more peripheral communities, such as those in the South Bay and San Fernando Valley – where housing density is more sparse. Flexible and low-cost shared mobility systems offer the potential to extend service across this complex landscape in a way that fixed-rail, capital intensive systems never could (Mann, 1996). Second, the scale and polycentric nature of the city has made auto ownership an essential tool for upward mobility (Bliss, n.d.-a). Riding public transit has not been viewed as a luxury – but
11 rather a mode of last resort for the city’s low income workers. This is also true of the bicycle. There is a key distinction to be drawn across both of these modes between ‘choice riders’ and ‘transit dependent riders’ (Lugo, 2018). This has produced rifts among sustainability advocates, as well as resentment that the city’s heavy focus on rail investment since 1980 reflects a greater attention towards luring the affluent out of their cars than serving the needs of low-income travelers that could never afford one (Mann, 1996). Third, the city’s profound orientation around the automobile has had severe public health consequences for the city’s low income and non-white populations. One angle is through air pollution and smog resulting from auto-exhaust. These are exacerbated by the placement of the city in a basin that experiences pressure inversions, often producing a thick layer of smog over downtown and its environs. This has produced high rates of asthma in south and east LA (August, 2016). Another is through obesity, and the imperative that most travelers face to spend their lives in the car. Third is physical safety; Los Angeles is a dangerous place for pedestrians and cyclists. Despite the city’s recent Vision Zero campaign to reduce pedestrian fatalities, deaths have remained stubbornly high (Nelson, 2019). Fourth, displacement of low-income communities has been a recurrent theme throughout the city’s history. The colonization of indigenous land by Spanish settlers, the demolition of black and brown communities from West Adams to Chavez Ravine (Shatkin, 2018), the severe lack of affordable housing in the city today: in the eyes of many, these are different chapters of the same story of LA’s transportation equity history. While various empirical studies have generated inconclusive results as to the link between rail investment and gentrification (Baker & Lee, 2019a; Marion G Boarnet et al., 2018; Marlon G Boarnet, n.d.), conflict has nonetheless emerged in many communities surrounding recent new transit investments (Eastsider, n.d.; Flores, 2019; Sandoval, 2018). The discord between empirical assessment and community perception reflect that locals’ anxiety is not only about having an affordable place to live. Rather, it invokes a deeper and more painful history of being repeatedly cast aside.
Why does data governance matter for equity?
As mobility planners turn increasingly to ‘big data’ to define problems and potential solutions, the question of whether how these histories are reflected in digital systems becomes
12 paramount. Scholars of ‘smart cities’ have begun to question how far into data-driven planning organizations equity goals can permeate. In a case study of six cities’ offices of innovation, Nguyen and Boundy (2017) found that local governments using big data approaches have tended to “focus on tame problems using a rational framework that promotes efficiency in government systems, raises long-standing concerns about ‘problem definition’ within government” (p. 533). Nguyen and Boundy (2017) further note that the typical decision making processes around big data tend to be top-down, favoring the voices of already advantaged populations. Equity is far from a tame problem. It cannot be easily reduced to a rational framework; and problem definition, in particular, is a key point of contention. Therefore it is valuable to consider whether, somewhere between community engagement and project implementation, the original ‘equity objectives’ may have been lost. Consider a typical planning workflow: within a broad project, one team of people is tasked with doing the public outreach. They receive a range of written, verbal, and graphic input from the community, and synthesize it into a set of over-arching principles and goals. They hand off these goals to individuals with technical expertise – for example, engineers who are knowledgeable in the design of roadways, or data scientists who specialize in geographic information systems. Technical experts tasked with implementing the over-arching goals may or may not be sensitive to community context, much less encouraged to reflect on the value judgments embedded in their practices. Even socially aware technical experts may not lack the leeway to apply to modify the designs as a result. Indeed, the transportation industry has historically been extremely rigid, with designers adhering to street design manuals and engineers adhering to design and modeling manuals issued by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. By the time any given project implemented, a small army of individuals, each with specialized knowledge, has interpreted and reshaped community input. The technologically savvy (i.e., architects, engineers, and data scientists) hold ultimate decision-making power over how a project gets implemented. By deciding which variables to include in the models, how to weight them, which statistical tests to apply, and how to interpret and apply the results, this group defines the set of options that policymakers are ultimately able to choose from. However, the individuals making these decisions may or may not have been present to actually speak with the community – and therefore may not have a personal sense of the implications of their decisions. This dynamic results in part from the specialization of labor,
13 which is necessary for any large-scale infrastructure project to be carried out. However, it comes at the cost of the persons who are actually building transportation systems being knowledgeable or aware of the implications of decisions that are deemed standard practice. Few other officials within a transit agency may have the technical knowledge to challenge the underlying assumptions, once they are embedded into a standard system. This presents a formidable barrier for meaningful community engagement. It implies that even when communities have been engaged in problem definition, data collection, and the selection of alternatives, the final result may not capture the community intent. In order for community input to have an impact, the people with technical expertise must have the awareness and resources to embed equity values in the digital infrastructures they are building. Equity planning in the 21st century, as such, requires attention to the way human values are translated into digital systems. These challenges become all the more pressing as the transportation planning field moves full speed ahead towards autonomous vehicles, and enthusiastically embraces machine learning approaches. In the planning workflow described above, there is at least an individual who mediates between the output of a model and transportation decisions. Machine learning approaches, by contrast, suggest that this middle man will be cut out altogether. This is deeply problematic – foremost because plentiful evidence exists that our current transportation system is shaped by structural inequality, which will permeate into mathematized approaches to planning (Green, 2019b; O’Neil, 2017). The basic idea of machine learning is that computer algorithms detect patterns in training data, usually a sample of data collected on society as it currently exists. Machine learning algorithms then generate models to describe society, predict future patterns, and these models are then used to make real life planning decisions. They are in this way self-fulfilling – meaning that the patterns embedded in the training data are especially impactful. If we are interested in advancing equity, it is important to make sure that the training data which will ultimately be fed into machine learning models is actually capturing the variables of interest. Machine learning algorithms are not trained to reflect on whether the modelers are asking the right question in the first place, or if the training data supplied is the most useful, and what this means for equity (Noble, 2018).
14 Unsupervised machine learning also creates the possibility that any equity-blind assumptions that were embedded into the code in the first place will be main-lined directly into transportation operations (Eubanks, 2018; O’Neil, 2017). There will be no opportunity for a person to say ‘what the model is telling me is just one point of reference – but I can decide what to make of that.’ Proponents of autonomous vehicles might reasonably object that human supervision is becoming standard practice in many cases. For example, the autonomous vehicle pilot put in place in Columbus, Ohio charges a human attendant with monitoring safety, answer passengers’ questions, and generally make it a more comfortable experience (Columbus AV Pilot “LEAPs” into Residential Service, 2020). Similarly, AV regulations in many cities are tending towards requiring a person to continue monitoring the vehicle. But these interventions are still missing the point, by inserting a human to ensuring safety and comfort for passengers rather than hard-coded operations of the system.1 Public agencies have put many policies in place so far (e.g. mandating the distribution of bikes and scooters in disadvantaged communities a census-tract level measure of exposure to environmental hazard) – but the case studies detailed in later chapters reveal that this fairly coarse measure of ‘equity’ is insufficient to meet the needs of populations that have been excluded. Given that these geospatial indexes are used as primary tools for governing, implementing more equitable policies would require the individuals actually touching the system – i.e. writing the code – to change the model parameters and analysis methods. The introduction of deep neural networks – or black boxes – in transportation planning makes the need for inclusion in the process early on particularly acute. Conventional machine learning practices have permitted this to some degree; a person may write a model, choose the parameters that go into it, and task a machine with identifying the coefficients for the variables in that model that most closely capture the phenomena of interest. Deep neural networks go one step beyond conventional machine learning model, by identifying patterns. The technical intricacies of DNNs are beyond my knowledge and scope of this paper – but they key difference is that even the researcher who calibrates the model can’t describe, precisely, the specifications used to estimate the model. An additional layer of accountability is removed; and even the data scientists that designed the model may not be able to explain, with certainty, the assumptions that the DNN used to arrive at its model. This means there is no individual whom a community
1 For example, in the case of scooters and bike shares, deciding where micro-mobility devices should be rebalanced.
15 member can approach and demand an explanation for inequitable outcomes. Whereas the Bus Riders Union litigants could directly challenge the MTA’s budgeting methodology at board meetings, the same guarantee does not hold in contexts where deep neural networks are used as a central planning tool. When challenged on this particular point, proponents of DNNs have countered that DNN’s stunning accuracy in predicting past trends is evidence that they should be used going forward. But this amounts to conceding that the patterns we have in transportation now are desirable to re-create going forward. To be fair, machine learning holds many promising opportunities to improve public transit, lowering operations, etc. But whether these cost savings ultimately translate into improvements in the lives of riders depends on policymakers being knowledgeable about the systems that they are using, and in intentionally redirecting resources towards policies that benefit historically disadvantaged groups. The business models undergirding shared mobility make it particularly urgent to consider this, as they rely on sophisticated matching algorithms that can be shifted in real-time, with little oversight from riders. To offer a point of reference, changes in conventional transit modes require extensive oversight processes (e.g. bus route redesign or fare increases). These take months. This slow process is in some ways a drawback -- but it at least offers the opportunity for deliberative decision-making. A model that can be calibrated, and re-calibrated in real-time weakens accountability in the long-term as the basic assumptions guiding service may change. There is a growing chorus of voices within the computer science movement to promote FAT (fairness, accountability, and transparency). To this I would add that a focus on the data which is being in produced in the first place is a threshold issue; without variables that adequately capture, from the community’s point of view, the issues of interest, no model or algorithm can be expected to produce an outcome that is equitable or fair. A danger also exists in the framing of machine learning as a tool to ‘solve’ urban transportation issues, which also implies an end to deliberative process. If the most powerful technological tool that we can use to improve mobility fundamentally doesn’t lend itself to this deliberation, then this deliberation needs to be shifted elsewhere. Rather than deliberation over the proper calibration of the model, the deliberation should be shifted to its inputs, interpretation, and modification over time.
16 Another looming threat is that the movement towards standardization and interoperability could also lead to the erasure of the context-specific phenomena that equity-minded planners are seeking to address. One data standard to rule them all (such as MDS) poses the risk that the standard will incorporate only issues that are universal and leave out the ones that are more context specific. This approach may allow a data standard to serve the maximum number of users and produce the maximum social good (a utilitarian approach). But in so doing, it leaves out the communities at the margins whose experiences may be localized. Placing these historically marginalized groups at the center of planning is not only an ethical imperative, but a practical one – as low income and communities of color represent the majority of transit riders (Mann 1996, Soja 2013, Greenling Institute 2019). Trip-making behavior is incredibly individualized. dependent on context and an individual’s personal experiences and psychological make up; hence the growing interest in transportation research on urban design and behavioral psychology as approaches to understanding behavior. If transportation planning systems routinely fail to address individual needs– and only think about equity at the highest, most aggregate levels – they will ultimately underserve vast quantities of riders. To sum up, the digital transformations underway demands that transportation planners, concerned with equity expand their focus beyond just the operations of modes and design of streets, to consider the digital systems themselves. It is vital to consider not just how decisions are made with the data provided, but what data we choose to collect and how it describes the ground truth (Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems - Google Books, n.d.). The current discourse on the Mobility Data Specification is example of these debates unfolding in real time - and their outcomes will shape the policies options that planners can choose from for decades to come. The evolving digital governance of shared mobility creates an opportunity to revisit the supposed tradeoff between social equity and efficiency (Dietz & Atkinson, 2010). This is rooted in the idea that context-responsive planning is inherently resource intensive, demanding far more time and resources to meet with community members and understand the issue. Then, the ultimate solution is not replicable elsewhere. The replicability of digital governance schemes at low cost (for example, through platforms like GitHub) enables much faster policy learning between governments experimenting with more equitable approaches to planning. Moreover, flexible standards like MDS offer the potential for both a universally legible and machine-
17 readable way to govern shared mobility devices, as well as the possibility for individual cities to add in variables of local relevance. Tailoring mobility policy to local context, in other words, can be done at much lower cost – meaning that ‘equity’ is itself becoming more efficient.
One might ask: is scalability even an appropriate goal for mobility planning? What is the problem with hyper-local planning processes ruling the day? This is a fair critique, as it was a modernist impulse towards maximum speed and efficiency that produced the sprawling megacity that LADOT and Metro is now trying to transform. But in response to climate change, speed and scale remain quite important. As a planet, we need to shift as many trips as we can away from the internal combustion engine, as quickly as we can. A hyper-focus on this scale can lead to local experiences being lost along the way; but we must take a practical approach to equity to ensure that global, intergenerational justice goals are aligned with local, distributional justice goals. As equity and justice become more central themes of the modern climate movement, it is essential that we accomplish these two goals together (Goh, 2020). At present, a barrier to mobility equity scaling now is that there is a narrow set of universal approaches to planning transportation systems, determined in part by the terms of the federal grants that provide a majority of local project. For any municipality, designing by different terms could mean forgoing federal money and seeking out the revenue sources, this requires developing new policies and procedures; hiring more staff; training more people. As a digital governance system, MDS offers a platform for cities to innovate at very low marginal cost in their response to community input. Through pull-requests and collaboration across cities, these equity innovations can plausibly proliferate to cities across the world. Thus MDS enables innovation – not just in tech, but in the way that policy goals are set and described. Realizing these benefits demands intention and introspection on the part of planners charged with deploying these technologies. As John F. Kennedy cautioned at the dawn of the ‘space race’ – another moment of profound disruption -- technology has no conscience of its own (JFK RICE MOON SPEECH, n.d.).
Chapter 2: Code Shift
18 We must be thoughtful about how cities adopt digital technology not for technological reasons— but because the technical infrastructure undergirding the smart city will go a long way toward determining the social and political infrastructure of twenty-first-century urbanism.
- Ben Green
Mobility stands at an unprecedented moment of disruption. As connected, autonomous, shared, and electric vehicles (collectively, ‘smart mobility’ systems), are being rolled out, so are new ways of governing. The interconnected nature of smart mobility offers the potential to provide affordable, high quality transportation to historically under-served communities. However, this outcome is not inevitable (Fleming, 2018). It is also important for planners to consider the network of public and private actors that govern the systems, and how they craft policy. While creating new possibilities for transparency and public participation, these networks also raise new questions of accountability and democracy. As these new technologies and governance systems are overlaid onto cities with deep structural inequality, we must ask how they shift the balance of power. I argue here that smart mobility systems, and the accompanying data governance structures, present planners with a series of tradeoffs, from the viewpoint of equity. No correct answer exists to these tradeoffs, and equity arguments can be made for multiple approaches. The individuals overseeing technical systems therefore get to decide what ‘equity’ means in practice. It follows that realizing a vision of mobility equity aligned with community goals depends on meaningful participation in the design, collection, and interpretation of data produced by smart mobility systems. The notion of ‘code shift’ describes this imperative.
Defining Code Shift
In an era when data are increasingly used to define and solve problems, the design, collection, management, and interpretation of data become key determinants of policy outcomes. Planners interested in advancing mobility equity, therefore, must look past the operation of mobility services, to consider the data systems that define the basis for discussion. As will be shown in greater detail in Chapter 3, data-driven approaches to gauging transportation equity have captured only a fragment of the issues relevant to community stakeholders. In order to capture the full discourse, and enable all stakeholders to arrive at a joint problem definition, there
19 needs to be an expansion of the ideas that are captured in the databases that will serve as basis for discussions going forward – as well as an expansion of the people empowered to access and use this data. Code shift describes this philosophy.
code shift /kōd/ /SHift/ 3. noun : a refocusing, by professional planners, private service providers, and communities, on data governance as an essential domain of equity.
4. verb: to facilitate the implementation of community-defined transportation equity strategies through inclusive data governance.
Formulated as a noun, code shift describes a refocusing on the public discourse around equity on data structures themselves. In some ways, this is already happening – organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontiers Foundation have intervened in lawsuits regarding data privacy, each using a civil rights framing to oppose LADOT’s data collection strategies. Organizations such as the Greenlining Institute (Creger et al., 2019) and Investing in Place (Guevarra & Meaney, 2016) have begun to consider the equity implications of autonomous vehicle technology. Each of these groups recognize the paradigm shift underway, and suggest approaches more profound participation strategies – but stop short of considering how the handling of data shapes the possibilities for the changes they propose. Code shift proposes that advocates consider, explicitly, the link between data governance and transportation equity outcomes. It also implies that government planners should include public participation in the creation and management of data systems as a part of their broader equity initiatives. A key plank of LA Metro’s Equity Platform Framework is to ‘Establish meaningful goals around a shared definition of equity and actions to achieve those goals’ (Metro Equity Platform Framework, 2018). For this shared definition of equity to be translated into action, it must also be taken seriously in decision-making processes, which are increasingly informed by terabytes of digital records. Tribone (2013) observes that the presence of data, on its own, is not guaranteed to improve service outcomes in transit agencies. This implies that advancing mobility equity requires not only the collection of more data, but also on making that data accessible, useful, and relevant to marginalized groups. Because individuals interpret data through the lens of their own
20 experiences (or as D’Ignazio and Klein (2018c) put it, “The data never, ever speak for themselves”), this demands collaboration and co-design on the governance of data systems. As a verb, code shift describes the planning practice of engaging community at the level of institutional design. It means asking communities to not only react to data that transit agencies provide, but rather engaging them in the design of data systems themselves. This implies an active and intentional dismantling of the mystique around data systems; considering data scientists less as ninjas, rockstars, wizards, and unicorns, and more as janitors (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2018b). In other words, we should respect data scientists as stewards of the public good, on whom we depend to maintain the spaces we live in – but recognize that their trade is learnable by all. Much the way Justice for Janitors movement in Los Angeles demanded that historically marginalized groups have a seat at the table to shape the institutions of labor, code shift asserts that planners should provide community groups a seat at the table and tools to meaningfully participate in the shaping of ‘smart cities’ (Green, 2019a). Code shift approaches ‘equity’ as fundamentally a language issue. Different stakeholders use the same term to talk about different constructs. For example – mobility advocates typically think about it through a lens of interconnected injustices, which extend to environmental hazards, the theft of indigenous lands, policy brutality, and housing segregation (Sheller, 2018). It would be very presumptuous to suggest that introducing a scooter or bicycle in a given city will remediate all the issues of interest to advocates. Yet, by broadly assigning the term ‘equitable’ to these devices, planners imply as much. The trouble is that prevailing methods of gauging ‘equity’ in transportation projects, consider only the impacts of individual transportation projects (e.g. the increase in job accessibility as a result of adding a new bus line) – and not the pre-existing inequalities that the proposed intervention aims to amend. For their part, private mobility operators consider ‘equity’ mostly through the lens of how devices are used and deployed; not who is at the table to make decisions. These divergent formulations produce conflict the different stakeholders, which can impede the successful implementation of devices that could meet a real need. This conflict becomes all the more vexing in the context of smart cities. Expressing ‘equity’ goals through data demands that planners and communities arrive at a definition that can be encoded in 1s and 0s. In other words, planners must translate human values into digital languages, to define what information should be gathered, made accessible, and how it should
21 managed along the way. Like human languages, digital languages simplify our knowledge of the world into a format that is standardized, legible and scalable. Similarly, digital languages are not infallible measures of reality; rather they are the products of interpretation. Programmers must decide how best to represent the complexity of the world in a simplified format, which means that some information is left out, some related concepts are grouped together, and some are emphasized over others. The same way that the structure of human languages reflects experience of the world, structures used to organize digital information ultimately influence the integration of community-held knowledge in planning. Opportunity arises in the fact that digital languages, like human ones, are fluid. They are redesigned and re-arranged to describe new social phenomena. In open-source programming languages like R, programmers introduce new functions, packages, and libraries to facilitate certain data analysis tasks that are frequently used. The ‘sf’ and ‘spdep’ packages, for example, enable R programmers to do sophisticated geospatial analyses with just a few lines of code. Rather than having to engage with every single data point distributed in space, write out the full mathematical equation, and consider the assumptions embedded therein, tidy packages like these enable programmers to skip straight to the geospatial analysis. Standardization of certain functions -- e.g., computing a local Moran’s I, or the Gini Coefficient – enables the quick calculation of statistics that may be useful as part of a broader discussion about equity. The cost of this convenience is that technologists need not consider as deeply the implication of their analytical method. However, the complexity of cities remains. Thus planners must reflect on how they are using digital tools – and whether the design of those digital tools inclines them towards a particular way of thinking. Code shift asserts that if a multifaceted issue like ‘equity’ is to be a central consideration in smart cities, planners must arrive at a shared vocabulary to describe novel phenomena. Metro acknowledges as much in its Equity Platform Framework, flagging the “need to define a common basis for talking about and building an agenda around equity, and how to improve it” (Metro Equity Platform Framework, 2018). Indeed, there are many issues that communities consider part of the equity discussion – such as police harassment and gentrification. Some data systems capture elements of these; for example, Los Angeles publishes data on pedestrian and bicycle interactions with police officers (Vehicle and Pedestrian Stop Data 2010 to Present | Los Angeles - Open Data Portal, n.d.). Various computational methods have also been created to
22 assess gentrification risk (Preis et al., 2020). However, these datasets have not been introduced in spaces where planners consider how data can advance mobility equity. In order for smart mobility systems to respond to the full range of issues impacting mobility equity, we must consider the interaction between different datasets that, collectively, form the basis for policy evaluation. The parallel between ‘code shift’ and ‘mode shift’ is intentional, signaling that digital infrastructure (i.e., code), is integral to efforts to change travel behavior. The word ‘code’ carries multiple meanings, relating to both digital syntax which commands the actions of a machine, and legal text that governs the machinations of a body politic. Indeed, as technology occupies an expanding role in urban planning, political and digital systems must respond directly to one another. Therefore the planner interested in implementing their values in physical systems must also focus on embedding their values in digital ones. Code shift also invokes ‘code switch,’ a social concept describing the tactic employed by people of color to change the way they speak in order to be listened to and taken seriously (Demby, 2013). Marginalized groups have often struggled to have their concerns taken seriously in transportation planning (Lugo, 2018; Mann, 1996; Sheller, 2018). In responses, marginalized groups have complained about having to shoehorn the diversity and complexity of their experiences into technical terms that resonate with engineers and formally designated policymakers – or as the Principles of Mobility Justice put it, “pick their battles” (Untokening 1.0 — Principles of Mobility Justice, n.d.). Code shift asserts that in a more equitable planning process, transportation planners would be open to modifying the languages they use (digital, written, and spoken) that they use, in order to more fully integrate the issues that advocates have pointed to as significant barriers. One fundamental question is – why do communities need to be engaged at the stage of data governance, and not just later on once data formats have been established? The data that we gather, and the ways we organize it, define the questions we can ask and answers we can uncover. Communities hold essential knowledge that technologists need to use to decide how to organize information in databases, such that it will be most useful for making decision process. The design of object-relational databases is a non-trivial matter, as equity is concerned. Identifying "entities" -- that is, ideas to be considered as separate objects -- is an essential step in database management. All the attributes related to a particular entity -- for example, a street --
23 might be stored in one table about that. A standard set of information to include in that dataset may be physical attributes of a street: its width, the presence of a bike lane, how many lanes it contains, and in which directions. This construction of a street depicts it primarily as a link in a network; holding little value apart from conveying travelers and goods. In reality, a street serves many functions – a social space in and of itself. Embedded in each street are different sensory experiences, as well as different histories. Individuals encounter this street in different ways. For example, the width of a sidewalk or height of a curb take on special importance for a person with disabilities. Considering a more complete set of attributes to be part of the same entity within a database, could inform the design of transportation networks that meet the specialized needs of groups that have been underserved in the past.2 Meaningful participation at the earliest stages ensures that later in the planning process, the data will be available to answer the questions of interest to communities – and that when planners go to collect data about streets, they can readily view the full range of variables of interest. Mobility equity advocates, moreover, have much to gain by shifting their attention to the way digital systems are constructed, so as to tighten broad social critiques of technological systems to specific, constructive input (Schuurman & Pratt, 2002). Geographic information systems (GIS) have been critiqued as imposing a positivist framing in the world; signaling through the graphic representation of data that the researchers are capturing a single ‘objective’ reality (Ground Truth, n.d.; Openshaw, 1997). Such a uniform reality does not exist, which has led critics of smart cities to assail data-driven approaches as tools to advance neoliberal ideologies and the interests of businesses that develop civic technologies (Grossi & Pianezzi, 2017). Dismissing quantitative data approaches out of hand, however, also means missing an opportunity to understand the disparate impacts on sub-groups within a larger population, the ability to track progress over time, and design transportation systems that more effectively meet the needs of all people in a city. From the technologist’s point of view, these are useful benefits no matter the context; from the social critic’s point of view, these uses are trivial (or even harmful) in a context of systemic inequality. Recalling similar disputes in the early days of GIS,
2 What if we designed a transportation network to steer more pedestrians towards minority-owned businesses? Or to protect citizens with disabilities from high rates of automobile traffic? These approaches to advancing equity require more attention to individual experiences.
24 Schuurman & Pratt (2002) note that “Part of the tension over positivism between researchers and critics of GIS stemmed from a general ignorance of the other’s research domain” (p. 295). A similar observation might me made about smart mobility systems, with each different group of stakeholders applying a different framing of equity. Code shift embodies the idea that by focusing on the mechanics of civic technologies social critics can both play a more direct role in shaping the future of smart mobility, as well as identifying areas of common ground.
Case Study: The Mobility Data Specification
The opportunity for code shift will be developed through the case study of the Mobility Data Specification: an open-source data standard that has been central to Los Angeles’s regulation of shared mobility devices. Because it is used to define and enforce legal regulations, MDS is changing not only the way planners analyze transportation system, but the way that public, private, and community stakeholders relate to one another. That MDS is hosted so publicly creates profound implications for public participation in policymaking. This shift in governance, towards openness and transparency creates both opportunities and hazards from an equity viewpoint. As a standard hosted on GitHub, it offers a unique opportunity for the public to participate directly in the governance of smart mobility systems. The founding of the independent Open Mobility Foundation to manage MDS creates space for deliberative democracy to occur at the level at which the data standard is being built and re-defined. This deliberation early in the process is more critical than ever as artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches weaken the ability of the planner to infuse their values later on. And as MDS expands to more cities around the world, and begins to govern new technologies, there is an opportunity to embed equity in transportation planning on a profound and global scale. MDS is a system for mobility companies to report information about the operation of bicycles and scooters, as well as for transit agencies to implement policies. It provides a schema, which detail a series of event types that describe how vehicles are being used by both users and companies, as well as the policies that are put in place. These data are structured in the Javascript Object Notation (JSON) and Geographic JSON (GeoJSON) formats, and are passed between
25 mobility providers and government through three application programming interfaces (APIs). These are digital ports that enable users with an API key (i.e. a code to grant them access) to query and access data stored on the host’s servers. MDS is composed of 3 API endpoints – policy, agency, and provider – which enable public agencies and mobility service providers to share data back and forth (City of Los Angeles, n.d.).
Governance of MDS
MDS was first developed by LADOT in 2018 as a component of the One Year Dockless Mobility Pilot. The official version of the standard is hosted on GitHub – an open platform where citizens can view the most up-to-date version of the code, review changes made in the past, and propose their own modifications. It forms part of the city’s Active Management strategy, in which they pivot from being a passive responder to tech disruptions, towards an active player that defines the terms of the market to align with their policy goals (Bliss, n.d.-b; Final One-Year Dockless Permit, 2019a). Accordingly, LADOT leveraged their permitting power and the size of their city to demand that private mobility providers seeking to operate in the market link their systems directly to the city’s servers via three application programming interfaces (APIs) and submit data in LA’s preferred format. The original standard was developed at the impetus of LADOT, with assistance from the consulting firm Ellis & Associates. Ellis and Associates developed a strategic plan that suggested ‘standardization of data practices to enable more effective regulation. In turn, a new industry of firms has grown up to assist cities with the handling and managing of MDS data. Ride Report, for example, offers user-friendly interfaces for private mobility operators and cities alike to understand ridership patterns in scooters (Ride Report, n.d.). Lacuna – which acquired Ellis and Associates – is another start up that was created to help guide cities’ implementation of the standard (Hawkins, 2019). Thus, the governance of MDS entails not just the collection of data by a public agency, but an entire ecosystem of private actors that mediate between citizens and government. The implication is that, while citizens contribute data about their personal movements through public space, the power to view, interpret, and act upon that data is current far from public reach. Moreover, the technical complexity of managing mobility systems makes it difficult to understand precisely which actors are involved, what their respective roles are, and who the most powerful decisionmakers are.
26 This complexity raises questions about the naming of the Open Mobility Foundation (OMF), an independent non-profit which assumed full responsibility for managing the MDS standard in April 2019. OMF currently has only two employees, and primarily plays a coordinating role between each of these actors. The Open Mobility Foundation (OMF) was founded in order to “develop and promote technology used in commercial products that either use the right-of-way or that help government entities manage the public right-of-way.” OMF is governed by 26 municipalities (‘Public Members’), which range in both size and geography from megacities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, to mid-size central like Louisville, Columbus, and Washington DCs. To small cities like San José, California and international cities like Bogota Colombia and Dublin, Ireland. OMF also includes as ‘Private Members’ several private tech firms, including Microsoft, Bird, Waymo and Lacuna. OMF is one of many projects supported by OASIS-Open, a consortium of non-profits engaged in standardization for software. As such – not only are there many actors contributing to the design and implementation of MDS, but also many cities and private companies standing at the ready to implement it. Decisions made about how MDS is designed and used are likely to reverberate around the world. This ecosystem of powerful actors makes public participation all the more important for advancing mobility equity. MDS is updated through two working groups: Provider Services and City Services. The Provider services group is convened to manage the Provider API. The City Services groups manages the two APIs implemented by cities (agency and policy) (City of Los Angeles, n.d.). Each group is composed mostly of software engineers from the MSPs, and their counterparts in city-government. In the bi-weekly conference calls, the groups discuss recent pull requests and issues, as well as set longer term goals. These working groups are organized informally, holding bi-weekly 1-hour conference calls that are open to the public, and communicating through a Google Groups mailing list (Openmobilityfoundation/Mobility-Data- Specification, 2018/2020). Individuals can also be designated as official contributors to the MDS, on the condition that OMF owns the intellectual property of any suggestions that are made. In this respect, MDS offers a degree of transparency that other digital standards may not. However, the fact that a standard which can have such a global and long-lasting impact is managed so informally raises questions about whether the relevant institutions are prepared to ensure equitable outcomes.
27 A Different Kind of Open Data
Open data is not new; what is novel about MDS is the way it changes the relationship between public and private actors. Beyond just defining a set of parameters and syntax for mobility providers to describe where they are deploying their scooters, LA’s MDS strategy constitutes a reversal of the power dynamics between the city and providers. When dockless mobility providers first appeared in Los Angeles 2017, they benefited from a regulatory vacuum that allowed them to design a new market. By LADOT’s own admission, they were caught ‘flat footed’ (Mayersohn, 2020). The city’s existing data systems lacked a classification for ‘scooter,’ nor rules in place to decide what behavior was permissible. The creation of MDS represents an exemplifies the city going on offense; devising its own data standard to suit city goals, and forcing providers to comply (Bliss, n.d.-b). Open data standards such as the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and the Global Bicycle Feed Specification have been used in mobility planning for a long-time. Considering these precedents reveals new possibilities in MDS. GTFS is an open data standard that cities use to publish public transit schedules (General Transit Feed Specification, n.d.). It came about in 2005, when TriMet – the transit agency for Portland Oregon, sought to help travelers, who did not already know that city, more easily access their routes and schedules. TriMet collaborated with Google to develop a standard set of comma separated values (CSVs) describing the geometry, schedule, and features of the routes. When TriMet first released this standardized dataset (known at the time as the Google Transit Feed Specification) through an early version of the Google Transit platform, the service was immensely among users and drew the attention of transit agencies in other cities. Simplicity was key to its success; though at first critiqued as low-tech because it shared sensitive data in CSV format – a relatively old-school approach – this also enabled many different users, both professionals and common citizens to interact with the data and make it their own, using any editor (e.g. Microsoft Excel) of their choice. From the get-go, public participation has been key to the development of tech standards (Pioneering Open Data Standards: The GTFS Story, n.d.). GTFS has continued to be developed over time, with various new features being added to the core set of information, including a real-time feature. Now, GTFS is near universally used as a standard approach for transit agencies to communicate their schedules and for navigation apps to relay this information. The standard was renamed the General Transit Feed Specification in 2010
28 to reflect its wide usage. It has also given way to other standards, such as the Global Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS), which undergirds docked bikeshare systems and facilitates their representation in smartphone apps like the Transit App. These standards provide information on station location, the number of bikes and docks available at a given time, how many are broken, and records where bikes are picked up and dropped off. While MDS was heavily influenced by GTFS, this earlier standard implies a different relationship between private and public sectors than MDS. First, it was developed by a private company, Google, to support the operations of a public system. While Google benefited from sharing public transit information on their platform, they were not offering a competing mobility service. GTFS drives more riders to public transit by making the public system more legible. MDS, by contrast, was developed by LADOT with help from consultants as a way to wrangle private mobility providers operating in their jurisdiction. Thus it acts as a regulatory tool, whereas GTFS communicates public transit operation to the public. Second, the original GTFS describes what planners intend for the transit system will do, if everything goes as planned. But research has shown the actual spatiotemporal accessibility provided by transit systems is quite different from that implied by GTFS. This can have important implications for public perception, as riders’ actual experience of unreliable transit services may differ significantly from the experience implied by data (Stewart & Zegras, 2019). Real-time GTFS feeds offer a closer look at what is actually happening – but only offer users snapshots of where vehicles are located at a given moment. MDS builds on real-time GTFS, by both offering real-time location data, as well as creating the possibility for more detailed insights into business decisions. Event types include data on where bikes and scooters were dropped off and picked up, which ones were taken off line, when, and why. MDS therefore offers the possibility of users observing how decisions made by private mobility providers translate into outcomes on the ground. Third, MDS traces individual movements, whereas real-time GTFS shows only the movement of buses along routes. Given that dockless scooters and bikes enable point-to-point travel, this makes MDS data a far more sensitive data stream. It can be used to trace individuals’ place of work, home, in a degree of detail that GTFS and GBFS do not permit. While raising serious equity concerns about data privacy and civil rights, this granularity portends new possibilities for travel demand modeling. Modeling individual movement along fixed rail and
29 bus networks demands substantial statistical inference using origin-destination-transfer (ODX) modeling. Theoretically, MDS offers the possibility to measure the entire route that each individual follows. This could be beneficial from an equity standpoint, as MDS could be used to segment populations with unique travel needs and patterns (e.g. late night shift workers). It also can bolster the efficacy of transit systems overall, as it enables planners to measure trips that are currently considered invisible via data streams (e.g., Automatic Vehicle Location and Automatic Passenger Counting) that form the basis of many transit agencies’ ridership analyses. To wit, although MDS and GTFS are both sources of ‘open’ data, they carry different implications for mobility planning. The novelty of MDS, the sensitivity of the data is organizes, and speed at which this standard is being adopted, make it all the more important to consider its implications for public participation.
How MDS is being used
The stated goals of MDS are “to provide a standardized way for municipalities or other regulatory agencies to ingest, compare and analyze data from mobility service providers, and to give municipalities the ability to express regulation in machine-readable formats” (City of Los Angeles, n.d.). In practice, this implies that MDS informs day-to-day operations, medium-term policy changes, and long-term infrastructure investments. Already, MDS data forms the basis of evaluations of policies. In LADOT’s 90-day report to the City Council on the Dockless Mobility program, they used MDS data to report how many rides were taken, at what times of the day, and the extent to which providers complied with their equity mandates (LA City Council File 17- 1125, 2020). Thus as LA and other cities incorporate shared mobility more deeply in their long- term plans, the way MDS is designed and used will have ripple effects across time, geography, and other modes. MDS has been framed by mobility officials Los Angeles and other cities to re-establish management over the public right of way (Mayersohn, 2020). Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft have positioned themselves as digital platforms – not providing transportation services, but pairing riders with independent contractors who in turned operated in the public right of way. While LADOT has wrestled with these firms over this data for a while, General Manager Seleta Reynolds acknowledged that the city was caught ‘flat-footed’ when these same firms deployed
30 scooters in 2017. Thus MDS is not only a tool for managing bikes and scooters; rather, it is the crux of a much larger policy debate about control of the public realm. One of the key ways that MDS tilts power back towards the city is through enforcement and modification of rules. Prior to MDS, cities wanting to regulate scooter companies had to ask for data – which was jealously guarded. Directly connecting to scooter companies’ devices via the APIs allows the city to collect data directly, thus lessening the administrative burden. It also allows the city to ensure data quality. Reynolds noted that in the early stages of scooter regulations, companies submitted falsified data and developed programs (e.g., Uber’s GreyBall) to stymie enforcement (L.A. Wants to Track Your Scooter Trips. Is It a Dangerous Precedent?, 2019). The MDS structure allows LADOT to spot-check scooters and bikes in real time, for example to verify compliance with parking regulations. MDS allows for more rapid updating of policy via the policy API. For example, when LADOT wants to impose a geofence where scooters are not allowed to be parked, or enforce a zone where they must be automatically decelerated, the city can push this file as a GeoJSON directly to companies’ servers. One planning official at LADOT reported that this had previously been an issue with the open-source mobility platform Waze, which generates maps and directions using user-generated data. When the city made changes in the built environment (e.g., closing or opening roads, putting up a ‘No U-Turn’ sign), the city could not be sure that this was being passed through to drivers depending on this service.3 Using MDS, the city can be sure that the rule changes are relayed to providers and shown in their platforms. Further, the open-source nature of MDS permits it to be integrated into platforms such as the Transit App, alongside GTFS data and other streams. This arrangement allows travelers to view many different modes in one app, with the aim of encouraging the use of modes besides cars. However, conflicts are emerging among private mobility providers between the open cities approach and walled gardens. Lyft – which also owns the Citi Bike docked bike sharing system in New York City – recently clashed with the Transit App, which briefly allowed users to unlock Citi Bikes through the Transit App. Lyft swiftly removed that functionality. This skirmish portends future conflicts as to whether the companies operating shared mobility devices may be willing to integrate their technologies with publicly operated systems – an ‘open data’ approach
3 Personal conversation in February 2020.
31 – or whether mobility data will be used primarily as a tool to gain market share – what some have called a ‘walled garden’ effect (Zipper, 2019). Finally, MDS data has enabled the creation of visualizations showing where and how scooters are being used. Private mobility providers, public agencies, and private citizens have each done these visualizations. The City of Austin’s Shared Micromobility Data Explorer allows users to visualize, in 3 dimensions, the total number of scooter and bike trips that occurred between council districts over a given time period (Shared Micromobility Data Explorer, n.d.). Uber’s recently launched New Mobility Heatmap reveals street segments that were most heavily traveled during different windows of the day. The ‘Swarm of Scooters’ app accesses the APIs for over 20 cities using MDS, and provides a real-time snapshot of where scooters are located (Swarm of Scooters, n.d.). These platforms the locations of devices to be easily downloaded in the GeoJSON format. These nifty visualizations meaningfully add value by giving users an intuitive sense for the parts of the city where scooters and bikes are most frequently used. For example, Uber’s platform gives users the options to toggle between different cities and mode of transport, and visualize aggregate data at the street segment level. In so doing, it gives planners and citizens a general sense for which streets may be the most important routes. However, despite their visual appeal, each of these platforms provides only limited utility for planning purposes, or critical analysis of scooter operations. Each platform offer users the option to download the data. Uber aggregates its data to 500m hexagonal bins, with each record showing how many times that area was traversed over a given period. Austin provides more granular data about individual trips – yet discloses only the council district where each one started at ended. This likely reflects valid concerns about data privacy. The Swarm of Scooters app provides only a snapshot of scooters’ real-time location; it does not offer users the ability to download historical data. These limitation raise questions as to how open ‘open data platforms’ are after all. Aggregate data limits the ability of citizens to understand where devices are being placed, why, and what assumptions are being made about users and demand. Neither platform includes demographic information about riders, or suggests which scooter trips were taking place in areas already well-served by public transit, versus meeting an unmet need. This scale of data is key for
32 advancing equity goals; yet, it is only available to professional planners in city agencies and private firms. Altogether, MDS is poised to form the basis of decisions that will have lasting effects on the built environment. The Open Mobility Foundation suggests that MDS can be used to not only keep scooters out of pedestrians’ way – but rather to guide “future capital investments such as dockless vehicle drop zones or furniture zones, Inform infrastructure planning efforts such as the addition of bike lanes or street redesigns, and provide visibility into the relationship between micromobility and other modes, such as public transit” (City of Los Angeles, n.d.). The high- resolution nature of MDS certainly creates these possibilities – but the limitations on public use of that data generate skepticism as to which individuals may be guiding these MDS-based policy decisions.
Equity Potential in MDS
An optimistic reading is that the open-source design of data standards such as MDS opens up profound possibilities for co-design. As MDS is used to make decisions on the ground, a collaborative definition process can help planners and communities arrive at a joint understanding of what the problem is, in a particular place, at a particular time. At the outset, we should recognize that not all ‘equity’ issues can or should be addressed through the design of a data standard. Gentrification is an oft-cited concern in discussions about equity an urban mobility, but it may not be appropriate to include changes in nearby housing prices in the data that is traded between scooter companies and the city. Data storage has a cost in computational power, energy, and physical space, as well as in labor. Computational efficiency, as such should not be totally discounted – and we should not think of MDS as a catch-all vehicle for transportation equity concerns. It is more useful to consider MDS as part of an ecosystem of data streams that work together to inform urban transportation policy. The analytical power comes not from the ability to summarize data from that single source, but to combine it with other data sets, so as to describe the way that smart mobility devices interact with context. In this area there is much room for improvement and community involvement. For example, LA’s GeoHub offers geotagged data on police stops of vehicles and pedestrians from 2010 to the present (Vehicle and Pedestrian Stop Data 2010 to Present | Los Angeles - Open
33 Data Portal, n.d.). This dataset aggregates stops to the level of the police reporting district, an idiosyncratic geospatial container which hampers the comparison of data across contexts. Mobility justice advocates have expressed concern about increased police interactions as a deterrent to shared mobility – yet, the dataset on LA’s GeoHub records only whether the person the police stopped was in a vehicle, or as pedestrian. It is not clear how scooters and bikes ought to be classified; nor is there a way to tell whether the cyclists who were stopped were riding personal bikes or shared ones. Addressing concerns about over-policing may require an updating of the police dataset, not the MDS standard. But understanding that analyses like the one outlined here are possible is a pre-requisite for communities to engage. MDS, as such, remains an important context to consider approaches for more effective participation in the future. A principal advantage of MDS being hosted on GitHub is that it allows for easy tracing of the different versions of code as they develop. It also provides a user- friendly interface to track public input, the versions of code, and all accompanying documents in one place, at one time. Thinking of MDS as a governing tool, an appropriate analogy would be a municipal legislative portal showing all the versions of written laws alongside the proposed line changes, debate by the legislators and public all in one place. It offers not only documentation of what the standard is, but also a detailed trace of its development. Unlike in-person legislative processes, GitHub permits direct participation by all members of the public. Already, most democratic institutions enable some form of participation. In California, the Brown Act requires that all meetings of government bodies be open to the public (Ca. Gov’t Code Sec. 54950 et seq.). The process that GitHub enables would be akin to a citizen in the audience of a legislative hearing ascending to the bench, grabbing a pen, and directly proposing changes to the law. Even the bylaws for MDS are public – such that through a wiki, the public could actually suggest a different way for the whole system to be structured. Another remarkable feature of MDS as a governing tool is its “forking” structure, which permits new versions of the standard to be easily replicated, customized for local context and traced back to the original. This greatly reduces the effort that would otherwise be involved to develop a new policy to respond to local planning needs. In principle, it would be extremely easy for a city to create a copy of MDS, host it on its own servers, and write a new data standard to directly integrate metrics that community groups have proposed. As more cities develop offices
34 of innovation and expand their technical capacities (Nguyen & Boundy, 2017), this customization of standard will become increasingly feasible. GitHub enables this type of governance by providing a precise traceback of standards’ development. Users can see who, precisely copied standard, and then access their profiles and see what changes were made. This allows users to trace the spread of a particular set of rules, and track their evolution over time, and identify the precise individual who proposed those. The analogous mechanisms in conventional governance would be the distribution of draft regulations. While many cities and states replicate each others’ legislative language, with tweaks to fit context, the process of tracking these down and comparing them is incredibly laborious for advocates and researchers. GitHub’s branched structure allows users to trace the spread of an idea through a human network. The mds-core example implementation is also notable. In addition to serving as a roadmap for other cities to literally copy-paste the mechanisms of government into their own services, it serves as an unprecedented level of transparency. This resource offers users with the right technical capacity the chance to actually implement a real version of the law on their own device. A user with the right technical skills could directly witness how the system works, view that same interface that an official would. If a mobility service provider were willing to share their data with a particular user, that user could walk through all the steps that a government would walk through to implement a policy alternative. In so doing, a technically savvy citizen could propose policy alternatives, examine the underlying assumptions, and ultimately ask pointed questions to officials. Consider again the comparison to a conventional governing process; an agency may receive public input, process it in a black box (potentially with some intermediate reports and sharing draft regulations), and then publish the final result. For viewers with the technical knowledge to interpret these – this offers a public view into how it is actually being implemented in government. This degree of transparency creates the potential for public participation to scrape the polish off of the idea of ‘smart cities.’ If you speak the right language, there is nothing more special about the ideas encoded in GitHub for MDS than the ideas that are encoded in conventional legislation. The face that the process of developing policy, including all comments and ideas that were considered and rejected, creates profound possibilities for open government.
35 The fact that MDS is used as a regulatory tool, as part of LADOT’s Dockless Mobility Program means that law is being written, open-source, in real-time. It is possible for any individual to read all the comments, all the thinking, all the suggestions that were considered, and rejected and why. This is in some ways akin to the practice of having public hearings in person. But what distinguishes MDS is a tool for regulating smart mobility is the speed of implementation. When a pull-request is approved, agencies using MDS can immediately push this change out to operators of bikes, cars, and scooters. When any other regulation is implemented, it cues off a whole different process before implementation. New agencies need to be built, new budgets allocated, new tech developed. And if that rule needs to be changed, there is a long process for writing a new regulation. MDS permits changes to be made in real time – and thus creates a direct line from user input on their home computers to changes in physical infrastructure.
Equity Hazards in MDS
Like any technological disruption, MDS also poses hazards from the viewpoint of equity. First is through the lens of accountability. On one hand, there is greater accountability – as the alternatives, process, and ultimate decisions that go into effect are on full display. On the other hand there is far less accountability, as the people writing the standard are not elected officials, or even public employees. The working groups – almost entirely white men with data science degrees – are hardly representative of the communities they seek to serve. It is common for private industry to advise public officials on what regulations may be most effective to meet mutual goals. What is different about this is that private industry is directly writing the rules. Moreover, the person with authority to approve the ‘pull request’ is the ultimate gatekeeper regarding suggestions community suggestions. One individual involved with the initial development of MDS suggested that the informal nature of these approvals meant that personal relationships between different participants impacted which rules were approved and denied.4 Thus it is not clear that, even if community input were to be provided under the current structure, that it would ultimately make it into the code.
4 Personal conversation in April 2020
36 Though described as a ‘neutral avenue for data exchange between mobility providers and government,’ MDS has nonetheless been a point of significant controversy – particularly with respect to data privacy. A frequently-cited 2013 study of mobility data found that using just four unique points in space and time, 95% of individuals’ full trip patterns could be identified (de Montjoye et al., 2013; LA City Council File 17-1125, 2020). Accordingly, operators have chaffed at the prospect of sharing all of their operational data in real-time. Uber and its brand of e-bikes JUMP, have been engaged in a prolonged legal battle with LADOT (Bliss, n.d.-b). Whereas most providers grudgingly complied, Uber refused to share its data, on grounds that it constitutes an invasion of riders’ privacy. Uber then helped found Citizens Against Rider Surveillance (CARS), to oppose LA’s policies. Civil liberties advocates have likewise weighed in, with the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontiers Foundation Open Technology Institute each submitting amicus briefs in opposition to LA’s standards – noting the particular hazards for civil rights and immigrant communities fearing surveillance (“Comments to LADOT on Privacy & Security Concerns for Data Sharing for Dockless Mobility,” n.d.; EFF, OTI Letter -- Urgent Concerns Regarding the Lack of Privacy Protections for Sensitive Personal Data Collected Via LADOT’s Mobility Data Specification, 2019, p.). California’s State Legislative Council intervened on the side of the complainants as well (Boyer- Vine & Kotani, 2019). This debate has continue to heat up as Los Angeles has pushed towards collecting real-time data, instead of collecting snapshots every five seconds of the locations of devices in the city. The economic justice impacts of data standardization are also worth considering. Taking a broader view, MDS can be thought of as an economic system where private firms collect data without users’ knowledge and sell it to other companies. As argued by D’Ignazio and Klein (2020), the ability to use these devices at all ultimately requires users to surrender their personal data. Companies then generate profits from these data, by aggregating them and selling them to other companies that use data to inform business strategy. Profit generation is not, per se, pernicious – though it does reflect how data standards provide infrastructure not just for urban mobility, but also a global economy that has generated deep inequality (Donohue, 2015). Data scientists are among the highest paid profession in the United States, and the average salary in this field has risen in recent years faster than the rest of the economy (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2018a). The path to this profession often flows through elite institutions like the Massachusetts
37 Institute of Technology, to which admission is itself quite competitive. Once trained, professional data scientists have a tremendous amount of latitude to move in different fields, and be well paid wherever they go. This allows them to accumulate savings, wealth, and power throughout various facets of society. Add to this the mystique around data scientists – often described in job postings as "ninjas, unicorns, and wizards" (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2018b), as well as the fact that "data-driven" is often synonymized with objectivity – and it is clear that this is an enormously powerful group. Community activists hold equally detailed knowledge – albeit recorded in different formats – which can have equally far-reaching impacts on urban transportation systems. Yet, key power differences remain. One, many community activists are black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) that face a higher degree of risk and challenge in everything they do – thus, taking the sort of risks that enable a high degree of competency in data science carries a higher risk of failure than it might for a white person simply looking to change careers. Likewise, community activists often engage in a struggle over the built environment not only by interest, but often by necessity. For communities in South LA, creating a less polluting transportation system, preventing traffic fatalities and reducing police interaction are not just fun puzzles to solve, but matters of life or death. Therefore when the going gets rough, when they encounter a problem that seems at first glance intractable, community activists have no choice but to persist. Data scientists have the luxury of moving on to a different project, or claiming some delimitation of their responsibility – I'm just the data guy, or some such refrain. Thus we encounter a situation where community activists must engage with a far more complex and messy set of incentives and challenges than data scientists, with far fewer resources to do so. Moreover, in our hyper-technological era of planning, there is much less of a guarantee that community recommendations will be taken seriously or acted upon even when they do succeed in untangling the challenge and presenting a complex reality in a way that is legible to policymakers. There is also the issue of time. Particularly for low-income workers – again, the people who transportation companies state that they would like to serve – wages are received on an hourly basis. Community organizing and long-term planning is extremely time-intensive. Whereas a data scientist being paid an annual salary with benefits enjoys some flexibility in their work schedule that allows for community engagement, the community organizer's contribution
38 to that project translates directly lost wages. Considering the time that it takes to learn new data skills, work through a long-term and complex planning process, and build personal relationships that allow for continued engagement, this cost of time is a significant equity barrier. The speed with which new technologies are developed and deployed by those with the right skills makes this imbalance all the more evident.
Conclusion
This chapter observes a sea change in urban mobility governance, argues that technological shifts have brought about political shifts as well, and reviews a range of new equity questions embedded in the operations of the MDS standard. As this field continues to quickly evolve, the outcomes of these debates are not yet known. But by introducing them here, I wish to suggest that the governance of data standards has meaningful ‘equity’ implications – and that private, public, and community actors should take notice. As data plays an ever-larger role in urban planning, the information that gets included, how it is classified, and which lived experiences are reflected ultimately constrain the information that can be used in practical decision-making. As MDS scales to cities around the world, the impacts of this standard will impact the way cities regulate mobility regardless of their individual context or user needs. Thus the subjective judgments made at these early stages by data scientists and engineers could have far-reaching policy impacts, measured in both time and geography. Indeed, OMF and MDS are just one node within an expansive network of cities that are developing new software standards and protocols to facilitate the implementation of civic technology. Los Angeles occupies a particularly visible position, and wields strong influence over the public discourse and could shape the trajectory of not only the shared mobility industry, but global movements towards data standardization. Moreover, the questions that LA are wrestling with are of fundamental importance to the ‘new mobility industry,’ as the same institutions and standards that govern bicycles and scooters are very likely to govern other corners of shared mobility, such as ride-hailing, autonomous vehicles, urban aerial mobility, and as-of-yet undeveloped technology. The notion of ‘code shift’ asserts that planners interested in mobility equity must refocus their attention on which information is collected, how it is organized, and who gets to decide. While it may seem a dramatic paradigm shift, there is already a substantial movement underway
39 towards public participation and open data (Dev, 2019). An industry consortium called the Mobility Data Collaborative includes among its guiding principles a commitment to “Foster Inclusivity and Equality” and “Embrace Collaboration,” and “Complement, Not Duplicate.” Community groups are also more than equipped to engage in these technical discussions – and they should. Policy documents such as Transform California’s Framework for Equity in New Mobility (Cohen & Cabansagan, 2017), and the Greenlining Institute’s Making Equity Real in Mobility Pilots Toolkit (“Making Equity Real in Mobility Pilots Toolkit,” 2019), and the Labor/Community Strategy Center’s New Vision for Urban Transportation (Mann 1996) attest to the depth of thought that exists among community transportation advocates. It is incumbent on governments to enable this participation. At least in LA, they are already moving that direction. LADOT’s Transportation Technology Plan already invokes the language of inclusion, envisioning that “all people have access to safe and affordable transportation choices that treat everyone with dignity and support vibrant, inclusive communities” (LADOT, 2019). Among its many goals are ‘to Leverage and evolve the LADOT agency culture,’ including the refinement ‘shared language’ to create meaning from experience. The city has collaborated with the Natural Resources Defense Council on a Shared Mobility Climate and Equity Action plan, which had as its first recommendation that LADOT ‘Embed’ equity outcomes (Los Angeles Shared-Mobility Climate and Equity Action Plan, n.d.). Metro’s Office of Extraordinary Innovation has an Unsolicited Proposals process, which creates a pathway for citizens to propose new ideas. The City of LA has launched Urban Movement Labs to do the same. The shifts underway offer the chance to consider how equity has been approached in shared mobility so far – and speculate on the benefits of a code shift approach. The next chapters will explore these ideas through the lens of LA’s mobility system – first by tracing the city’s history, drawing lessons from recent mobility pilots, and finally offering recommendations for future practice.
40 Chapter 3: History of Transportation (in)equity in Los Angeles
There can be no justice without memory. – James Cone
Digital and physical mobility systems are not deployed in a vacuum. Rather, they encounter a complex urban landscape, where socioeconomic inequities manifest across different demographic groups, and geographies. The deeply entrenched inequities emerged over decades, as a result of many planning decisions and ambitious infrastructure plans. Smart mobility systems may have a role to play in addressing these. In order to do so, they must first engage with the history of the place they were deployed. This chapter seeks to lay the foundation for more equitable mobility planning in Los Angeles, by considering how we got here. One way to understand economic mobility in Los Angeles is through the lens of physical mobility. Access to a car is the greatest predictor of rising incomes (Bliss, n.d.-a). Transit dependent populations (those involuntarily without a car) are at a steep disadvantage. However, LA’s transportation inequities extend far beyond access to transportation technology and infrastructure. Inequities evident in today’s built environment have been produced not only by asymmetrical resource distribution, but by power imbalances. Low-income, communities of color have had less power to choose where and how to move, as well as to influence policies that determine their options. This pattern is evident of histories of racial housing segregation, police brutality, and Metro’s prioritization of wealthy, white residents’ travel needs at the expense of low-income communities of color. Frameworks for evaluating ‘equity’ in transportation, such as Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, have largely focused on the distribution of benefits and costs for a given project – thus overlooking the underlying power dynamics. Whether smart mobility technologies advance equity ultimately depends on how they redistribute power. This key argument will be advanced through a history of significant projects that have produced the current transportation context. Each case will reveal conflicts over what different communities and government understand ‘equity’ to mean – and highlight how power was unevenly distributed among stakeholders. I will then briefly consider the federal laws that form the basis for ‘equity’ assessments, and argue that power still remains in the hands of professional planners to set the bounds of the equity discourse.
41 From Rail to Roads
Modern Los Angeles began to take shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike east coast cities that experienced their most pronounced growth around a tightly condensed walkable urban core, Los Angeles was first build around streetcar and rail networks. Los Angeles’ biggest boom was from 1910 to 1930, when the population quadrupled from 300,000 to 1.2 million. A fragmented system of streetcars had existed since the late 19th century – yet a key turning point came in 1911, when the “Great Merger” integrated numerous local rail lines into the Pacific Electric system, owned by Southern Pacific. Pacific Electric reached its peak ridership in 1923 and later during World War II, as well as the growth in the number of rail lines in 1925. As many as 2,700 trains operated every day on 1,100 miles of rail track. The predecessor of today’s bus system was the Los Angeles Railway. The so-called “Yellow Cars” were streetcars that operated in the middle of city roads and connected downtown to suburbs west, east, north, and south of the city. The LA Railway connected to the larger Pacific Electric lines, reaching its peak ridership in 1925, with about 650 track miles (Barrett, n.d.). This inter- urban system enabled the development of the suburbs – the primary source of the current form of the city (Elkind, 2014).
Figure 1: Map of Southern Pacific Company and Pacific Electric Railway Company lines in the Los Angeles region of southern California (Image courtesy of the Newberry Library). (Map of Southern Pacific Company and Pacific Electric Railway Company Lines in the Los Angeles Region of Southern California | The Newberry, n.d.)
42 Thus from its early days as a metropolis, Los Angeles has had multiple centers, and been dependent on high speed travel over long distances. Industries arranged themselves accordingly, with multiple significant economic centers emerging in the Port of LA, Downtown, and the San Fernando Valley. By the late 1920s, rail service was hamstrung by large capital and maintenance costs, for which there was no subsidy from local, state, or federal governments (Barrett, n.d.). Buses and automobiles became an attractive option – especially as Hollywood emerged as the epicenter of the American film industry in the 1920s, and promoted the automobile as a glamorous mode of travel (Davis, 1990). The traffic congestion for which LA is now famous began in the 1930s, when automobiles grew in popularity and clogged the insufficient road network. In 1939, General Motors unveiled its famous Futurama exhibit, which seeded dreams of a futuristic metropolis, built around speed and efficiency. These developments ushered in an era of highway construction, including the opening in 1940 of the Arroyo Seco Parkway – the first ‘freeway’ in the United States, now known as the Pasadena Freeway. By the same year, the city was home to one million cars -- and almost immediately after its opening, the Parkway was clogged by motorists.
Figure 2: Traffic jam on the Arroyo Seco Parkway, in 1941 two months after its opening. Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Times (The History of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, 2011).
43 While rail ridership enjoyed a brief boost during World War II due to wartime rationing, the auto-centric city form was locked-in during the post-war economic boom. The freeway network expanded rapidly with subsidies from the 1944 and 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Acts, which provided a 50% subsidy to local governments to support the construction of highways. Soon, the city bore a striking resemblance to GM’s original Futurama Exhibit. By 1968, when the LA Metropolitan Transit Authority proposed a 0.5% sales tax to support a substantial rail expansion, the city was well-established as an auto-oriented metropolis. In the era before Congress regulated auto pollution, the city was also blanketed in a layer of smog so thick that it dimmed the mid-day sun, caused wrecks by blinding drivers, and made citizen’s eyes water (Pasley, 2020).
Figure 3: Smog in the city of Los Angeles. Left: Looking out from city hall, 1949. Above: A roadway in 1952. Below: View of General Hospital in 1948. Images courtesy of USC Libraries, Getty, Corbis, Los Angeles Examiner.
44
Thus its auto-oriented development foreshadowed environmental justice concerns that persist into the present moment. Compounding the impact of this pollution was the demolition of otherwise thriving minority neighborhoods to make way for highways. One such area was West Adams, which had continued to be an important social center for the city’s black community, despite assaults from white neighbors seeking to enforce racially restrictive covenants. Dozens of homes were razed in 1961 to clear a path for the I-10, the Santa Monica Freeway (Meares, 2018). This freeway defines a travel corridor reaching west from downtown to the coastal municipality of Santa Monica. Metro opened a new rail line, the Exposition Line, along this right of way in 2012 – which, in a striking historical parallel, has produced new displacement concerns from the low-income communities in its path (Flores, 2019). This auto-centric development pattern was reinforced throughout the 1980s, with the ‘slow growth movement’ (Davis 1990). Most of the city was zoned for single family homes, and the freeway network continued to expand. LA became a canonical example of urban sprawl, covering hundreds of square miles. Los Angeles Today
Today, Los Angeles is sprawling and complex. The City of Los Angeles covers 468 square miles and is home to 3.2 million people. The metropolitan area reaches to five counties, covering over 4,000 square miles and 18 million people. Traversing long distances at high speed is key to accessing the city. As such, access to an automobile has historically been an economic necessity – yet, this arrangement has had deleterious results from the viewpoint of both equity and environment. Car ownership is itself a large financial burden, costing the average owner an estimated $9,000 per year between the cost of insurance, maintenance, parking, and paying off auto loans (Reed & Arata, n.d.). Automobile emissions make up the largest share of the city’s carbon footprint, and auto exhaust harms public health, especially in low-income and minority communities. The city’s orientation around the automobile also produces long commute times for low-income travelers. This applies both to ‘super commuters’ that have migrated to the edge of the metropolitan area in search of affordable housing, as well as transit-dependent populations whose buses are caught in traffic (Lopez, 2017). In its current state, Los Angeles is also
45 dangerous for active transportation, with a stubbornly high rate of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities (Nelson, 2019). Greater LA, moreover, presents a unique challenge to mobility planners. It is polycentric, with important economic centers not only in Downtown, but also in the San Fernando Valley, Orange County, and in West LA. Capital intensive systems extending out radially from downtown therefore of limited use. Metro’s rail lines reach only a fragment of the people in greater Los Angeles, and take even fewer where they want to go. The primary challenge for LA’s transportation planners is to find ways to move a lot of people in many directions at once, rather than facilitating a daily inflow and outflow from downtown. The Metro Bus system offers a denser network and the opportunity for travelers to move in more directions. Yet, it is still limited as buses run infrequently in many areas of the county, and are constrained by congestion from automobiles. Provided sufficient supporting infrastructure, shared mobility systems offer potential for filling significant gaps in spatial accessibility. However, the history of the built environment in LA suggests that achieving ‘equity’ may be far more complex than the simple deployment of a scooter or bicycle.
Housing Discrimination
A first historical consideration is historical racial segregation in the housing market. Accessibility depends not only on how fast people can move, but also where they start, and where the opportunities are located. Greater Los Angeles is, by some measurements, one of the most diverse cities in the world. It also remains one of the most segregated (Soja, 2013). Racially exclusive housing policies enacted from the 1930s to 1960s, with the full knowledge and approval of the federal government shaped spatial patterns that persist today. As such, the question of how a given person can move through the city is not just a function of their ability to buy a car or live near a bus stop; it is also shaped by structural inequities that extend far beyond transportation infrastructure. Mobility justice advocates assert that, in the first place, Los Angeles (like the rest of the United States) is a colonial project on land unjustly seized from indigenous groups (Lugo, 2018). The southern and central portions of Los Angeles County, as well as the northern reaches of what is now Orange County, were originally inhabited by the Tongva (or Gabrieleño) people.
46 The Tataviam and Serrano tribes occupied the north reaches of Los Angeles County, and the Chumash occupied was it now Ventura county. Spain began colonizing what they called “Alta California” with the Cabrillo mission in 1542, and later established the “pueblo” of Los Angeles in 1781. This deep historical perspective continues to impact the current discourse. One advocate interviewed for this paper used this context to reframe the assertions that some wealthier residents make that new transportation infrastructure should be built, but ‘not-in-my-backyard.’ The advocate asked – “Whose backyard? That’s funny.” This reflects how for at least some observers, transportation equity concerns not only how people move across the city, but who owns the land in the first place. Indeed, racialized land ownership proved fundamental in shaping the city’s current form. Since at least the 1920s, when the city was booming, racial animosity and racially restrictive covenants created segregated neighborhoods across greater Los Angeles. A famous photo published in 1925 in the Hollywood Examiner shows flagrant anti-Japanese sentiment, which eventually led to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Figure 4: Japs Keep Out: This is a White Man's Neighborhood, ca. 1925. Image courtesy of the National Japanese American Historical Society
In 1933 as part of the New Deal, Congress created the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which was tasked with refinancing homes at risk of foreclosure during the depression. The HOLC set the terms of its loans based on ‘Residential Security’ maps, which assessed the
47 relative riskiness of each areas. These maps were explicitly racialized, dubbing areas with significant non-Anglo populations as ‘Hazardous,’ and unsuitable for favorable loans. The Federal Housing Administration in 1934 by the American Housing Act entrenched this structure by insuring the mortgages that banks issued to home-buyers, to protect lenders in case of default. As a condition of receiving these loans, lenders had to adhere to certain security standards. Thus the FHA placed the financial might of the federal government behind an explicitly racist way of geographically segmenting the city. Particularly notable is that this policy was part of the New Deal – a program presented as serving the interests of the socioeconomically marginalized. The racist implementation of the policies provides an early example of how even policies framed as ‘equitable’ have not, in reality, been meant to serve those who need it most.
5: A Residential Security Map produced in 1939 marks South and East Los Angeles as high risk (red and yellow ink), while deeming the west side more suitable for investment (green and blue ink). Many of the same patterns persist today. Image Courtesy of the Mapping Inequality project at the University of Richmond.
This process was sped along by the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 – known colloquially as the “G.I. Bill.” This provided enormous federal subsidies for the construction of high-quality public housing for servicemen returning from World War II. However, this public housing was designed to be a temporary holdover for white families, as they transitioned into homes of their own. As such the federal government designed a policy infrastructure to support the purchase of homes.
48 In tandem with racially restrictive language in the deeds of homes, as well as the charters of neighborhood associations throughout Los Angeles, these interwoven policies and factors created a deeply segregated city, whose structure persists to this day. A 2013 study detected similar discrimination, finding that applicants in majority black and Latino neighborhoods are more frequently denied loans, even when controlling for neighborhood socioeconomic status. Similarly, 2018 study found that 88% of tracts that received a D HOLC rating (the lowest), along with 77% of C-rated tracts, remain majority minority (Mitchell et al., 2018).5
6: The Sunkist Gardens notify non-white Angelenos that this tract is 'exclusive and restricted,’ accessible to white people only. (ca. Sept 28, 1950). (“This Tract Is Exclusive and Restricted,” circa Sept. 28, 1950, Los Angeles, n.d.)
Over time, the neighborhoods where communities of color were able to find their footing have become some of the metropolitan areas most important cultural centers. Little Tokyo (Japanese), Koreatown, Boyle Heights (Latino), Crenshaw (African American) are a few examples. These same communities have been identified as key areas for transit expansion, sparking fears among long-time residents that they will be displaced once again, either directly by the construction of new infrastructure, or indirectly through surging real estate prices that follow. Indeed, the lack of affordable housing in California and Los Angeles have evidently shaped the region’s transportation infrastructure. As the city’s population has expanded and affordable housing shortages have become more acute in the urban core, lower income
5 Communities of color were concentrated in areas that have since grappled with concentrated poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and over-policing.
49 communities have developed in far-flung suburbs and exurbs (Davis, 1990). This has given rise to a generation of super-commuters, who have accepted a daily commute of up to 3 hours in each direction, in exchange for affordable rent (Chiland, 2019a; Lopez, 2017). Together, these historic trends produced an enormously complex metropolitan area. While downtown is a certainly an economic center, the greater region is a polycentric megalopolis, famously described by Dorothy Parker as “72 suburbs in search of a city.”6 LA’s near suburbs (such as Pasadena, Eagle Rock, and Burbank, and the South Bay) are whiter and higher-income, while the dense areas right around downtown remain predominantly Latino and Black. This racial archipelago reveals a first way that power dynamics shaped communities’ ability to move about the city. The construction of highways not only razed communities of color that were thriving, but failed to serve communities that were not nearby. Communities of color had been cordoned into the path of highways by racialized policies. And once displaced, they would lack the ability to move to areas that would have been served by these highways.
Police Brutality
Another facet of power imbalance in LA’s transportation history concerns the way that people interact with transportation spaces. Some of the cities’ most famous moments of civil unrest highlight how transportation spaces are frequently the venues for broader struggles over justice and equity in the United States. The Watts Uprising was ignited in 1965 in a transportation space, when the California Highway Patrol stopped Marquette Frye, a 21-year old African-American motorist for reckless driving. A fight ensued. This ignited the racial tensions that had been embedded in the city’s built environment – and highlights that even routine transportation operations, such as a traffic stops, reverberate with a much deeper history of racial discrimination. The consequences of not considering these inequities today can be dire. By the time the riots subsided on August 17, 1965 - 34 people were killed, over 1,000 were injured, and an estimated 40 million dollars in property damage (Watts Riots, n.d.). The racial tensions that seeded the Watts Uprising have resurfaced in the decades since, most notably in the 1992 King
6 The precise genesis of this quip is the matter of some debate; some attribute it to Aldous Huxley’s 1925 Americana, where he described it as “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis” (August 22 & Am, n.d.)
50 Uprising (also referred to by some as the “Justice Riots”) in response to acquittal of four LAPD officers videotaped in the brutal assault of Rodney King, Jr.
Figure 7: A security camera captures the beating of Rodney King, Jr. by LAPD officers. Image courtesy of George Holliday, KTLA Los Angeles via Associated Press.
The refrain of protestors in the 1992 uprising – ‘No justice, no peace’ – was reclaimed by Black Lives Matter protestors in 2015, as they occupied highways to protest the acquittal of the police officer that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Interactions between police officers and black and Latino travelers on Metro’ rail system has continued even through the most recent years (“Can We End Violent Crime on Transit Without Over-Policing?,” 2020; “Strategy Center Files Civil Rights Complaint Against Metro Fare Enforcement,” 2017). Police interaction has continued to be a controversial issue more recently, with passengers of color being stopped disproportionately on Metro trains, while LA Metro spends heavily on police presence (“‘Burn the Witch!,’” 2018; “Can We End Violent Crime on Transit Without Over-Policing?,” 2020; “Teen Hauled Off Metro Train, Cuffed for Putting Her Feet Up,” 2018). This issue has surfaced in the context of other civic technologies – such as LAPD’s controversial use of PredPol, a machine-learning assisted software that LAPD used to target communities for policing. It was discontinued due to findings of racially discriminatory outcomes (LAPD Predictive Policing Tool Raises Racial Bias Concerns, n.d.). Issues of over- policing have likewise surfaced with respect to the mobility technologies of interest in this paper.
51 In August 2019, the Los Angeles Police Department launched a task force to ‘crack down’ on e- scooter riders. An LA Times investigation found that over 900 tickets were written from January 2018 to July 2018, penalizing scooter users for riding in sidewalks with a $190 fine (As Scooters Flood Los Angeles, the Number of Tickets Written to Riders Is Soaring, 2019). Given the shortage of bike lanes and street space in LA, however, this presents a significant barrier to scooter use for communities of color that have ample reason to fear police. The history of police interaction thus reveals a second branch of power imbalance: transportation spaces are not equal. Riders of color must confront challenges that white riders never have to worry about. The barriers that these riders face can only be understood by the riders themselves; as such, addressing these inequities requires empowering people from these demographics to influence the decision-making process. Similar concerns have been raised with respect to bikeshare, with a survey from New Jersey in 2019 finding that for black and brown communities – physical safety from police, as well as crime in the community – is a substantial barrier to bicycle use (“For People of Color, Barriers to Biking Go Far Beyond Infrastructure, Study Shows,” 2017; “What Bike Planners Are Missing When They Design Projects in Black and Latino Neighborhoods,” 2017).
Conflicts over Bus and Rail In response to worsening traffic congestion in the 1960s, LACTC made several efforts to raise funds for regional rail construction. However, these were foiled by resistance from residents of the outer suburbs who complained that the plans focused too heavily on downtown and did not serve the interests of the outer areas. Measure A in 1968 proposed a half-cent sales tax to support a $2.5 billion (~$17.8 billion in 2017 dollars), 89 mile rail system (Proposition A, n.d.). While this measure received support from both high-income communities in West LA and the San Gabriel Valley, as well as low-income communities nearer to Downtown, it failed to capture support from the outlying, moderate income communities (Wachs et. al 2018). Proposition A in 1974 met a similar fate – as did Propositions R in 1975 and T in 1976 (Grengs, 2002). This string of failures confirmed the assumption that in order to win support for capital expenditures for regional transportation system improvements, LACTC had to take a more expansive approach, and ensure that benefits were distributed more equally. The key impact was
52 to shift the focus away from serving communities throughout Los Angeles with the least ability to pay.
8: Rail Rapid Transit System Proposed by Proposition A. Proposition A, passed in 1980, took a broad Only about half of track the mileage proposed by this measure was ever built. regional approach. The measure proposed 180 miles of new rail, in a hub and spoke structure, to be constructed over 35 to 40 years at a price tag of $3 billion , which would be funded through a 0.5% sales tax on all retailers in the county. The plan proposed three initial rail lines. The Blue Line would extend 22 miles from downtown southeast towards Long Beach. The Red Line was an 18.6 mile spur which would extend west from downtown towards Wilshire, turn North through Fairfax, and press east into the San Fernando valley to serve the community of North Hollywood. The final leg was the Green Line, which would run east-west to connect Norwalk to Redondo Beach. This was the first in a series of ballot measures that relied on a sales tax increase. Proposition C, passed in 1990, levied an additional 0.5% sales tax to support construction and operation of the bus and rail system. The Blue line was the first to open, in 1990, followed by the Red Line in 1993, and the Green Line in 1995. This massive expansion set up a clash between the community and Metro as to the definition of equity (Grengs, 2002). The 1983 EIS for the Red Line construction approaches ‘equity’ primarily through the lens of ethnic composition, automobile access, and regional access. The EIR anticipates that in addition to the few dozen units that would be directly displaced by the construction of the line, that the construction of the heavy rail line could create upward pressure on housing prices in adjacent developments. SCRTD promises that “Relocation assistance will be provided for all displaced residents and businesses in accordance with state and federal regulations” (Southern California Rapid Transit District, 1983). The 1989 Final
53 Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement uses the word ‘equity’ only once, to refer to its policy of allocating contract dollars to minority-owned businesses. The FEIR’s social and community impact section suggests some attention to minority and transit-dependent users. While the impact report did include reference to racial minorities and transit dependent riders, it created a very low bar for equity, noting “Twelve of the sixteen stations 'in the New [locally preferred alternative] have minority populations of 33 percent or more.” In other words, adding neighborhood that are up to 2/3 white could still be counted as serving the neediest neighborhoods (Southern California Rapid Transit District, 1989). This rail expansion generated outcry from community groups that the city was diverting resources from bus services to rail (Mann, 1996). Overall, 60% of Metro’s ridership had incomes below $15,000 per year. While minority groups made up 80% of system-wide transit ridership, Metro projected that Red Line riders would be 66% minority. Around the time the Red Line opened, Metro was spending 70% of its annual budget on rail services that ferried just 6% of riders. From 1988 to 1992, while Metro was spending heavily to expand its rail service, it also reduced the bus service vehicle-revenue miles (a measure of the distance over which riders are paying fares) by 8%. In the period leading up to the Red Line’s opening, Metro’s per-passenger subsidy was over 10 times greater for urban rail passengers and over 22 times for regional metro link passengers, compared with riders of local buses (Grengs, 2002). The community strongly contested Metro’s depiction of the impacts of the Red Line; so much, in fact, that it laid the groundwork for the famous 1996 Bus Riders Union consent decree. The Bus Riders Union contended that projects like the Red Line were ‘buses that couldn’t turn,’ and subject to cost over-runs resulting from mismanagement of private contracts (Mann, 1996). The experience of the Red Line highlights the challenge that LA Metro faces in directing resources to specific under-served communities. In order to get political backing for a given measure, most projects have to over-promise and spread benefits throughout the region Proposition A included several provisions aimed at winning widespread support. First was the ‘local return’ provision, which promised to return 40% of the taxes raised county-wide to individual municipalities, who could invest in local transit systems as they saw fit. It also included a provision to subsidize bus fares for 3 years (Grengs, 2002). ‘Regionalists’ at LACTC described Proposition A as an attempt to “spread the wealth,” even though suburban areas at this time were generally more socially advantaged, with higher incomes, a whiter populace, and
54 higher rates of educational attainment. Opponents at RTD suggested that it effectively asked low-income customers to fund a service that would only benefit high-income riders. This same conflict has re-emerged in subsequent policy debates, and has been heightened by LA’s continued reliance on local sales and property taxes to fund its initiatives, as federal funding for transportation projects has dried up. Second, the Red Line highlights the challenge of winning support for capital intensive projects that are regional in scale. Transportation systems are most useful as networks. The sheer size of Los Angeles makes bringing an entire network into existence at once is a gargantuan task, that comes at enormous capital costs. Ridership has been very low since the day the Red Line opened in 1993 – and after some brief periods of growth, has continued to decline as Metro has redoubled its investment in rail (Tinoco, 2017). Third, it raised concerns about public finance, and the impact on low-income riders of using public ballot initiatives to award private contracts. The Red Line suffered from cost-over runs – and even with the new ballot initiative, still relied heavily on user fees. Ultimately only a part of what was promised was built. Many observers have noted that the sales tax is a regressive revenue raising instrument, as low-income consumers spend a higher proportion of their income on consumer goods (Mann, 1996). One of the key equity issues that Red Line raised was the impact funded almost entirely with sales tax revenue, which places the heaviest burden on low- income customers for whom consumer goods make up a larger proportion of income. Altogether, the history of Metro’s early rail build-out suggests that power is unevenly distributed in the policy-making process as well, with under-resourced communities having to both compete with wealthier communities for political sway, as well as negotiate compromises in the ultimate service provision. While this is in some ways a universal challenge in urban planning, the geographical size number of independent municipalities in the MTA’s service area makes this challenge particularly acute in Los Angeles. Accordingly, Wachs et al. (2018) argue that “ballot measures crafted for voter approval to generate these enormous sums of money have likely had more influence of the development of the region’s transportation (and particularly public transit) systems that the transportation planning processes ostensibly intended to guide that development” (p. 5).
55 9 - Plan for the Red Line from the 1983 EIR.
The Bus Riders Union Case
In order to win support for rail expansion Proposition A dedicated funds early to, for 3 years after its passage, lower the basic bus fare from $0.80 to $0.50 and provide a monthly transit passes for $20.00. After the 3-year period, that funding would go into a more general pot that Metro could use for ‘public transit purposes.’ The Metro board promised to identify funding in the future to maintain these low fares, but ultimately reneged on this promise. In 1985, the reduced fares expired and returned to $0.80 per ride. In early 1994, shortly after the Red Line was opened, Metro proposed to increase bus fares from $1.10 to $1.35, eliminate monthly passes, and reduce service, citing cost overruns from the rail development. The Labor/Community Strategy Center took issue, and sued Metro in what would become a pivotal court case: the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority vs. Labor/Community Strategy Center – known informally as the “Bus Riders Union” case for the coalition of community groups led by the L/CSC (LABOR/COMMUNITY STRATEGY CENTER v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit
56 2009 - Google Scholar, n.d.). The plaintiffs argued successfully that Metro’s disproportionate investment in heavy rail over buses was racially discriminatory. In 1996, Metro entered into a consent decree whereby it agreed to several stipulations. First was a set of mandatory service improvements, which included reducing peak load factors (the ratio of seats to passengers) from 1.45 to 1.2 by 2002, and maintain that load factor for the remainder of the consent decree. The MTA was also required to expand bus services in South and East LA, as well as initiate new bus services to increase resident’s access to health care centers. The second major requirement was that Metro had to provide more affordable fare options. While the base fare remained at $1.35, Metro was obliged to offer fare tokens for $0.90 and lower fares in off-peak hours to $0.75. Similarly, Metro was to reinstitute the monthly pass at $42.00. This was a higher price than the BRU had argued for, but still represented a meaningful victory. Finally, the consent decree established a Joint Working Group, consisting of equal representation of the plaintiffs and Metro, to ‘foster cooperation’ in the implementation of this consent decree. This was a landmark case for the current equity debates in many ways. First, it was a stunning example of a coalition of community led groups over-powering a county-wide agency that had the support of voters and the federal government (Soja, 2013). It evidenced that the communities hold detailed policy expertise, and had the capacity to challenge Metro’s official figures and put it in context (Mann, 1996). That it took prolonged direct action and a lawsuit for these community groups to gain sway belies the underlying power imbalances. Second, it amount to an official legal recognition that ‘equity’ is different from equality. The judgment identifies as a first principle that “MTA is fully committed to insuring [sic] that all transit patrons in Los Angeles County, without regard to race, color, or national origin, have equal and equitable access to a fully integrated mass transportation system that effectively meets the need of all riders.” By setting a goal for both equal and equitable transit service, the MTA subtly concedes that these are two different things. Leading up to this point, Metro’s policies had reflected a preference for equal distribution of resources around the county. By their reasoning, the Red Line was located near downtown and the proposal they suggested would extend out to the suburbs. It also passed through minority communities – though in practice, this provided very little benefit to communities. The BRU
57 charged that, so long as the system was still providing inadequate bus service, no investment in rail could be considered equitable. A pivotal part of the BRU’s argument was encapsulated by a UCLA Master in Urban and Regional Planning student’s remark that trains were, effectively, ‘buses that couldn’t turn’ (Snyder, 1996). The BRU charged that, in addition to investing disproportionately in services that benefited white suburban communities; Metro was also passing up passing up a far more effective alternative, which was the bus. Third, the consent decree acknowledged the distinction between transit-dependent riders, and specified that Metro must affirmatively advance the service for this group. The consent decree stipulated that “Future MTA long-range plans, major capital projects shall include a section devoted to the means by which the transit needs of transit-dependent residents are being and shall be met.” This is a significant tightening of the requirements relative those of NEPA, which at the time left substantial room for interpretation as to how assessments of socioeconomic impacts must be carried out (Smith, n.d.). Fourth, and most pivotally for the present discussion, it suggested that ‘equity’ is not only about outcomes, but rather about decision making power. The establish of the JWG amounted to a federal endorsement that black and brown communities are not hapless people waiting to be helped, but competent and intelligent policymakers equipped to make decisions. Metro was obliged to consult JWG on matters of bus service improvement and fare adjustment -- as well as to conduct rider surveys, and “seek the participation and concurrence of the JWG in developing the methodology and parameters for said surveys.” Thus the JWG also constituted an early suggestion that the methodology for measuring fairness ought to be co-designed. Though Metro had fulfilled its obligations under the consent decree in 2004, litigation has continued since then (LABOR/COMMUNITY STRATEGY CENTER v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2009 - Google Scholar, n.d.). This reflects a lingering distrust of Metro among community advocates, which has continued to surface in controversies around Metro’s more recent rail expansion.
Housing Affordability and Gentrification
One example of these tensions is the construction East Side Extension of the Gold Line, which began in 2004, and was completed in 2009. Previously, the Gold Line had only extended
58 north from Union Station to the whiter and wealthier communities of Glendale and Pasadena. The new addition would reach south through Little Tokyo and the Arts District, before turning east through Boyle Heights and extending into East Los Angeles. The initial phase included 6 miles of light-rail, electrically powered track, which would stop at 8 stations, at a cost of $898 million. In addition to the light rail extension, Metro also added the “East Side Access” initiative which proposed bike and pedestrian enhancements around the stations to be built out along the new branch reaching south (Eastside Access, n.d.). The complexity in creating this rail line emerged from the cultural and social conditions that had grown up along the East Side Rail’s track. For much of the 20th century Boyle Heights was an extremely multicultural community, but since the 1960s has become overwhelmingly Latinx. It been a center of activism – including for the United Farm Workers movement and others. Although the community has struggled internally with poverty and gang violence, for a long time it remained an area where residents could count on affordable housing and cultural affinity. The US Secretary of Transportation at the time hailed it as a “Model for the Nation” – though public discourse suggests far less consensus on the ground as to the success of the community. Construction of the Gold Line sparked fears of gentrification – that in building out this needed resource, that the city would displace the very communities it was attempting to serve (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2017, p. 40). Community groups such as the Bus Riders Union, East Los Angeles Community Corporation, and Right to the City Coalition asserted that Metro had vastly underestimated the number of families that would be displaced by the line construction, and argued Metro had failed to deliver on its promises of affordable housing development (Gross, 2015; Perez, 2012). The neighborhood of Boyle Heights has been a particular flashpoint for these concerns. though a rift is highlighted between the data presented by planners and the experience of communities (Sandoval, 2018). Boyle Heights had been one of the areas most harmed by Los Angeles’ prior transportation development. The 5, 10, 60, and 101 freeways all intersect at this location, exposing residents to what CalEnviroScreen 3.0 estimates to be, literally, the worst pollution in the state. The census block containing Mariachi Plaza registers an overall Pollution Burden score in the 100th percentile. Mobility-related impacts appear to drive this composite score, with PM2.5 concentrations score in the 93rd percentile, diesel pollution in the 98th, and
59 traffic in the 99th – though hazardous waste deposits, toxic releases, and groundwater threats score above the 87th percentile as well (August, 2016). These statistics suggest that from an environmental contamination perspective, Boyle Heights is one of the places where improved transportation could have a significant positive impact. Moreover, a significant practical existed for improved mobility options. Even before the Gold Line East Side Extension opened in 2009, the census tracts serving Boyle Heights had high rates of transit ridership, with up to 31% of workers in the service area using the bus on their way to work, per the American Community Survey. Around 30% of the residents lacked access to a car, compared with just 9.47% county-wide. Despite this density of transit users, the FEIR noted that even though the existing bus routes had very high crowding during peak hours, “Adequate transit services are not being provided to some locations of high transit demand. Most person trips to key activity centers within the study area require at least one transfer” (Los Angeles Eastside Corridor Final SEIS/SEIR, 2001). Thus, the geospatial, environmental, and demographic data suggested that extending the Gold Line was a worthwhile investment for a community that had been neglected in the past and had a pressing need. Nonetheless – community conflict has continued, while studies of the Gold Line’s impact on gentrification, have only partially corroborated community concerns. A study of in- and out- migration of renters to the areas within 0.5 miles of the rail from 1992 to 2013 confirm that openings of new stations along the Gold Line produced a statistically significant increase in out- migration, and that over the entire study period, the neighborhoods around the Gold Line tended to have a higher rate of out-migration than the county as a whole (Marlon G. Boarnet et al., 2017). Counter to the popular discourse, however, the researchers found a higher increase in out- migration rate among the highest income households (17%) and middle income households (12- 13%), than among the lowest income households (8%) following the opening of Gold Line stations, thus narrowing the gap in out-migration among low-income and high-income households (p. 44). However, data from the entire study period reveal unusually high rates of out-migration among the lowest income households. These stations were Little Tokyo/Arts District (30%), Pico/Aliso (24%). These data trends reinforce concerns expressed by Latino community in Boyle Heights and Japanese business owners in Little Tokyo that investment would not benefit them equally (Zuk et al., 2017).
60 The key takeaway from Metro’s experience with the Gold Line extension is that even when all the data suggests that a particular intervention is needed and can advance equity, local communities may not perceive it that way. Moreover, data can be aggregated and repackaged to tell a variety of different stories.
Mobility and Culture
I will turn finally to one of LA’s highest visibility pedestrian and bike projects. This is the Los Angeles RiverWay. This forms part of a broader planning effort to ‘revitalize’ the Los Angeles River, which was paved over in the 1938 as part of a water management scheme. The river, which for the majority of its length is really a concrete flood channel, runs south from the San Gabriel Valley to Long Beach, passing east of downtown and coursing through South LA. It has been broadly considered an eyesore, which some observers describe as “a serpentine gray scar zigzagging around freeways and city streets,” which “seems to lack a purpose or identity” (Efforts to Restore the Los Angeles River Collide With a Gentrifying City, 2018). In the late 1990s began a push to “revitalize” the river by removing sections of concrete, and rehabilitating it as a recreational and natural space that would also include a paved bike path.
Figure 10: Map of Los Angeles River Path (Image courtesy of LA Metro)
61 Controversy has centered around the 7.4 mile segment extending from Glendale Narrows through Elysian Valley, located just north of downtown. Metro’s plans to add 12 more miles through its LA River Path Project, which will extend the path towards Downtown and Boyle Heights, have heightened these tensions. Though far less capital intensive than the bus and rail projects highlighted here, this bicycle path puts on full display the tensions between the environmental and equity tenets of ‘sustainability.’ The area has long suffered from a lack of open space and natural areas. However, the opening of this bike path and the park along it have fueled community concerns of ‘green gentrification’ and subsequent displacement (Christensen, n.d.). Developers of a proposed 419 unit apartment building marketed the construction as a response to displacement concerns – but ultimately drew the ire of environmental groups who charged that new residents would bring more emissions, while affordable housing advocates charged that the 35 affordable units would be too meager to meaningfully impact California’s housing crisis (Can Los Angeles Blend New Housing with River Restoration? - Los Angeles Times, n.d.). While the path had long been used by people in the neighborhood as a walking, biking, and gathering place, the ‘revitalization’ sparked concern that existing residents of the area would be forced out. This applies to both nearby housing, as well as the transportation space itself. One activist underscored the class undertones to this debate; “a lot of seniors who had previously used that path as a walking path on a regular basis. And now they were concerned about being run down by dudes in lycra and $10,000 road bikes.” Indeed, deep inequities exist within Los Angeles’ cycling community in particular. The LA County Bicycle Coalition, for example, operates a program for Invisible Bike Riders – low income travelers who use bicycles as way to commute to work, and often receive less attention than lycra-clad weekend warriors. Through Operation Firefly, LACBC distributes lights for riders traveling at night to fasten to the front of their handlebars: a small intervention that can make a world of difference. 75% of the riders they served used bikes as a principle form of transportation, 33% rode without a light, 86% were misinformed regarding the legal requirements for riding at night. Serving these riders requires special attention on the part of transportation planners. A group of Los Angeles-based scholars has similarly detailed the interaction of cultural experience and mobility infrastructure. Characterizing recreational cycling as a predominantly
62 white and male sport, Hoffman (2016) charges that ‘Bike Lanes are White Lanes.’ Likewise, Lugo (2018) describes her experience of economic and racial schisms within pro-cycling movements, producing conflicts between cyclists who ride by choice and those who ride by need. Barajas (Barajas, 2016, 2018, 2019) further details the unique experiences of immigrant communities with regards to cycling, suggesting that cultural narratives shape riders’ sense of belonging. I do not mean to imply that communities of color are innately opposed to bicycle lanes. Indeed, Barajas found in a separate that Latino immigrants hold a positive view of cycling, for reasons due to sustainability and self-sufficiency (Barajas, 2016). Lugo (2018) affirms this – as do the activism of groups such as the East Side Riders Bike Club, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, and People for Mobility Justice. Rather, what this body of literature from authors of color suggests is that serving communities that have been historically marginalized requires transportation planners expand their conventional practices, to consider infrastructure not just through the lens of emissions reductions or level of service – but also through lived experience and local history.
Equity Evaluation Frameworks
The case studies bring into relief the complexity of the history that informs today’s discourse on transportation equity, and raises the question of how ‘equity’ had been assessed along the way. At least since 1964, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (hereafter, “Title VI) is the legal foundation of transportation equity policies in the United States. Section 601 specifies that any recipient of federal funds “may not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, ethnicity, and other features” (42 USC § 2000d, Pub. L. 88–352, title VI, § 601, July 2, 1964, 78 Stat. 252.). Section 602 authorizes federal agencies to implement regulations to enforce these. Federal legislation, such as the 1991 Interstate Transportation Surface Equity Act (ISTEA), as well as the 1998 Transportation Equity for the 21st Century (TEA-21) further ordered federal transportation projects to comply with these.7
7 Though each of these overhauls invoked ‘equity’ in the title of the legislation, they primarily considered this to be the equitable distribution of federal funds among states. To the extent they engaged with equity at a local level, it was through reference to Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
63 However, successive U.S. Supreme Court decisions have limited citizens’ ability to sue to enforce the rights granted under Title VI. A pivotal, two-part ruling came in Guardians Assn. v. Civil Service Comm'n of New York City, 463 U. S. 582 (1983). First, the Court held that Title VI § 601 prohibited only intentional discrimination. Given the near impossibility of proving that an agency meant to discriminate against a particular group, this posed a formidable barrier to plaintiffs asserting discrimination. Second, Guardians declared that when agencies were found to have intentionally discriminated, harms could be remedied through agency regulations (Alexander v. Choate, 46 U.S. 287, 293). Summarizing the impact of Guardians, the court wrote that “Title VI had delegated to the agencies in the first instance the complex determination of what sorts of disparate impacts upon minorities constituted sufficiently significant social problems, and were readily enough remediable, to warrant altering the practices of the federal grantees that had produced those impacts (ibid.). In other words, agencies receiving federal funds were accountable only to the judgment of the federal government as to the magnitude of the harm inflicted on communities, and what would be an appropriate remedy. The Court further weakened citizens’ leverage in Alexander v. Sandoval (532 U.S. 275, 2001), which found that even when while citizens could sue to enforce Sec. 601, which enshrined a protecting against discrimination, “there is no private right of action to enforce disparate-impact regulations promulgated under Title VI” (emphasis added). This narrow reading of the statute said, in effect, that citizens had a right to be protected against discrimination – but could not personally sue to enforce this right. Rather, it falls to the executive branch to do this. As such, White House Executive Order 12898 (1994) has remained instrumental in guiding equity analysis. Section 1-103 orders that:
Each Federal agency shall develop an agency-wide environmental justice strategy […] that identifies and addresses disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations.
This order extends the obligations of federal agencies under Title Vi, compelling them by law to identify address disparate impacts across minority and low-income populations, regardless of intention. The most recent US Department of Transportation regulations, pursuant to this order, were issued in 2012 (US DOT Order 5610.2 (a)). FTA Circular 4703.1 offers guidance for
64 implementing these regulations, organized along three key principles: avoiding disproportionate harm, ensuring fair distribution benefits, and having a robust participation process to decide how the first two principles should be carried out. The circular stresses the importance of this participation, and anticipates disagreement between or within communities as to whether a particular project constitutes a harm or a benefit. Suggested harms to consider include bodily harm, denial of benefits to a population, contamination of soil, air or water; displacement of persons, disruptions of community cohesion, and destruction of man-made or natural resources. Thus the circular thorough in anticipating the complexity of ‘equity’ discussions. However, there remains room to question the efficacy of this guidance for producing equitable outcomes on the ground. The agency states that it ‘requires [grantees], as a recipient of FTA funds, to facilitate our compliance with Executive Order 12898 and the DOT Order 5610.2 (a).” This vague assertion leaves much room for interpretation. The circular offers a sweeping set of possible evaluation approaches, while only recommending that local administrators identify the most appropriate approach in their areas. What actions the FTA is requiring local agencies to take, and the extent of FTA’s authority to intervene in local planning decisions, is unclear. Likewise, transportation scholars have questioned the efficacy of equity assessments following Title VI to actually advance the interests of disadvantaged communities (Karner, 2018). In a review of ‘equity analyses’ carried out as part of Metropolitan Planning Organizations’ Regional Transportation Plans (RTPs), Karner and Niemeier (2013) find that in practice, most Title VI assessments gauge disparate impact on the basis of areal density of minority populations – and not environmental exposure. The same authors report that prevailing methods of modeling transportation demand under-count racial minorities. Subtle modifications to input data can lead to opposite conclusions about whether a project is in Title VI compliance (Karner & Golub, n.d.). Likewise, that project-specific environmental impact assessments required by the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act require can fail to account for cumulative impacts over time (Krieg & Faber, 2004). Altogether, federal legislation aimed at equitable impact of infrastructure projects have collided with a messy reality on the ground. The relevant statutes and court cases leave broad room for interpretation of the impacts of a given project. Yet, given the historical drivers of transportation (in)equity, these project-specific assessments are unlikely to produce a more fair society overall. Efforts to enhance equity in the mobility realm should not focus only in the way
65 that transportation investments are made, but rather on the impact relative to the historical benefits and burdens directed to each groups. Conclusions
Spoken word poet Marisela Norte describes the dissonance in riding LA Mtro’s #18 bus as a place of “containment and connection, of incarceration and affiliation, of solitude and solidarity" (Reft, 2015). Indeed, the history of LA’s transportation infrastructure is one of complexity, which has left different segments of the population with very different senses of where they can move. Cognitive maps in 1971 produced by the communities of Westwood, Avalon, and Boyle Heights bring this pattern into stark relief (Figure 2.3). Wealthier, whiter neighborhoods perceived more of the city to be theirs, while lower income communities understand their horizons to be much more limited (Hayden, 1997, p. 28). This dynamic persists today: as one runner in Los Angeles testified in May 2020, “On the surface, Los Angeles is a mostly liberal town, but the white privilege runs deep” (Streeter, 2020). If today’s transportation planners wish for the three revolutions, towards autonomous, shared, and electric vehicles, to be ‘equitable,’ they must take stock of this history. The sources of spatial inequality in Los Angeles extend far beyond decisions about how, when and where to introduce transportation technology. They include decisions about the allocation of land use, housing, policing, and labor markets. The result has been that different segments of the population perceive the accessibility of transportation and mobility in their own way. Smart mobility technologies are often deployed in an ahistorical fashion. Funded with capital from far outside the local community (e.g. from the federal government, Silicon Valley, or foreign investors), these technologies begin with no inherent link to the communities they are meant to serve. For them to be dubbed “equitable,” without reference to the deep history I have described, does a great disservice to the many community residents, planners, and experts who have detailed the ways that LA’s transportation structures have failed the same communities, over and over.
66 Figure 2.3: Composite Cognitive maps of Los Angeles, by residents of Westwood (left) and Boyle Heights (right). – from Dolores Hayden, Power of Place (1992), p. 27
67 Chapter 4: Shared Mobility as Civic Technology -- A Case Study of LA’s Shared Mobility Pilots
It’s never just about the scooter. - Wendell Joseph
Equity has become a buzzword for transportation planners at large, and particularly in the shared mobility industry. Indeed, shared mobility systems hold the potential to offer greatly improved service to marginalize groups – yet as the previous two chapters have shown, governance systems are changing quickly, and the history of ‘equity’ in transportation planning in Los Angeles is complex. Thus, best practices for equity planning in new mobility are still emerging. Los Angeles’s recent shared mobility pilots offer the opportunity to observe what planning for equity in new mobility pilots has looked like in practice – particularly with respect to low income riders. BlueLA, the Dockless Mobility Pilot, and Metro Bike Share each implemented similar policies to encourage use of their devices by low-income riders. However, they had drastically different outcomes. Why is this? I first outline the value proposition for low-income riders, to show why shared mobility ought to be appealing in theory. I then describe the strategies that each pilot used to appeal to low income riders. In light of their varied success in reaching low income riders, I investigate the structures of governance and participation in each program. Together, these discussions show that, even though shared mobility systems offer benefits to low-income communities, placing vehicles in these communities is not enough for them to be used. The way mobility planners engage communities matters. BlueLA, Metro Bike Share, and the Dockless Mobility pilots each implemented similar policy strategies for reaching low-income riders. These include offering reduced prices, spatially distributing shared modes in communities deemed disadvantaged, and lowering technological barriers by providing payment systems that do not require users to have credit cards, bank accounts, or smart phones. Though each pilot took a similar approach, early data show that they achieved vastly different outcomes in terms of attracting low-income riders. From April to December 2018, nearly 60% of BlueLA trips were taken by Community Pass holders (Ferguson & Holland, 2019). By contrast, just 6% of dockless scooter rides were unlocked via the ‘equitable access’ mechanisms required by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LA
68 City Council File 17-1125, 2020). 11,789 independent users took advantage of these options, though for data privacy reasons, LADOT does not collect information on the unique patterns of individuals, so it is not possible to say precisely how many trips were taken by low income riders. The rider survey, however, suggests that the typical user took about one scooter trip per week over the study period. If low-income users adhered to this same pattern, it would imply that approximately 481,000 trips were made by low-income riders – or 6% of the overall trips taken. This rough estimate would be consistent with LADOT’s finding that only 6% of riders were aware of the availability of low-income programs. Data from January – October 2019 suggest more mixed results with Metro Bike Share. 11% of monthly passholders and 50% annual passholders purchased their passes through Reduced Fare Pricing (Reynolds, 2019) – though a survey of actual riders found that less than 15% of Metro Bike Share users had incomes below the Area Median Income (Crowther et al., 2019). These results reinforce other research suggesting that riders of bikeshare systems skew high- income (Couch & Smalley, 2019; Krull, 2018; Nickkar et al., 2019).8 Indeed, a growing body of literature detects similar trends in dockless scooter systems (Barnes, 2019). BlueLA – which fared the best, by far, in reaching low-income riders – modeled a ‘civic inclusion’ approach to participation (McDowell & Chinchilla 2016). BlueLA likewise designed a business model oriented entirely towards low-income customers, and implemented a structure where communities had meaningful decision making power. Metro Bike Share had more limited success in reaching low-income riders. While Metro incorporated some elements of ‘civic inclusion,’ decision making power remained firmly in the hands of the agency. Despite the awareness and will of Metro planners to implement an ‘equitable’ system, the agency’s size and bureaucracy impeded more effective power-sharing. LADOT’s Dockless Mobility Pilot (i.e., bikes and scooters) had the least success in reaching low-income riders. Early evidence suggests that scooters may have provided at least some benefit to those without vehicle access. LADOT’s rider survey found that 25% of scooter riders have no access to a personal vehicle – nearly triple the percentage of county residents lacking vehicle access (9%). Upon close inspection, though, though roughly proportional groups tracts where the scooters were deployed (which ranges between 20-30%), and lower than the
8 These studies also detect a bias towards male-identifying, young, and educated riders – but for the sake of clarity, I will focus here on low-income riders.
69 figures for the census tracts near downtown (30-40%). This neighborhood perspective reveals that – while scooters offer some potential overall, they are underutilized by people lacking vehicle access in the neighborhoods designated as ‘disadvantaged’. After an initial roll-out that created an adversarial relationship between private providers and the city, the operations of scooters and bike systems remained very opaque. The community engagement that did happen tended to take the form of marketing, rather than co-design of systems. While some providers took more assertive steps to expand low-income access and share power, scooters and bikes remained a service primarily used by a higher-income, white, and male clientele.
Potential Benefits to Low-Income Riders from Shared Mobility
First, it is important to consider the value proposition to low-income riders of shared mobility, relative to conventional modes. One way to organize these potential benefits is through Jarrett Walker’s 7 Demands of Human Transit (Walker, 2012). While Shaheen et. al (2017), offers an equity framework targeted directly at shared mobility systems, their S.T.E.P.S. considers equity only within the bounds of shared mobility systems. Walker considers the elements that make any system of movement useful to people – and is therefore more effective for assessing shared mobility systems’ ability to improve on past systems. In addition, I will expand on Walker’s (2012) framework to consider the equity implications of shared mobility for planning processes, as well as provision of service.
1. It takes me where I want to go.
The first promise of shared mobility systems for low-income travelers it to take them where they want to go. Conventional public transit systems require compromise; a bus line is not designed to take any one traveler door to door, but rather to group together trips that are similar enough to be carried along the same route for most of the trip. This produces operational efficiency – but can also lead to the network design prioritizing the needs of travelers whom the agency considers the most important, or who have the most political sway. To the extent this compromise leads transit planners to try to meet the need of the greatest number of riders, it can leave out the riders at the very margins who may be small in numbers but have the most acute
70 needs. For example, an LA Metro report found that women travelers use the system in fundamentally different ways, tending to chain more trips together and take more cross-town trips (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2019c). However, like many cities, LA has a radial network of the rail and high frequency bus lines that was designed to shuttle travelers from the suburbs directly to downtown. This has the effect of prioritizing workers in male, white, and high-income occupations, while underserving travelers who have conventionally taken on more household and childcare duties that produce more trips between external neighborhoods. Shared mobility services offer riders greater flexibility in route choice, while preserving some of the efficiency gains of a conventional public transit system. Though shared mobility systems are still constrained by the network of docks or service areas, they allow individual travelers to choose different routes, while preserving the economies of scale produced by a centrally operated system.
2. It takes me when I want to go
Walker’s (2012) second principle, “it takes me when I want to go,” follows closely from the first. Fewer bus or train routes available to serve low-density areas or marginalized groups also means that public transit is available less often. This need for greater temporal service is particularly acute for low-income travelers who work night shifts, which demands that they travel off-peak. Public transit agencies often struggle to provide night service, because it is more expensive, per rider, to serve fewer riders. One approach to serving these groups more cost efficiently is to offer a few routes, which are scheduled such that many bus lines arrive at a central hub in the same window, and allow riders to transfer. While this produces greater cost savings for the agency and a wider service area for night time riders, it also lengthens the amount of time these riders must spend in transit, and not in bed. Shared mobility services offer the potential to fill this gap by lowering the operational cost of providing 24-hour services. Labor is one of the largest costs for public transit agencies, which is also irreducible. Systems that are primarily user-operated, such as bike share and scooter, demand fewer workers. Each worker can also be deployed more efficiently, in response to acute needs such as a broken kiosk, whereas it always takes one bus driver to drive each bus. The potential undermining of public transit workers is a significant equity tradeoff that will be
71 discussed in greater detail below – but at least from the rider perspective, shared mobility services may meet an unmet need.
3. It’s a good use of my time.
Walker’s third principle is that transit should be a good use of travelers’ time. Once people have made the decision to use transit, it should get them where they want to go quickly. Buses, which served the majority of LA’s low-income riders, are often hampered by congestion created by single-occupancy vehicles. Delays can be particularly costly for hourly workers, for whom lost time translates directly to lost wages. Moreover, these groups lack flexibility in their work schedule, which makes the penalty for being late more severe than it would be for a white collar worker. LA Metro, like many transit agencies, has struggled to provide frequent late-night service. Shared mobility services offer opportunities to ameliorate some of these inequities, in that all three systems provide service 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2019b). The nuance between dockless and docked modes has to be considered with respect to reliability. The drawback of docked systems, from a reliability perspective, is that each dock has a limited capacity; riders who encounter a full station when they need to dock their devices must find another station nearby. Similarly, riders seeking to ride ,may encounter only empty stations. The fact that these stations are fixed in space, however, creates a simpler calculation for a rider concerned with reliability. They must carefully consider the time of day when deciding whether to take one mode or another. Dockless modes help riders overcome the issue of system capacity by allowing riders to deposit their bike or scooter wherever they like. The fact that they are free-floating, though, means that riders cannot rely on scooters or bikes being available in the place and time they need them. Through a process known as ‘rebalancing,’ operators of shared mobility systems redistribute vehicles to assure sufficient coverage. The Dockless Mobility Providers in Los Angeles tend to closely guard their algorithms for identifying rebalancing points. The permit granted by the agency to one provider stated that their “team utilizes proprietary demand prediction models in conjunction with specialized, in-depth city analysis techniques that have been refined and
72 optimized over the course of 100+ market launches.”9 However, research from other cities has suggested that dockless bikes tend to be more readily available in high-income neighborhoods, even when rebalanced in low-income neighborhoods at the beginning of the day. This suggests that current rebalancing practices may not be sufficient to ensure availability of dockless modes throughout the day. And if – as the providers report– the spatial allocation of devices is determined using the same algorithm refined in other cities, this availability bias is likely to persist in Los Angeles as well. Shared fleets can be particularly valuable for helping travelers complete trips of short distances. 35% of total car trips made in the United States were under 2 miles (National Household Travel Survey, 2017). However, even moderate distances can be difficult, unpleasant, or dangerous to cover on a bike or foot. Built environment factors driving this including traffic, air pollution, and increasingly in Los Angeles, extreme heat (Chiland, 2019b). These issues are especially prevalent in LA’s low-income and minority neighborhoods, which are located adjacent to high-traffic arterials that produce toxic air pollution as well as traffic threats, and which frequently lack in tree cover. 4. It’s a good use of my money
Walker’s fourth principle is that transit systems should be ‘a good use of my money.’ By purchasing a membership to a bike, car, or scooter-sharing system, users can move around the city on their own schedule while avoiding the costs of insurance, parking, and maintenance, and interest payments on auto loans. These costs can add up to more than $8,000 per year (Reed & Arata, n.d.). This is a particularly stark driver of inequality, where access to a car remains the single strongest prediction of upward economic mobility (King et al., 2019). Thus for a low- income household, the opportunity to pay for a device only when it is needed can be a life line. The shared business model also enables mobility service providers to offer even lower fares by cross-subsidizing from the revenue generated by wealthier users. By contrast, a low-income car buyer would likely have to pay a similar price – and likely even higher, given the less favorable loan terms and interest that accumulates over a longer payback period. Research suggests that for some low-income car buyers, the time it takes to pay back loans can exceed the useful life of a
9 Dockless Mobility Permit Application obtained from LADOT.
73 car. In turn, access to greater mobility can pay economic dividends to travelers, who can access more employment opportunities as well as more essential service.
5. It respects me.
Conventional transit systems raised concerns over whether they are clean and aesthetically pleasing. Further concerns include whether users have positive interactions with the staff, and whether the system includes accommodations for people with disabilities, people who do not speak the local language, and whether the information presented to users, as well as its formatting, are altogether legible and useful. A particular flashpoint in Los Angeles has been police interactions. Over-policing on metro systems, including the use of physical force to enforce minor infractions like fare evasion or placing one’s feet on the seat, have sparked community uproar in cities across the US, Los Angeles included. Shared mobility systems may offer some benefits in these respects. One of the key elements is dignity. Researchers have documented how car use instill a sense of self-sufficiency in riders, which is a psychological benefit above and beyond the value they get from the opportunities they access (Moody & Zhao, 2019). Thus shared vehicles, such as those offered through BlueLA, may be appealing to low-income riders, above and beyond their value as mobility tools. Shared bikes have also been presented through the lens of personal autonomy and freedom. Underscoring this point, the promotional video that Lyft shared as part of its LyftUp initiative featured professional basketball star Lebron James – who grew up poor in Akron, Ohio – narrating a sequence of young adults exploring their city by bike, riding up and down embankments and performing tricks in a way that is decidedly expressive. Over a background of hip hop beats interspersed with gospel music, he says:
You might think it’s just a bike – but you’d be surprised how far it can take you. A bike is freedom. A bike is opportunity. Whether you are a kid from Akron or New York, a bike can take you to wherever you want to be.
Environmental benefits can also be included under the banner of respecting riders and neighborhoods. Providing alternatives to automotive travel can substantially lessen the air pollution that communities face. It can also be thought of as advancing intergenerational equity, inasmuch as it reduces greenhouse gas emissions and helps mitigate climate change. In addition
74 to reducing these direct benefits, shared mobility could theoretically advance environmental goals indirectly by catalyzing changes in the built environment that reflect more sustainable design features, which encourage future walking and cycling trips.
6. I can trust it.
With respect to public transit, this principle implies that riders should be able to count on buses and trains arriving when they say they will. Unreliable service can be especially harmful to low-income workers, who may be fired for showing up late to a shift. Low-income riders who avoid this risk by leaving early to leave cushion in their travel schedule end up sacrificing more time to ride than a person who can afford an unexpected 10 or 20 minute delay. Trust can also be used to understand the safety concerns that riders face when traveling. Cyclists and pedestrians alike must navigate inadequate infrastructure for crossing streets, or otherwise sharing road space with motorist. Fear of gang violence, sexual assault, or other crimes also pose a barriers to covering otherwise walkable distances. Shared mobility systems may be effective in ameliorating some, but not all, of these trust barriers. Because shared mobility systems are connected to the internet, users with access to a smartphone can verify in real-time the availability of bikes or scooters. Some public transit systems are moving this direction, including in Los Angeles, by providing real-time arrival information for public transit services (Mobile App & Resources, n.d.). They can also check out a bike or scooter as soon as they arrive at the location where it is parked; they need not stand and wait for one to arrive. However, bikes and scooters produce reliability of their own, resulting from the more sophisticated technology being exposed to the elements. Nevertheless, shared mobility systems hold potential to improve reliability by introducing redundancy. A low-income car owner may be out of luck if their car breaks down, while a user who finds a malfunctioning scooter may be able to find another one nearby. Likewise, riding a shared bike on a street with no bike lane is equally perilous to riding a personally owned bicycle. Yet, shared bicycles may still offer a safety benefit to cyclists by providing higher-quality devices, equipped with lights and bells, that make it safer to ride at night. If shared systems can encourage enough people to start riding bikes, it may also produce a
75 safety in numbers effect, whereby all cyclists and scooter users are safer overall (Elvik & Bjørnskau, 2017). Trust can also be thought of through the lens of the planning process, and the degree to which users can be confident that their voices are being heard. Shared and conventional mobility systems each carry advantages of their own in this regard. Conventional transit systems have historically been built through public planning processes – which, in principle, create avenues for transparency and accountability. However, many planning scholars have documented how conventional public participation processes can end up privileging the input of already- advantaged groups (E. Innes & Booher, 2000). Shared systems may better to serve the interests of marginalized groups by providing more touchpoints for users to provide feedback (e.g. a rating system through an app). They may also provide more user-friendly interfaces, where users of shared mobility systems can receive customer support directly (whereas getting immediate assistance may be much more difficult from a public transit planning agency). The extensive data generated by shared mobility systems also offers avenues for users with the right technical skills to conduct their own analyses of how effectively a given system is serving their neighborhoods. LA’s Metro Bike Share and Boston’s Blue Bikes system are examples of systems with open data that could facilitate this type of participation.
7. It gives me freedom to change my plans.
Seventh and finally, Walker offers that human transit should provide riders the flexibility to change their plans. A fixed route system that is sufficiently dense, and which operates around the clock (such as the New York MTA), may offer users this degree of flexibility. In a place like LA, however, relying on public transit can restrict users’ possibilities to the areas where they can count on there being a bus or train available to get them back to their origin, once their trip is finished. This is unlikely. Car owners face a similar constraint; in addition to the challenge of finding parking once you arrive at a destination, tending to a parking meter is a chore that can derail plans, and driving home late at night can be both tedious and dangerous (especially when alcohol is involved). MaaS offers users a menu of appealing alternatives. One-way sharing schemes means that users’ responsibility for a device stops when they are done using it, allowing them without having to account for their parked car or locked bike. MaaS likewise offers the
76 ability to change routes or destinations more flexibly than a fixed bus line would. Finally, the ability to call a ride at any point offers at taxi-like service. Walker’s (2012) notion of flexibility to change plans can be expanded to consider users’ control over long-term, urban plans. Constructing capital intensive conventional transit systems force planners to forge compromises, which may not be satisfactory to all parties. The extensive construction, permitting, and financing process makes it difficult and costly for planners to change course, once they have started building10; and the final product will remain in place for decades. Moreover, the expense and challenge of building such a system places pressure on professional planners to do air-tight analysis, rely on federal funding and confirm to federal guidelines – which has also fomented a resistance to including community input. Shared mobility offers planners the opportunity to try out different approaches, with low risk and low cost, until an alternative is found that suits the community’s needs. Because shared mobility systems are not anchored in space by extensive infrastructure. and can be partially redistributed and designed at low cost, interventions can be tailored to specific neighborhoods – thus helping planners navigate the tradeoff between the needs of a neighborhood and a whole region. Likewise, the emerging data collaborations between cities and mobility providers allows for policies to be more quickly updated, implemented, evaluated, and revised, thus allowing for more precise and richer feedback, as well as interventions tailored for specific neighborhoods or user groups that have been previously under-represented. Lastly, the decentralized nature of infrastructure to support new mobility systems allows for shared systems to be better linked with other needs, such as bike sharing systems being integrated with affordable housing developments. A final which to consider the flexibility that shared mobility enables is through the built environment. Inasmuch as shared mobility induces travelers to sell or avoid buying cars, it can also reduce demand for parking in urban cores. This in turn, opens up space for cities to accomplish a whole range of other goals that form part of an equity strategy, such as the construction of affordable housing, development of park space, or mitigating flood risk through reductions in permeable pavement.
10 Robert Moses famously used this maneuver to win construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway – and it has been recycled by proponents of the California High Speed rail to defend it against political criticism.
77 Case Study: BlueLA, Dockless Mobility Pilot, and Metro Bike Share.
The benefits outlined here suggest that shared mobility systems hold the potential bring great value to marginalized communities. Indeed, survey data on bikes and scooters show that low- income users are interested in these systems and find them an appealing alternative (Clewlow et al., 2018; Populus, 2018). Discrepancies in low-income usage across LA’s three shared mobility pilots however, suggest “price alone is not enough,” to attract low-income riders (Can Monthly Passes Improve Bikeshare Equity?, 2015). Rather, the way that communities are engaged matters. The three programs of interest here were selected because they represent a cross-section of different public-private relationships and governance structures.
Metro Bike Share
Metro Bike Share is a public program that was initiated by the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The current system consists of 2,000 bicycles deployed in three areas around the city – Downtown, Venice Beach, and North Hollywood.11 The fleet consists of a mix of standard bicycles, electric-pedal assist bicycles which must be docked at Metro Bike Share stations, and ‘smart’ bicycles which can be locked to any bike rack inside a service area for a small fee. Metro owns and manages the bicycles, stations, and kiosks. As a county agency, Metro contributes up to 50% of the capital cost for the equipment and 35% of the operations costs. Municipalities where stations are located (e.g. the city of Los Angeles) contribute the remaining costs (Fehr & Peers & Bicycle Transit Systems, 2018). The operation and maintenance of bikes, is contracted out to a private vendor that provides these services to the entire county. Thus Metro retains a tight grasp on the bike share system, and has to manage only one relationship with a private vendor. However, Metro must also negotiate with individual cities where systems are located. Thus the most challenging negotiations happen not between Metro and a private agency, but between Metro and the municipalities where it seeks to operate. For example, the wealthy municipality of Pasadena elected to discontinue the operation of Metro Bike Share within its city, after low ridership and a monthly cost to the municipality of over $100,000 (Pasadena’s
11 Various areas within LA county have hosted Metro Bike Share systems in the past, such as Pasadena and the Port of Los Angeles – but local lawmakers ultimately decided not to continue these pilots after low ridership.
78 Quick Exit from Bike-Share Program Is a Blow for Metro - Los Angeles Times, n.d.).
BlueLA
BlueLA is a public-private electric vehicle sharing partnership. currently operates a fleet of 100 electric cars, at 35 stations with 200 Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE), also referred to as “charge points.” The Battery-Electric-Vehicles (BEVs) that BlueLA operates are 4-door fully electric sedans, of a unique model specifically for car-sharing. It gets about 90-100 miles to the charge. Users are not required to pay insurance. The car is a unique model designed specifically for car-sharing, which gets about 90-100 miles per charge. BlueLA is structured as a public-private partnership. With funding from the California Air Resources Board (CARB), LADOT issued a grant solicitation in 2016 to subsidize private company – Bolloré Group (dba BlueLA) – to serve low-income areas (City Council File 19- 0131, 2019). BlueLA operates as a for-profit, which has a business model entirely oriented around serving low-income customers. BlueLA was awarded $1.7 million for Phase 1 of the project, and won additional $3 million in funding from CARB in January 2019 (City Council File 19-0131, 2019; Ferguson & Holland, 2019). The principal partners on the project are Mobility Development Partners – a Chicago-based consultancy that provides technical assistance and community engagement strategies. The fleet and stations are operated by BlueLA - a private subsidiary of French mobility company Bolloré. LADOT is the official partner on the project, which receives and administers funding from the California Air Resources Board (CARB). BlueLA stations were targeted to low-income communities -- clustered primarily in downtown, as well as the neighborhoods to the west and northwest of downtown, such as West Lake Village, Koreatown and Hollywood. These were identified as census tracts in the top 10% of the Disadvantaged Communities index. Per the terms of the California Air Resources Board grant, these must be deployed in areas designated as “Disadvantaged Communities” in CalEnviroScreen, a state-operated interface that measured environmental exposure alongside sociodemographic features (August, 2016).
79 Dockless Mobility Pilot
BlueLA and Metro Bike Share differ greatly from LADOT’s Dockless Mobility Pilot, which was developed in response to private companies’ sudden deployment of scooters and bikes all over Los Angeles in 2017. In this arrangement, LADOT provides no subsidy to private operators; rather, a group of mobility service providers pay LADOT a fee to operate in the public right of way. The city issued the One Year Dockless Mobility Permit in November 2019, which imposed a range of requirements on scooter companies. The key equity stipulations were (1) that companies had to offer a price discount for low-income users, (2) unlimited free trips under 30 minutes, (3) enable users to unlock scooters without access to a smartphone, and (4) that companies had to submit an ‘equity plan’ that detailed their approach for engaging local community organizations. The permits also included a series of incentives for deployment of vehicles in historically marginalized areas. Each company could deploy up to 3,000 vehicles in non-Disadvantaged communities, and up to 7,500 additional vehicles in DACs. As opposed to paying $120 per device deployed in non-Disadvantaged Communities (non-DACs), scooter providers could pay a lower fee per device located in DACs and also increase the number of devices they deployed overall. Mobility providers were also required to report operations data through the MDS standard, which enabled LA to track scooter usage and do real-time enforcement to ensure that companies which received discounts for deploying scooters in DACs were fulfilling their commitments (LA City Council File 17-1125, 2020). The pilot was extended by an additional 6 months in March 2020, with approximately the same requirements (2020 Dockless Mobility Six-Month Permit Extension, 2020).
Low-Income Access Strategies
Like any transportation system, usage of shared mobility systems depends on a wide range of factors, including the availability of safe infrastructure, proximity and density of attractive destinations, technological access to modes, and the design of the street network (Shaheen et al., 2017). Despite what the academic literature points to as the barriers facing low-income riders, in practice, policy approaches to reaching this group tend to focus on three main factors: price of
80 modes, technological access, and spatial distribution of modes (Final One-Year Dockless Permit, 2019b).12 Some basic provisions aimed at low-income populations reflected requirements outlined in permits or legislation, though providers took a range of approaches to meet these standards. Data on equity provisions with respect to scooter were collected through a review of the applications submitted for the One-Year Dockless Mobility Permit, which were obtained from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). The strategies implemented in Metro Bikeshare were identified through the 2015 Regional Bikeshare Implementation Plan and the Fiscal Year 2019-2020 Business Plan. These were supplemented by interviews with public officials, a review of the popular press, as well as the quarterly reports that each program submitted to its respective governing body (Reports to Metro Board for Metro Bike Share; LADOT to the Los Angeles City Council regarding both the BlueLA and Dockless Mobility Pilot). Further details were added through review of public information on each provider’s website. Strategies used to target low-income travelers can be categorized according to the Transportation Equity framework offered by Shaheen et al. (2017). These comprise Spatial, Temporal, Economic, Physiological and Social (STEPS) factors that influence the ability of people to access shared mobility.13 The full range of strategies is summarized in Table 4.1, and discussed in further detail below.14
12 Even within these categories, a focus on price tends to predominate. A report that LA Metro commissioned in 2019 found that low-income groups were under-represented in bikeshare riders. However, the issue of low income access only was considered only through the lens of fare pricing. Related issues such as spatial access and timing of availability were used to assess the general ridership, though no special consideration was made of low-income groups. Ultimately, the authors recommend that Metro ‘Invest in Equitable Access;’ – though their principal suggestion is to consider restructuring the price of passes (Crowther et al., 2019). 13 Each of these facets are, of course, interlinked; it requires time to travel through space, per-minute pricing puts an economic value of time, and people with disabilities may have less spatial accessibility to adequate modes. These strategies might easily be arranged differently, but are grouped through this framework for clarity and to respond directly to the framework offered by Shaheen et al. (2017), which is the guiding framework used by the FHWA. 14 Due to the very different safety and disability implications between the different modes, I do not focus here on the physiological and social components of Shaheen’s Framework, as it does not offer a useful point of comparison between bikes, cars, and scooters.
81 Table 4.1: Low-Income Access Strategies by Provider Parameter Low-Income Access Strategies Dockless BlueLA Metro Mobility (#) (Y/N) Bike Share (Y/N) Spatial Deployment in low-income areas Y* Y ** Y ** Location Near Public Transit ? ? ? Temporal 24-hour availability Y Y Y Unlimited Free trips Under Time Limit Y* Y Y Economic Cash Payment option Y* Y N Price Discount Y* Y Y
Partial or Full Fare Integration with N Y Y Public Transportation Non-smartphone access Y* Y Y Security Deposit Waiver Y n/a N Physiological Disability Access N Y Y Safety Equipment Provision Y N Y Social Rider Education Y Y Y Multilingual Materials Y Y Y Targeted Outreach to Community Y* Y Y Organizations * Required by LADOT ** Required by CARB
Spatial Access
Spatial equity includes geographic limitations on travel behavior, such as a paucity of vehicles in low-income areas or a limited number of locations accessible within a reasonable travel distance. Because all three programs were funded at least in part by the state Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fun (GGRF), each had a strong policy incentive to locate their devices in ‘disadvantaged communities’ (DACs), as determined by the California Environmental Protection Agency. DACs are identified as census block groups with a CalEnviroScreen score in the top 25%, state-wide. (CALIFORNIA TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION, n.d.; Clean Mobility Options for Disadvantaged Communities Pilot Project, n.d.; California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006: Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund., 2012; New Funds for Active Transportation, n.d.).
82 Thus the location of DACs became a key spatial determinant of vehicles and docks. However, because the density of low-income populations is just one of many factors in a composite index determining DAC status, this spatial unit is a blunt tool for reaching low- income populations.15 CalEnviroScreen score does not include any measure of mobility access, such as car ownership or proximity to transit. Thus, although CalEnviroScreen is presented as a data-driven approach to equity, it is a poor measure of where communities have the most need for improved mobility. Dockless mobility providers were privately funded and therefore not subject to the same regulation. However, LADOT adopted the DAC measure to guide its own activities. The Dockless Mobility Permit capped providers at 3,000 vehicles in non-DACs, and allowed an additional 2,500 vehicles in DACs outside the San Fernando Valley, plus 5,000 more in SACs in the San Fernando Valley. In addition, LADOT charged providers a lower per-vehicle fee ($39 for vehicles deployed in DACs, versus $130 for vehicles deployed in non-DACs). The important distinction is that, whereas BlueLA and Metro Bike Share were required to as a condition of the money they receive to operate, dockless mobility providers were simply offered a price incentive to do so. They could choose not to operate in these communities at all, and some did. Technological Access
The ‘digital divide’ – or disparate access to internet and communication technologies (ICTs) across different social groups -- has been identified in many planning arenas as an obstacle to meaningful engagement (McDowell & Chinchilla, 2016). This is particularly so in shared mobility. The typical user of shared mobility technology relies on smartphones throughout the process of using the system -- from learning about the price and availability of mobility options in a location (e.g. through the Transit App), to locating a device, to unlocking it, and receiving messages that support use (e.g., a confirmation that a scooter or bike has been properly docked after use). Moreover, access to ICTs shapes users’ ability to participate in the planning of a system, both by providing feedback through the app – and by having the technical
15 This composite metric is generated by four indicators: “Exposure” to air and water pollution, “Environmental effects” such as Superfund sites, the density of “Sensitive Populations” (people with lung and cardiovascular disease), and finally, “Socioeconomic Factors” such as poverty, educational attainment, and the proportion of the population that is housing burdened.
83 vocabulary and knowledge to interpret the jargon that some technologists use to explain their decision-making methods. One of the key approaches that mobility providers in Los Angeles worked to span the digital divide was through providing mechanisms to unlock devices without smartphones. LADOT stipulated in the One-Year Dockless Mobility Permit that providers “have a non-smart phone option for Customers to use the dockless Vehicle system.” . One common approach taken are “text-to-ride” options where users create an account online and load a balance using a credit card. Users then unlock the scooter by sending a text message printed on the scooter or bike to a central number. Then the central server unlocks the mode. Users end the ride by texting the same number. Another approach is to provide users with debit cards they can load by paying in cash at third-party locations, such as convenience stores. These debit cards can then be tapped on bikes and scooters in order to unlock them. Where BlueLA and Metro differed is in the fact that they facilitated access through integration with the Metro TAP card. Whereas users without smartphones need to go through many additional steps (identifying and visiting a third-party vendor to gain access to a debit card) in order to use the cash payment options for scooters, BlueLA and Metro Bike Share were integrated with a system that users already used. Governance played a key role in this; from the outset, BlueLA and Metro Bike Share were both projects of public agencies – each of which owned the capital of their systems. This meant that they could specify the technological features of their systems. By contrast, the scooter technology was developed in a regulatory vacuum and was then deployed on LA’s streets, giving public agencies little opportunity to ensure that they are accessible to low-income users (Mayersohn, 2020). Economic Access
Metro’s principal means of making shared modes economically accessible to low-income riders is through integration with the TAP Card, a pass for all Metro Services, which low-income users can access through the Low Income Fare is Easy (LIFE program). For a 30-day unlimited Metro Bike Share pass, LIFE users pay $5 per month or $50 per year, compared with the standard rate of $17 per month or $150 per year. While the dockless mobility providers varied in the prices they offer to low-income riders, the Dockless Mobility Permit requires each provider to offer unlimited rides under 30 minutes per day. Finally, BlueLA offered the lowest price for
84 monthly passes ($1), and offered a per-minute trip price that was comparable with scooter providers. They also imposed a minimum charge of $2.25 each time a car was unlocked. Thus, from a pure price perspective, BlueLA was the most expensive – though it offered greater utility than bicycles and scooters. For low-income users, Metro Bikeshare was generally the most affordable, although certain scooter companies offered an even deeper discount. Table 4.2 summarizes the price structure for each system. Another facet of economic access is the length of commitment one must make when buying a pass, and the structure of payments for each ride. All three systems were comparable in that they provided service 24-hours per day. However, they differed in the temporal flexibility offered to low-income customers interested in buying a pass. A 2015 NACTO survey found that low-income bikeshare riders are more likely to opt for single passes or week-long passes over monthly subscriptions – though this could relate more to the price than the flexibility of the whole system (Faghih-Imani et al., 2014). As it pertains to the length of commitment for a pass, all three offered users a 30-day pass, and BlueLA and Metro also offered annual passes. Only Metro’s annual pass was cheaper on a per-day basis than the monthly pass. On a trip level, dockless scooter systems offer the most flexibility to low-income customers -- they do not charge to begin a trip. BlueLA offers the least flexible price structure for unlocking the car, charging $2.25 for the first 15 minutes of use, or $2.50 for the first half hour. Metro Bikeshare charges $1.75 for the first half hour, and offers Transit Access Pass (TAP) card holders free transfers between Metro buses, rail lines and bike share systems. Taking into account the per-minute chargers users face, this makes Metro Bikeshare by far the most affordable of the three systems.
85 Table 4.2 Low Income Pass Pricing Structures
Trip Prices Dockless* BlueLA Metro Bikeshare
Free Minutes of Travel 30 min. / trip, 0 30 min / trip or 60 min / day Per minute $0.05 - $0.15 $0.15 (= $4.50 $1.75 / 30 min. / 30 min). Per mile - $0 $ 0 Minimum charge - $2.25 $1.75 Security Deposit - - - Price for a 30 minute trip $1.50 - $4.50 $4.50 $1.75 Passes 30-day Pass $5 $1 $5 Annual Pass - $12 $50 * Prices represent minimum and maximum range of passes offered by providers currently operating in Los Angeles. Where this type of discount is only offered by one provider or all providers offer the same price.
Outcomes
The strategies described above resulted in vastly different outcomes. Table 4.3 shows the differences in trip-making among low-income residents and the general population. The data concentrate on ridership in the first nine months after the low-income options were introduced. For BlueLA, this covers the period from the commercial launch in April 2018 through December 2018. For Metro Bikeshare, the starting point is when fares were lowered and TAP integration was introduced in May 2018, through December of the same year. The data for dockless mobility covers the period from May to December 2019.16
16 Though the data for dockless devices is offset by one year, it still offers a useful point of comparison as it covers a similar time period at the same time of year. One potential hazard is interaction between the modes; low income users may become more likely to use one shared mode having used another one before. However, the rates in low income usage suggest that this is not an issue here, as dockless modes, which were deployed in 2019, show substantially lower usage among low income populations than the modes that came before them.
86
Low-Income Trips by Shared Mobility Service in 9-months following introduction of low-income strategies.
Metric Low- Dockless BlueLA Metro Income Mobility Pilot (LA City (Ferguson & Bikeshare Access Council File 17-1125, Holland, 2019) (Crowther et al., Strategies 2020) 2019) # % # % # % Trips Total 7,139,002 100% 8,253 100 238,435 100
Equity Access ~481,000** ~ 6% ~ 4,855 ~60% n/a n/a Cash Payment 6% 6% n/a n/a n/a n/a awareness awareness
Vehicles Total 14,161 100% 100 100% 3,065 100% Deployed Disadvantaged 5,460 38% 8,253 100* n/a n/a Communities average
Users Total ~183,000** 100% 1,367 100 74,000 100% Community 11,879 ~ 6% 637 437 n/a n/a Membership * All BlueLA stations were located in DACs; therefore all trips taken were in these areas. ** Estimated weekly ridership and users, based on LADOT Rider Survey n/as denote areas where no data was collected
Operational differences in the modes only partially explain the differences in usage among low-income populations in Los Angeles. In some respects, the higher usage of BlueLA is to be expected; relative to bicycles and scooters, cars provide greater travel speeds and a longer range. Therefore, they may be more effective tools for overcoming the spatial mismatch and connecting low-income workers to employment opportunities. They also provide an ability to haul cargo, such as children or groceries; these may make them particularly appealing to families. More generally, note that especially in Los Angeles, car pride can have a major impact on behavior; low-income riders may have a greater sense of self-esteem when taking a car than a bicycle or scooter (Lugo, 2018). The land use and built environment factors also may explain the greater utility of cars; with a lack of bicycle lanes or adequate sidewalks in Los Angeles, electric cars are likely to be understood as a safer mode. But cars may be more useful late at night than
87 scooters or bikes; offering a greater sense of safety. This is especially important for meeting the needs of hourly or night-shift workers. A closer examination of the data suggests that operational and policy explanations don’t fully explain the difference in ridership among low-income populations. First, pricing was about comparable between bicycle and scooter trips, and scooters demand less physical strain. Yet, a larger share of Metro Bike Share trips were taken by low-income riders; with about 15% earning below the county median income, compared with 6% in scooters according to a rider survey (Crowther et al., 2019, p. 12). For a person eligible for a community membership, the price of taking a BlueLA car for half an hour would be double that of taking a scooter or bike for the same amount of time. Yet, nearly 2/3 of BlueLA trip were taken by Community Pass holders. This might be explained by the idea that a car offers a higher-quality service that they were willing to pay more for. The number of devices deployed also offers a contrasting view from the operational and policy perspectives. There were far more scooters deployed than any other device, and they caused much hype in the media, so lack of awareness does not explain the differential either. Nor does the classic economics explanation that membership in a club (in this case, mobility as a service) is appealing if the club is bigger (i.e., there are more devises). BlueLA has only 100 cars, Metro Bikeshare has about 1,700 bikes, and the Dockless Mobility Pilot provided an average of 14,161 scooters deployed all over the city – though monthly totals range from 12,000 to 22,000. Each scooter provider had more scooters deployed than the entire Metro Bikeshare network, with an average of about 2,000 per provider. At the same time, only 12% of users surveyed were even aware of the community pass options available (LA City Council File 17- 1125, 2020). Analyzing these data in light of network effects can be counter-intuitive. As free-floating devices, dockless modes should be the most useful to low-income riders seeking to access jobs in areas where there may not be a Metro Bike Share station nearby. Docked modes (bikes and cars), by contrast, are only useful in the areas where they can be parked. Even for Community Members, it would not be economical to check out a BlueLA car all day. Therefore we should expect that dockless modes observe the greatest usage among low-income populations – but the data do not bear this out, as explained above.
88 Shared Mobility as Civic Technology
Considering shared mobility as ‘civic technology’ illuminates this difference. The Knight Foundation defines ‘civic technology’ as “technology that spurs citizen engagement, improves communities, and makes governments more effective” (McDowell & Chinchilla, 2016). This are key considerations and cause shared mobility systems to differ from conventional public transportation systems. Like conventional transportation systems, they spur citizen engagement by modifying the public realm, and installing features that can change the shape of a community. Often overlooked in transportation planning discussions is the fact that transportation systems operate as social space in and of themselves. This is especially true of shared mobility systems, which are collectively owned and stored in the public realm. Whereas cars are customizable and used by individuals, the design and location of shared mobility systems reflects public input from a range of stakeholders. Shared mobility, especially when made accessible to low income populations offers an opportunity for citizens to engage one another and their public officials in ways that cars do not. The introduction of scooter and bike share systems, for example, has engendered a new wave of interest in tactical urbanism – low cost, citizen-led interventions to improve the public realm. This is not just limited to Los Angeles; for example, after the introduction of scooters caused controversy in Nashville, Tennessee, Lyft and other mobility providers turned to the Nashville Civic Design Center as a consultant to develop scooter corrals that were quickly deployed downtown (Guiding Principles for SUMD Operation in Nashville, 2019). Similar efforts have unfolded in Washington D.C, Denver, Salt Lake City, Miami, and others (“Member Spotlight,” 2019). Testimony from community advocates in Los Angeles also suggest that shared mobility plays a role in fostering community, and sparking social interaction (“Watch Multicultural Communities For Mobility Second Bike-Share Video,” 2017). Lastly, shared mobility provides new opportunities to make government more effective by providing the flexibility to pilot new technologies in response. Public transportation systems also offer this possibility – yet, redesigning a bus network can take months or years of planning. Rail systems are even less flexible. Shared mobility systems can be re-deployed much more quickly at a lower capital cost. Informal buses and jitneys carry these benefits as well – and indeed, the fact that buses can be re-routed in response to shifts in community needs was a key tenet made
89 by the Bus Riders Union in opposing LA’s urban rail investment. However, informal transit networks have also come at the cost of legibility from the user perspective. Internet connected, shared mobility systems offer this flexibility, while also allowing users to be easily updated on the location of devices. For example, users can see where scooters and bikes are located, in real- time, through an application. The framing of shared mobility as ‘civic technologies’ offers a helpful way of assessing the opportunities for and obstacles to low-income uptake. McDowell & Chinchilla (2016) assert that in order “to promote democracy in a diverse world, civic technology must design for civic inclusion instead of civic engagement.” Civic inclusion refers to “the process by which groups, previously excluded, are incorporated into democratic processes as full citizens.” This entails shifting the focus away from solely distributional issues, such as income or accessibility to destinations, towards relational questions of how planners and communities relate to one another. Realizing this inclusion entails not only a re-allocation of resources, but also a resolution of power asymmetries (McDowell & Chinchilla, 2016, p. 462). The civic inclusion framework suggests five challenges that civic technology must overcome. These include (1) spanning digital and analog divides, (2) bridging social divisions, (3) embracing ‘full frame’ thinking, (4) addressing hyper-local issues, and (5) shifting the locus of design.
Digital and Analog Divides
The ‘digital divide’ – or disparate access to internet and communication technologies (ICTs) across different social groups -- has been identified in many planning arenas as an obstacle to meaningful engagement (McDowell & Chinchilla, 2016). This is particularly so in shared mobility. The typical user of shared mobility technology relies on smartphones throughout the process of using the system -- from learning about the price and availability of mobility options in a location (e.g. through the Transit App), to locating a device, to unlocking it, and receiving messages that support use (e.g., a confirmation that a scooter or bike has been properly docked after use). Moreover, access to ICTs shapes users’ ability to participate in the planning of a system, both by providing feedback through the app – and by having the technical vocabulary and knowledge to interpret the jargon that some technologists use to explain their decision-making methods.
90 One of the key approaches that scooter providers in Los Angeles worked to span the digital divide was through providing mechanisms to unlock devices without smartphones. LADOT stipulated in the One-Year Dockless Mobility Permit that providers “have a non-smart phone option for Customers to use the dockless Vehicle system.” (Final One-Year Dockless Permit, 2019b, p. 37). One common approach taken are “text-to-ride” options where users create an account online and load a balance using a credit card. Users then unlock the scooter by sending a text message printed on the scooter or bike to a central number. Then the central server unlocks the mode. Users end the ride by texting the same number. Another approach is to provide users with debit cards they can load by paying in cash at third-party locations, such as convenience stores. These debit cards can then be tapped on bikes and scooters in order to unlock them. BlueLA and Metro differed from Dockless Mobility pilots by facilitating access through integration with the Metro TAP card. Whereas users without smartphones need to go through many additional steps (identifying and visiting a third-party vendor to gain access to a debit card) in order to use the cash payment options for scooters, BlueLA and Metro Bike Share were integrated with a system that users already used. Governance played a key role in this; from the outset, BlueLA and Metro Bike Share were both projects of public agencies – each of which owned the capital of their systems. This meant that they could specify the technological features of their systems. By contrast, the scooter technology was developed in a regulatory vacuum and was then deployed on LA’s streets – and more generally, private mobility providers have jealously guarded their data. Another important way of spanning the digital and analog divided concerned the identification of locations for sites. One of the main systems that Metro Bike Share uses to identify station locations is a web-based digital map (LA County Map, n.d.). However, Metro also collected suggested station locations using a giant, printed physical map where users could suggest locations in-person. These suggestions were then digitized and integrated into the online platform.17 BlueLA relied on a data-driven approach to identify the census tracts where it would deploy its devices, but relied on analog input for identifying dock locations on the scale of blocks (Ferguson & Holland, 2019). By contrast, the scooter providers used a ‘proprietary software’ to determine optimal locations. To the extent that there was analog engagement, it was in the form of printed marketing materials. Moreover, prospective riders cannot view the prices of trips
17 Personal conversation with planner at LA Metro.
91 without having first downloaded the app. This may enable more sustainable business models by helping scooter providers change the price in real-time – yet, it also does little to dispel the impression among low-income users that have not yet downloaded the app that scooters and e- bikes are intended for a higher-income clientele (“Not Just Tech Bros,” n.d.; Schmitt, 2018). Another difference between the providers in their approach to spanning digital and analog divides concerned the way that they packaged community input and presented their recommendations back to them. In the case of Metro, users were able to provide input, and then see the immediate results, and be confident that their suggestions were being weighted evenly with the data-driven analyses that Metro had done internally. Beyond just the presence of both digital and analog materials, the connection between them was made clear to users. In contrast, scooter providers offer users an app, and also collected information manually – but how the digital and analog inputs were weighed relative to one another was not clear.
Bridging Social Divides
McDowell and Chinchilla (2016) observe that “People are segmented by socioeconomic status, race, and/or ethnicity. Before we can build civic technologies that are able to motivate entire communities to engage, we must comprehend what brings people together and what keeps them apart” (466). Metro has embraced this perspective in its recent studies of conventional transit systems, by publishing a report on how women travel differently within travel systems (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2019c). Yet, research on how micro- mobility interacts with shared social divides is still emerging. Put bluntly, shared micro-mobility systems have been broadly perceived as being targeted towards white, rich, educated, men (Matier, 2019; Ramanathan, 2018; Schmitt, 2018; The Gender Gap in Shared Micromobility, 2020). This perception is striking in light of both survey findings and public commentary which suggests that enthusiasm about the technology itself was actually greater among low-income users (as well as women and people of color), and that most scooter riders were local residents using the devices to get to work (Clewlow et al., 2018; Dunn, 2019; “Not Just Tech Bros,” n.d.). One aspect of this could relate to the fact that in the early days of scooter systems, they often appeared first in wealthy neighborhoods, to the exclusion of low- income neighborhoods (Bhuiyan, 2019). In Los Angeles, they first appeared in Santa Monica, a wealthy coastal municipality is home to a disproportionately white and wealthy population, and
92 which also attracts many tourists (Fonseca, n.d.). And even once they were required by the terms of the Dockless Mobility Permit to deploy in lower-income areas, LADOT’s reports to the council show that scooters have been deployed at a lower rate in DACs (LA City Council File 17-1125, 2020). A second angle on bridging social divisions relates to the cultural context of different modes. A rift exists in the cycling community between people who ride by choice and those who ride by necessity. This has in turn produced fissures within cycling advocacy movements (Lugo, 2018; Sheller, 2018). Recognizing that the ‘local community’ is not monolithic, and that they have different needs and concerns, is essential to generating trust. Moreover, the cultural construct of ownership takes on a different significance within low-income communities – it is not only access to the mode, but feeling like it meets personal needs that matters (Barajas, 2019). Metro Bike Share learned this through workshops with Multicultural Communities for Mobility (MCM; now called People for Mobility Justice) which revealed that word-of-mouth communication is especially important for reaching low-income communities. The summary describes a “a prevalent perception among many low-income residents in Los Angeles that bike share is not for them. Instead, many see the bikes as meant for tourists and the affluent” (Stefani Cox, 2017). Indeed, a shopkeeper whose storefront was located adjacent to a Metro Bike Share station recalled that the activists interviewing her were the first people to ask her opinion about the stations. As such, MCM expressed frustration at Metro’s failure to adequately communicate and engage – and chose to instead to produce their own materials that explained to low-income populations what Metro Bike Share was, and what value it could add. Car-pride, too may have played a factor in usage by low-income communities. (Moody & Zhao, 2019). Sparking this behavior change also requires meeting people where they are – and making them feel like shared services are an asset to be proud of, and not another example of a corporation hawking a new technology at a low-income community deemed ‘needy.’ This dynamic could help to explain why bridging social divisions was perhaps a more formidable task for Metro – an agency with a long and troubled history -- while BlueLA offered low-income communities a product that was more culturally attractive. A third angle on bridging social divisions relates to the agency’s differing approaches to internal representation. Micromobility industries have been widely criticized as being overly white and male, which some observers have chalked up to the dominance of these same
93 demographics within the venture capital industries that fund them.18 A tweet from an industry summit in January 2019 prompted one observer to ask – ‘Where all the women in the micromobility space?’ (Jean Walsh on Twitter, n.d.). Similarly, the members of the Open Mobility Foundations are overwhelmingly white and male. Beyond just cursory engagement and the placement of people of color in photos, Metro and BlueLA attended to the structure of their organizations, to ensure inclusion. Metro established in 2017 a Policy Advisory Committee, which was given the responsibility “to review, comment and provide input on the draft Measure Master Guidelines, the Long Range Transportation Plan, and other work plans and policy areas that the Metro Board may request.” The PAC is primarily an advisory committee, which lacks decision making power (Roles and Responsibilities of the Metro Policy Advisory Council, 2019). Meeting minutes from this group around the time of Metro Bike Share’s implementation, however, reveal some uncertainty about the PAC’s role relative to these other bodies and which organizations within Metro ultimately have decision making power (Policy Advisory Committee Meeting Minutes, 2017). Indeed, interviews revealed internal conflict emerges between community-led bodies and those led by career transportation planners. One high level official described the process of mediating between the Policy Advisory Council and other offices. Planners at Metro tend to focus on the practical elements, such as the geographic location of bike share and the pricing of system – though these may not capture the issues of interest to communities. Discussing the draft definition of ‘equity’ that the agency is currently development, the official said, “We’ll see as I go back to the Policy Advisory Committee next time. I don’t want to foreshadow what their concerns will be. But I imagine it will be is, ‘what is Metro’s role outside of the projects it can control directly?’ The interaction of the PAC with other offices within Metro suggests internal friction with respect to implementation of equity goals. Metro’s interaction with community partners, as recounted in a video produced by Multicultural Communities for Mobility reveal fissures in the partnership when it came to implementation. At the same MCM workshop above – Metro learned that an equitable partnership is a critical components to producing equitable outcomes on
18 Some companies are making movements to change this – for example, Lyft launched a more diverse CityWorks council where local non-profits individual Lyft drivers, and company executives trade ideas – yet, this is a nascent effort (Inc, n.d.).
94 the ground, which required the dedication of time and resources to affirm to community partners that their voices are heard and valued. The example of Metro’s Blue Line First/Last Mile Plan is illustrative. Community-based organizations (CBOs) were brought on as consultants in a paid capacity and invited to design the process of engagement itself. Though represented significant departure from what had historically been considered standard practice at Metro, conflict nonetheless emerged between the CBOs invited to consult and the planners. A Metro planner recalled how their agency originally conceived of community organizations through a client-consultant lens. That is, Metro paid CBOs for a specific task (in this case community engagement), and Metro deliberated internally as to the desired direction of the project overall. This left the CBOs feeling “very much cut out of the communication loop.”19 Likewise, Metro’s relationship with community groups was hierarchical, such that two CBOs (in this case Ténemos que Reclamar y Unificar Salvar la Terra South LA, or T.R.U.S.T.) were designated as the primary consultants, who were charged with engaging other organizations.20 Therefore TRUST and the LA County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) became the mouthpiece for most CBOs, which limited Metro’s ability to engage with the diversity of viewpoints that come from the ‘community.’ This experienced helped inform Metro’s Equity Platform Framework, published in 2018. Conversations with planners at Metro, however, reveal ongoing discussions within the agencies as to what ‘equity’ means in practice. One bike share recalled a conversation with advocates who “told me that, you know, our agency and our structure is based on white supremacy. The structure of our government and agencies has been developed in such a way -- and so, there are structural inequities that exist in it.” The same planner reported being at a loss for how to respond: “I've had trouble with that, because I'm like, well, it is the structure that it is. How do we -- there are lots of ways to rebuild the structure so it is more equitable.”21 Metro would do well to follow the example of BlueLA, which vested much more decision making power in a Steering Committee co-led by representatives from community organizations. These included the Korean Immigrant Workers Association (KIWA) and the
19 Personal conversation 20 These ultimately included the Asian Pacific Islander Forward Movement (API Forward Movement), the East Side Riders Bike Club, Healthy Active Streets, Multicultural Communities for Mobility (now People for Mobility Justice), and Ride On! Bicycle Co-Op. 21 Personal conversation in January 2020.
95 Salvadoran Labor and Education Fund (SALEF), and Tenemos que Reclamar y Unidos Salvar la Tierra – South LA (TRUST-South LA). One of the Steering Committee’s main functions was to lead the outreach to other community organizations, through the hiring of ‘Street Ambassadors’: local community residents who were familiar with the needs of the local neighborhood, and could market the technology to communities in way that was context-responsive.
Full Frame Thinking
The third facet that McDowell and Chinchilla (2016) highlight is ‘full frame thinking’ – recognizing that the populations that equity programs seek to reach are considering a diverse set of constraints at any one moment. For example, transportation and housing affordably are linked, leading some advocates and scholars to call for these to be assessed together (H+T Affordability Index, n.d.). Another example of ‘full-frame’ thinking relates to compensation for the time that community groups spend participating in panels. Community groups are often asked to participate in panels as members of the public, and not paid for their time, even if they are asked to be ‘equity’ experts repeatedly. Especially in the context of low-income communities, many people work hourly jobs that may not give them any flexibility. Donated time therefore translates directly into lost wages. BlueLA compensated the community organizations that sat on its Steering Committee for their time, signaling that their expertise was valued equally with that of technical experts. A final, salient example of the importance of full-frame thinking relates to police interactions. This has been a recurrent theme in transportation equity discussions in Los Angeles – famously with regards to the beating of Rodney King in 1992, but more recently with the harassment of teenagers on Metro trains. More recently, many community groups have sharply criticized the presence and conduct of police officers hired to monitor Metro systems. A 2017 civil rights complained noted that while African American riders make up just 16% of Metro Rail ridership, this group accounted for nearly 60% of arrests (The Strategy Center Submits DOJ & DOT Civil Rights Complaint Against the LACMTA » Fight for the Soul of the Cities, n.d.). In 2018, a young woman of color was handcuffed and dragged off of a train for putting her feet on the seat (“Teen Hauled Off Metro Train, Cuffed for Putting Her Feet Up,” 2018).
96 In principle, Metro’s contracts with law enforcement officers are aimed at providing greater security for Metro riders. Indeed, CBOs have flagged the security of riding trains as a concern (Blue Line FINAL, n.d.). In practice, however, mobility equity advocates have sharply criticized police enforcement tactics heavy-handed and discriminatory against riders of color. One advocate described her preferred policy alternative would be to “Get the damn police off the train.” To allay these concerns in the case of the Blue Line / First Last mile plan Metro facilitated a meeting between mobility advocates and Metro’s Chief Security Officer. While new policies are still being implemented, this represents a remarkable expansion of Metro’s mandate – beyond just the provision of transit service, to mediating disputes between different users of the space around Metro stations. Ultimately it was this attention to context that led to meaningful interaction with user groups. And the CBOs that were paid to consult seemed to approve of the final project, at least enough to post a video on Youtube about it (Blue Line FINAL, n.d.).
Addressing the hyperlocal
McDowell & Chinchilla (2016) observe that “Civic issues are frequently framed as citywide engagement, without much effort to understand the varying degrees of importance these issues may have at the local level.” One neighborhood where all three systems of interest encountered this tension was in Boyle Heights, located just east of Downtown. Historically a center of Mexican culture in Los Angeles, and a locus for various activist movements, it has recently been the site of conflict around gentrification (Gross, 2015; Perez, 2012). With a dense built environment often described as ‘walkable,’ a rich cultural heritage, and located in close proximity to a major employment center in downtown, it has the structure of a neighborhood that could be very appealing to new residents. The community has voiced concern that new mobility modes may be the catalyst that signals to new residents that, rather than being a socioeconomically depressed neighborhood plagued by gang violence, that Boyle Heights is a trendy destination that offers comparatively affordable housing prices and ready access to other amenities near downtown. Various research has explored the link between the introduction of new multimodal infrastructure and gentrification in a neighborhood (Baker & Lee, 2019b; Marlon G Boarnet, n.d.; Dawkins & Moeckel, 2016; Golub et al., 2016). Similar criticism is being developed in an emerging body of
97 literature on shared mobility (Fleming, 2018; Kim et al., 2019), though empirical research documenting this link is scarce. Nevertheless, mobility systems carry particular salience, especially those that carry the aesthetic of silicon valley and are marketed in ways that attract a higher income, young, white, and educated clientele. Bikeshare, carshare, and scooter share took different approaches to this. Metro had some difficulty in this – needing to govern for an entire county, not just one community (Stefani Cox, 2017, 2:01). Another way to understand the challenge of responding to hyper-local concerns is through the spatial units used to identify areas of need. The key unit used to identify areas of need for BlueLA and MDS were ‘Disadvantaged Communities’ as identified in CalEnviroScreen 3.0. However, this measure suffers from the modifiable areal unit problem, measures issues that may or may not be relevant to users actual mobility needs (e.g. environmental quality), and measures them at the state-wide level (Guevarra & Meaney, 2016, p. 3). This is especially an issue for MDS, given that scooters are deployed over more census tracts and they enable shorter distances. Metro Bikeshare considered more local datasets to identify the spatial allocation, as well as the functional needs of its prospective riders. While its equity framework uses the same spatial unit of census tracts, it considers variables of direct relevance to mobility needs. Moreover, they are evaluated relative to the county and not to the whole state – meaning that they are more precisely targeted to low-income communities. And whereas CalEnviroScreen uses a ranking that reflects the socioeconomic profile of each census tract relative to others, but does not account for volume -- Metro Bike Share uses an absolute measure that targets the communities with the highest spatial density of potential riders. In this way Metro Bike share is focused on providing services to individual communities, whereas the governance of MDS is a much broader construct. A third angle on hyper-local needs relates to the availability of safe infrastructure. Through LA’s Vision Zero project, extensive data has been used to identify the streets that have the highest rates of bicycle and pedestrian deaths relative to the county as a whole. The High Injury Network uses spatial data to identify street segments that are particularly perilous for cyclists and pedestrians. However, it is not clear how the relative safety or danger of street networks is incorporated to operational decisions about where to site BlueLA or Metro Bikeshare stations.
98 Shifting the Locus of Design
The final stage of McDowell and Chinchilla’s framework is shifting the locus of design – that is, the center of decision making – from planners to the communities they serve. An often overlooked issue whether a particular mode is the resource that would best respond to community needs. One planner who participated in the implementation of Metro Bike share recalled that by the time they began community engagement, they had already received “very clear direction from my Metro Board on when and how the project should be implemented.” This left them with little control over the broader structure of the project, and little leeway to integrate community feedback. This left the planner questioning whether, when “the terms of the product have already been defined and set, is that equitable? Is that not? Who is the bike share for?”22 They likewise wondered whether bikes are the right intervention for mobility equity at all. Cars or other modes, this person suggested, may be a more effective tool. Yet, “the nature of the way that things work currently is that we don't have that opportunity to go to the community and say, "What do you think would improve equity and bikes?." It's, ‘here's the bike share system that we have federal funding for to implement.” This interview highlights that a key part of generating a shared definition of equity is generating a shared definition of the problem to be solved. Many communities that transportation officials seek to serve have been neglected by the state and private companies for a long time, in contexts that may or may not have to do with transportation service planning. Yet, this can engender skepticism – and even frustration toward public and private institutions coming to the community proffering a new technology, and using the language of equity, when they have been sidelined for many years. Some advocates question whether ‘equity’ is even a desirable end – preferring instead a justice framing. Constructs like the Untokening Principles use the ideas of ‘equity’ and ‘justice’ in close succession, suggesting that they are at least complementary constructs (Untokening 1.0 — Principles of Mobility Justice, n.d.). Eric Mann of the Labor/Community Strategy Center challenged this idea, noting that “Equity has no justice to it.”23 His experience litigating against the MTA had instilled a belief that Metro, fundamentally, had little regard for low income and
22 Ibid. 23 Personal conversation on March 19, 2020
99 communities of color and was unwilling to cede decision-making power. From his view, the existing processes labeled ‘equitable’ were simply designed to placate historically marginalized their communities that wanted to get their share of the benefit from a fundamentally unjust system. Other advocates continued to use the term equity, while still questioning the possibility of achieving an equitable mobility system. One commented “I think it's very difficult for in a capitalist system for private firm to have values and principles that align with equity. Yeah. So, I think it sounds good. I don't know that I've seen it in practice as much.”24 Mr. Mann also sharply critiqued the distortion of the word: “The term equity is meaningless and co-optable. It's now become so profaned that it both doesn't mean anything, but it's often used to cover up racism.” From his viewpoint, the relationship between the private sector and public sector systematically disadvantages low-income people. Policy interventions that are labeled as being aimed at ‘equity’ do little to change the underlying nature of the relationship between communities and the government. In fact, the introduction of the word can obfuscate he issue. Recalling the experience of suburban white communities that lobbied hard for rail investments during the 1990s, Mr. Mann noted that “suburban white people who feel black people are getting something they're not say, "We want equity." Speaking from the perspective of the Strategy Center, he stated: “We don't want equity. We do not want equity. […] every time a group says they're for equity. I know they're a sellout group.”25 This point of view underscores the diversity of viewpoints represented within the network of organizations frequently referred to as ‘the community.’ Thus, a second facet of shifting the locus of design concerns the framing of the questions that providers posed to their users. Initial public engagement around scooters primarily focused on asking users, ‘what do you need in order to use our technology.’ However, more recent discussions have taken the approach of asking communities, ‘what value can this technology provide for you – or can this technology provide any value at all?’ Lyft is an example of one scooter company shifting that discussion, through its equity strategy.26 One approach to shifting the focus of design concerned the co-design of the process and operations. BlueLA’s community-led Steering Committee wielded some decision-making
24 Personal conversation in January 2020 25 Personal conversation on March 19, 2020. 26 Lyft Application for Dockless Mobility Permit
100 authority. The Steering Committee participated in the definition of the grant request that BlueLA ultimately won; and collaborated directly with LADOT and CARB in selecting bids. Once BlueLA won the bid, the Steering Committee also participated in the approval of the pricing scheme that BlueLA proposed. These powers allowed the Steering Committee to ensure that their input was carried through to the stage of implementation (Ferguson & Holland, 2019). While Metro’s project was initiated internally, further refinements were made in close collaboration with community partners. Co-design was the least present in scooters, which had the most opaque processes for deciding where and how scooters were to be deployed. All three providers made efforts in this direction – but BlueLA succeeded in responding to a community-identified need for more mobility options from the get-go. One of the planners that helped design the program BlueLA described this approach, noting that planners’ tendency to focus on barriers to using a particular system limited their ability to serve community needs. Instead, this planner proposed asking: " ‘Are we designing a program that people are going to use?’ When you ask, ‘what are we designing a program that people are going to use,’ you have to ask, ‘Why are they using it? What are they using it for?’ If you start a program from those questions, then you're going to build the program that people want to use.”27 Metro ended up taking a more responsive, rather than proactive, approach to equity. After its initial roll-out, Metro was ‘told by workers that it didn’t make sense for them to take bikeshare because the bus was a more appealing alternative (Stefani Cox, 2017, 5:28), Metro adjusted its fare policies and offered more flexible services. Some scooter companies have made steps towards this approach; for example the first question that Lyft will ask in its community engagement plan is ‘What value can dockless bikes or scooters add to this community?’ However, the continued dismal deployment of scooters in Disadvantaged Communities, per the most recent LADOT report to the city council suggests that in aggregate, scooter companies have generally fare poorly in serving low-income usage. BlueLA offered the strongest incorporation of co-design opportunities in the physical implementation of infrastructure. The private system responded to a public request for proposals, and the ultimate structure included a Steering Committee on which community organization members were compensated for their time and held decision making power. Metro Bike Share’s original implementation plan included provisions for equitable station siting and discounted
27 Personal conversation in March 2020.
101 passes; though it’s not clear if or how residents participated in the design of the analytical methodology (Fehr & Peers & Bicycle Transit Systems, 2018). Scooters had the least effective co-design process provisions, as the design and operational strategies have been closely guarded by private firms.
Discussion
Considering shared mobility as ‘civic technology’ provides a frame through which to understand different levels of uptake by low-income users across the different modes. While all three systems took measures to increase their spatial availability, affordability, and technological accessibility to low income population, their institutional structure and the extent of their collaboration with local communities played an important role in determining their success. The outreach strategies used by each program are summarized in Table 4.4. The program that was most successful in reaching low-income riders, BlueLA, adopted a ‘civic inclusion’ to public engagement framework, which integrated elements of co-design and shared decision making over the operations of the program. The least successful (scooters) relied on an approach more oriented towards marketing and encouraging the use of their devices. Metro Bikeshare was somewhere in between – but as it has changed its strategies over time, its use among low-income riders has also increased.
102 Table 4.4: Approaches to overcoming Civic Technology Challenges Challenge Dockless BlueLA Metro Bikeshare Mobility Pilot
Digital v. Analog Marketing Street Ambassadors Analog siting map Cash payment system Localized Full TAP Integration Decisionmaking about station siting Partial TAP Integration
Social Divides Meeting with Meeting with Meeting with community groups community groups community groups Equity Framework Full Frame Participatory Problem Brokering discussions Definition around police harassment Address the Addressed Street upgrades around Hyperlocal gentrification concerns bike stations Shifting the Locus Paid community Focus on internal of Design groups to serve on representation Steering Committee
One feature of the different programs that shaped their public engagement strategies was the level of control they sought to regain over the design and spatial deployment of capital. Metro owned and operated the equipment for Metro Bike Share, and could therefore require contractors to build it to their exact specifications, and deploy it to meet low-income users’ needs. As a public agency, Metro was also in a position to invest in streetscape improvements to support riders in using Metro Bike Share, through projects such as the Gold Line East Side Access and Blue Line First/Last Mile Plan (Eastside Access, n.d.; Hornstock et al., 2018). The capital in the case of BlueLA remained privately owned – but again, it was custom built to meet the exact needs of car sharing (Ferguson & Holland, 2019). Scooters, by contrast, were totally privately owned; the only tools that LADOT had were permitting and the use of financial incentives to shape spatial deployment. Each company had an incentive to deploy scooters in places that would achieve their maximum ridership over the lifetime of the capital. A second framing of the situation relates to market dynamics. Scooter providers are competing with many others, and funded by venture capital. They had to pay LADOT to
103 operate.28 The unit economics have been a challenge for bike share and scooter sharing systems alike (Zipper, n.d.). A McKinsey report suggested that it takes 4 months for scooters to pay off as a profitable investment (Sizing the Micro Mobility Market | McKinsey, n.d.). However, more recent studies have found that dockless bikes and scooters rarely remain functional for this long (Hollingsworth et al., 2019; Must Reads, 2018). It was not surprising they were more focused on market segmentation – which demands distinguishing themselves as a service, and trying to establish control of the market. The same priorities also created an incentive for them to tightly guard their data, and for deployment strategies to be kept secret. Most private mobility companies have resisted LA’s demands for data transparency on grounds of protecting rider privacy (Petersen, 2019). BlueLA and Metro Bike Share were publicly funded and faced a different set of incentives. Their charge was to maximize ridership to provide political support for continued funding from the state (Program 2018-0479, n.d.). The private companies providing the services (Bolloré Group and Bicycle Transit Services) profit by winning contracts from the city. This means they compete at the stage of meeting the city’s political needs at the lowest cost – but once they are established, they have a more secure place in the market. It also means that instead of maximizing revenues (as would be demanded by a venture capitalist seeking to make a return on investment), their primary profit incentive is to convince the city that their service continues to be worth funding. This means that once they begin working with the city, they need only to offer the city a price that is more cost- effective than competitors might provide and restarting the long procurement process. Altogether this creates a degree of financial security and flexibility that allows them to be more inclusive in so far as public engagement is concerned. A third framing relates to the physical infrastructure; car stations are the least mobile, and represent the largest investments. They also depend on the installation of energy and charging stations. Limited energy storage capacity in electric vehicles means that users will be constrained within a certain distance of stations, wherever they are ultimately located. This means that every station is likely to be permanent, and it matters greatly that there is a robust participatory process in selecting initial locations.
28 In addition to a $20,000 permit fee, each operator had to pay $139 per device in non-DACs, plus $39 per device deployed in each DACs, as well as fees that replace parking revenue.
104 Bike share stations, while also relatively permanent, are comparatively mobile. Even though they cost a lot to install, they can be removed (Fehr & Peers & Bicycle Transit Systems, 2018). And they require only being bolted into an existing sidewalk. Little additional infrastructure is needed. The kiosks have relatively low energy demands, and can be powered by solar energy while charging infrastructure for electric vehicles demands much higher wattage. Because e-scooters can be easily re-deployed, rebalancing decisions are less permanent, and potentially less subject to community scrutiny. They can likewise be picked up and moved multiple times in the course of a day. This means they have a weaker incentive to engage extensively in discussions about the placement of a particular station. It also means that over time, there is less of an incentive for scooter providers to engage repeatedly with the community in any one location.
Conclusion
A video from a workshop in 2016 focused on low-income bikeshare shows a participant saying, ‘It’s not for us. That’s what we’re saying. It’s not for us’ (Stephanie Cox, 2018) . This chapter has sought to explain why the community took this position. I’ve tried to juxtapose the equity provisions in recent mobility interventions in terms of efforts to remedy past conflicts over shared mobility in Los Angeles. The three case studies I have presented suggest that an uptake of shared mobility services by low income population depends not only on the price, technological features, and spatial deployment of mobility services, but also on the structure of the provider organizations and their approach to public engagement. This, in turn, implies a need to rethink the tools that are typically included in a city’s strategy for enhancing mobility equity. Of the three systems, BlueLA most closely modeled on the civic inclusion framework. From the viewpoint of digital and analog engagement, BlueLA benefited from integrating with the Metro TAP card, such that users did not need a smartphone to unlock rides. BlueLA also provide its strength in bridging social divides; rather than simply ensuring that low-income communities were included in its larger market, BlueLA concentrated its services in low-income communities. By virtue of providing cars, BlueLA was better positioned to address the ‘full frame’ of issues relevant to users – but especially excelled at creating an institutional structure to support its intentions. Its oversight committee enabled them to better respond to hyper-local concerns and shift the locus of design to communities themselves.
105 An excerpt from a video from MCM underscores that, while important, participation is not everything. The most critical issue is whether public participation actually leads to changes in design and policy. An organizer asks, “Will Metro actually listen to the recommendations we are making? Or, are we just a face they can use to say they have been equitable? I don’t know” (Stefani Cox, 2017 5:48). Tamika Butler, who participated on the Metro Bike Share project, reflected on her experience. After leaving the transportation field for a while, she was disappointed at what she found when she returned: “The truth is, there are new components that look different, but for anyone who values equity in transportation, the same questions and concerns still simmer just beneath the surface” (Asking Questions about Equitable Micromobility, 2019). Final decision-making power still seems to rest with the public and private agencies creating the new means of mobility. However, as the notion of the development of new data regimes may constitute a possible new chapter in governance – what I call a ‘code shift.’ The next and final chapter returns to this idea introduced early on, and offers recommendations for practice.
106 Chapter 5: Conclusions & Recommendations for Practice
“We have to make sure these equity principles don’t just sit on a shelf and gather dust – or, I guess in the modern world, sit on a server and get dust.” - Jesi Harris
Transportation equity is complex. Advancing the interests of marginalized populations presents planners to navigate tradeoffs regarding whose interests should be served, how ‘equity’ should be defined, and how it should be measured. These tradeoffs are increasingly being resolved in digital contexts, as internet-connected, ‘smart’ mobility systems play a larger role in urban transportation. This shift makes it all the more important to consider how historical power imbalances manifest in our current systems. The digital information systems that LA currently has in place do not capture the full range of issues that fall under the heading of ‘equity.’ The history of LA’s built environment shows how communities’ ability to move is shaped not only by mobility infrastructure and technology, but also on housing dynamics, police interactions, and the unique cultures and experiences of individuals. Transportation planners concerned with making smart mobility technologies ‘equitable’ must engage with these historical complexities – which implies including the people who endured harms in the past in today’s planning processes, and the design of systems used to inform them. Innovations in technology and governing systems create both opportunity and need to reconsider what political commitments to ‘equity’ imply for contemporary planning practice. Transportation systems have never been neutral, and that historically, standard practice for gauging equity has placed power squarely in the hands of professional planners – who have often overlooked low-income and minority communities. Awareness of the need to address equity is growing in planning circles, yet transportation planners are still learning what this implies in practice. Each of the shared mobility pilots described in the earlier chapters made efforts to serve low-income riders, they have achieved vastly different outcomes. Even the outcomes are contested, with different stakeholders measuring them against different philosophical notions of equity or justice. Purely quantitative approaches are ill-suited to evaluating equity in a way that is meaningfully context-responsive. Statistics do not easily capture the skepticism communities that has been ravaged by highways and then offered bike share systems as compensation. Fear of
107 police harassment or of looming displacement, cannot be represented in a Lorenz curve. Low- income families may not have time to offer their input, but it more their lack of trust that their recommendations will be followed that gets in the way. When planners approach equity only through statistics, they miss the most important community concerns. On the other hand, data can play a role in advancing equity if they are presented in the right way. For example, big data and artificial intelligence can be used to provide services at lower cost. Quantitative data can be used to monitor and benchmarking progress. Prominent mobility equity advocates have stressed these points (Butler, 2019; Guerrazzi, 2019). A number of advocacy organizations have presented metrics that they think should be used to measure transportation equity in Los Angeles. (Guevarra & Meaney, 2016; “Making Equity Real in Mobility Pilots Toolkit,” 2019; Metro Equity Platform Framework, 2018; Zac, 2018). The tension between public agency managers and community advocates regarding how mobility equity should be measured and benchmarked is real. The same people expressing enthusiasm about data as a tool for equity have raised questions about whether shared mobility systems have lived up to their promises (Butler, 2019). In my view, the only way to reconcile these tensions – and arrive mutually agreeable planning outcomes -- is to insist on what I call code shift. The preceding chapters have advanced this argument three central arguments. First is that open data is creating a fundamentally new relationship between the public, private, and community stakeholders that govern shared mobility systems. This presents new equity tradeoffs, which community representatives should be present to navigate. Second, the existing transportation (in)equities in Los Angeles have resulted from a history of asymmetrical power dynamics. Providing smart mobility devices will not, on its own, reverse these dynamics. Third, providing resources is not enough for them to be used; it also depends how people are engaged. Meaningful power sharing is central to providing a useful service. Together, these arguments reinforce that equity is about the sharing of power, not only of resources. In order for mobility systems to be both ‘equitable’ and ‘smart,’ they must be co-designed with local expertise. The notion of code shift suggests that a key arena where power imbalances are manifesting anew is the design and planning of the digital infrastructures underpinning smart mobility systems. Community advocates should turn their attention to these systems and consider practical realities, private actors should make their business models more transparent, and
108 government should take steps to better include community stakeholders in the process. I will conclude by offering practical recommendations for each set of stakeholders – to bring about ‘code shift’ and a more fair distribution of power.
Recommendations for Practice
Community Groups
As Michael Mendéz notes in Climate Change from the Streets: “In order to participate in decisions about climate change that will inevitably affect marginalized communities, environmental justice activists must adapt their perspectives and strategies from the local scale to the global. How to take interconnected action across scales has become a central concern for them” (2020). Digital infrastructure is an essential medium for translating environmental justice goals across scales, in the form of low-carbon mobility – and that open data systems may facilitate more flexible planning institutions to achieve these goals. The implication for code shift of community organizations is that it is critical to develop a greater digital literacy, and enlist the use of data in a way that speaks to lived experiences. Tamika Butler, a prominent mobility equity advocate in Los Angeles, has argued that “data is a tool for equity and inclusion” (Guerrazzi, 2019). She notes that it is a two way street; while data needs context to be meaningful, anecdotal evidence also needs to be substantiated by data in order to be convincing to policymakers. One approach is to collect counter-data. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a vocal advocate for improved transportation equity investments in the greater Boston area, has noted that "Data directly informs where you are able to push for those infrastructure investments." Community groups, she suggests, may have ample anecdotal data to describe injustice – “but you still need to collect the data because that's what informs the sequencing of these investments” (Walk This Way, 2020). Data-scientists from marginalized communities all over the world have begun to demonstrate this approach. As early as 1971, the Detroit Geographic Expedition Institute published a map depicting the locations where black children had been killed by white motorists along the Pointes-Downtown Track, a major arterial in the city (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2018a). The map evidences the frequency of death and violence in a way that statistics presented in a table never could. That this was a collaboration between black neighborhood residents and white,
109 professionally geographers with academic pedigrees reveals how a more representative data analysis process can reveal new insights – and also be a platform for meaningful interpersonal relationships.
Figure 11: Detroit Geographic Expedition Institute, Where Commuters Run Over Black Children along the Pointes Downtown Track (1971) (D’Ignazio, 2020)
This map is just one example of the overlapping fields of critical cartography, which uses geographic data visualization to reveal injustice, and civic mapping, in which citizens work with trained geographers to represent community-held knowledge. Given the inherent spatiality of transportation systems, as well as the spatial segregation of Los Angeles, depicting equity goals spatially is particularly important (Soja, 2013). Recall that red-lining maps were used as tools for racial segregation, which had real and measurable impacts on the built environment, which permeated through the mobility system for decades thereafter. As geodata could be used to shift power dynamics then, so too can it be used to shift power dynamics now. This is an especially important moment for community groups to
110 intervene, as the City of Los Angeles has extensive use of geospatial technology, through its GeoHub to support their policymaking around mobility systems (City of Los Angeles Hub, n.d.). Data visualization is an essential medium in which community activists ought to intervene to shape discussions about equity in shared mobility – though to date, there have been few community-led visualizations of MDS data. A second recommendation is that community organizations create a staff position or point person to lead on data equity, whose job it is to be a data liaison. Engaging with data systems takes much expertise and attention – both due to the technical nature of the content, as well as the speed with which data systems are updated and changed. Only the most well-established information systems have user-friendly documentation. More often, learning to use cutting edge- tools requires sifting through comment threads on platforms such as GitHub and StackOverflow. While there is much useful insight to be found in these areas, specialization is particularly important – especially in community organizations where many staff are likely to be juggling multiple roles at once. A third recommendation for community groups is to critically assess which facets of ‘equity’ data is an appropriate tool to address – and how much data is needed for that. Some transportation equity advocates, including Rep. Pressley, have called for planners to “collect racial data, in real time, disaggregate it, and report it” (Walk This Way, 2020). While measuring disparate outcomes across social groups is essential for assessing distributional justice outcomes, this degree of transparency creates hazards of its own. The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundations have noted the civil rights issues posed by LADOT’s data collection strategies (Sheard, 2019). Their critique centers equity, and considers how data privacy protects the well- being of marginalized groups. However, the public debate about privacy and transparency has been leveraged by coalitions such as Communities Against Rider Surveillance (supported by Uber) to advance an aggressively anti-data collection stance. The participation of groups such as Media Justice and Inner City Struggle (a community organizing non-profit focused on Boyle Heights) affirms that data privacy is a real concern to communities. However, vastly reducing the amount of data available for pubic analysis may not desirable end for advancing racial or social justice, either – as it could lead to weaker corporate accountability mechanisms overall. The point is that a tradeoff exists between user privacy and disaggregation, and community advocates
111 should think in detail about how to reconcile their interests in privacy and responsive mobility policy. A fourth recommendation for community groups is to identify actionable metrics to ensure equitable policy implementation (“Making Equity Real in Mobility Pilots Toolkit,” 2019; Screening for Transportation Equity, 2016). Selecting practical and representative metrics, remains challenging, even for community organizations focused on this task. Consider the What We Measure Matters brief, published by Investing in Place’s Transportation Equity Technical Working Group. This group was formed in 2016 to provide recommendations on Metro’s Long Range Transportation Plan which will guide implementation of Measure R and M. The policy brief recommends the principal metrics that Metro should use to target ‘equity’ communities for investment. As the working group themselves acknowledge, this ‘Transportation equity is a complicated concept with many more nuances than can be captured in a simple definition. And while the group is very specific in its definition on which variables should be used to identify ‘equity communities’ (income, race/ethnicity, and vehicle ownership rates), their report suggests some further issues to be resolved. Following is the group’s definition of ‘transportation equity’:
1. Equitable access to safe, reliable, and affordable transportation options that connect people to employment, services, education, health care, recreation, and cultural destinations;
2. Shared distribution of the benefits and burdens of transportation investments, especially for communities historically impacted by racial injustice, disinvestment, pollution, and unsafe streets.
3. Partnership in the planning, investment, and implementation processes that results in: shared decision-making; more equitable health and quality of life outcomes for high priority areas while strengthening the entire region and serving existing residents; and equitable policies to achieve development without displacement.
The three top-level principles – equitable access, shared distribution of benefits and burdens, and partnership – are intuitive enough. But still, the principles leave many questions unanswered. Regarding the first principle, using the word ‘equitable’ to define ‘equity’ is circular – and it is unclear if ‘access’ considered only in spatial terms, or economic, temporal, physiological or cultural terms as well. The second point is helpful in identifying groups that should be prioritized – but offers only a vague declaration that costs and benefits ought to be ‘shared.’ Is a fair sharing
112 of benefits of burdens just about the directionality (i.e. that people who have been historically excluded receive more of the benefits and fewer of the burdens) – or about magnitude (i.e., that the proportion of benefits that people who have been historically excluded is concomitant with their disadvantage)? What is an acceptable level of difference? The third bullet suggests that presumably, these decisions ought to be made through deliberation -- but the question remains as to which decisions ought to be shared, and which taken unilaterally. Should community groups have veto power over a budget proposal? When a dispute arises among community groups drawing on lived experience, and planners relying on digitally collected data, whose information should prevail? I raise these questions not to invalidate the work of Investing in Place and partners (indeed, this is a crucial step), but rather to underscore the scale and complexity of the challenge – and propose that describing precisely which data should be used for what is a critical approach for mobility equity advocacy. Fifth and finally, I would suggest that community activists should consider teaching as a critical way of linking of stakeholders with different expertise. Facing towards the technologists, community groups should consider participating in the Open Mobility Foundations’ working group calls – which are open and accessible (City of Los Angeles, n.d.). I would also encourage a concerted effort to expose technologists and individuals with technical expertise to the equity issues of greatest importance to the community. LA’s Alliance for Community Transit, for example, holds an annual Bus Tour where community members and patrons of the organization visit the communities where ACT-LA works (“Transit Justice,” 2018). Engaging the people actually writing code can help ensure that the knowledge held in communities is ultimately embedded in the digital systems being deployed.
Government
Internal Organization & Power Sharing
Governments can advance mobility equity in multiple ways. In general, they should follow the guidance offered by long-standing community groups. Key Los Angeles based organizations include the BIPOC Mobility Justice Policy Lab (Zac, 2018), ACT-LA’s Transit Justice Committee (“Transit Justice,” 2018), the Labor/Community Strategy Center (Mann, 2013), and Investing in Place (Equity Focused Communities at Metro, 2019). National organizations to learn from include the Untokening (The Untokening, n.d.), the Greenlining
113 Institute (“Making Equity Real in Mobility Pilots Toolkit,” 2019), TransForm (TransForm |, n.d.), and the Better Bike Share Partnership (Bradley, 2018). Each of these organizations offers detailed, practical recommendations for what principles should undergird equitable mobility planning – though there remains substantial room for deciding how these principles should be embedded in digital planning processes. Governments such as LADOT and Metro should work with these groups to translate these principles into machine-readable metrics. Governments should alsostrive to break down internal siloes. This is key for addressing the issues, such as affordable housing and police interactions that impact transportation systems but do not themselves involves transportation policy. LA Metro has already stepped into this role in some ways, for example through its First/Last Mile plan for the Blue Line (Blue Line FINAL, n.d.). While engaging communities, they handed out rent control materials and facilitated negotiations between community activists and the security officers. These are functions that lie at the edges of what has conventionally been considered ‘transportation planning’ – but which play a central role in ensuring the long-term success of a project. Governments should also consider mobility data not only as a free-standing resource, but one element in a whole system of datasets that collectively shed light on outcomes on the ground. Tools like CalEnviroScreen 3.0 are clumsy instruments for measuring mobility equity; a different dataset, such as the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing + Transit Affordability Index, or the Dockless Mobility Equity Map proposed by Schneider (2019) may be a more apt metric for matching the mobility technology with related transportation and housing needs. Similarly, governments should restructure other datasets to better record new mobility phenemonena. An example is LAPD’s Pedestrian and Vehicle stop data – which only captures pedestrian and vehicles, but is mum on scooter riders and cyclists. Creating room in this dataset is key to gauging how new mobility technologies have impacted community-police interactions.
Context-Aware Equity Assessments
Government should also be transparent in its definition of ‘equity’ on a particular project, and clarify why it is using that definition. To simply say “we don’t know what equity means” and avoid taking a specific stand on a project is not productive. Rather, governments should frame the discussion to say ‘we know equity is complex – and we want to find metrics that are
114 appropriate for this project. Help us know what makes sense in this case.” Metro’s Equity Platform Framework models this approach. Governments should also re-assess how power is distributed within each of their mobility pilots. Chapter 4 revealed how the presence of a well-supported Steering Committee with decision making power in the BlueLA project led to better outcomes. Replicating this type of body within other shared mobility pilots would be worthwhile. Namely, this means better compensating community partners for their time, and empowering them to engage in problem definition, and policy evaluation stages of policy formulation. In turn, it demands being willing to contest the problem definition – and consider whether the technology being proposed is actually useful to the communities they are intended to serve. In a word, governments should co-define the research question to be answered with data streams like MDS. Instead of leaping directly to, ‘how can MDS data answer the questions that we already have?’ it is worthwhile to reflect on whether they are asking the right question in the first place, and whether MDS allows them to ask a different set of questions that better respond to community needs. As D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) write, ‘Before data, there are people – people who offer up their experience to be counted and analyzed, people who perform that counting and analysis, people who visualize the data’ – and, I would add, people who bring relevant questions. Government should think of data as a tool for answering these embedded questions, rather than conjuring up a question to make data relevant. Governments should also explicitly state that their goal is not just to avoid worsening inequality, but in fact to affirmatively address it. Given the deep entanglement of transportation systems with other components of inequality in an urban context, this stance implies that equity evaluations of transportation projects should go beyond just the direct impacts (e.g. travel time saving or geographic distribution of vehicles), to consider factors such as police interactions, housing affordability, and environmental justice. This contextual approach to equity analysis also implies that transportation planner should assess the cumulative impacts of numerous transportation investments over time – and prioritize investments for communities that have sustained repeated injuries.
115 Meaningful Data Engagement
Governments should make concerted efforts to improve data literacy. Los Angeles already has some efforts like this underway (Dev, 2019). Urban Movement Labs is an independent non-profit, founded by the City of LA, which works closely with local agencies, as well as private mobility providers to drive innovation in urban transportation. UML’s Workforce Development Initiative aims to train citizens in the skills for careers in fields such as transportation and data analytics, urban air mobility, connected and automated mobility, and real-time data exchange. The city should redouble its efforts to engage key ‘equity’ communities in these initiatives, including through open-source public facing tutorials on how to engage with MDS and what it is used for. The City of LA’s GitHub page has a few resources on analyzing geospatial data – but these still are still written in a way only really legible to people with prior data analysis knowledge. A set of more basic, step-by-step guides would be a welcome addition (CityOfLosAngeles/Best-Practices, n.d.). Engaging community effectively also requires creating a more clear point of contact within data-driven agencies and partnerships. Currently, the data-driven agencies in Los Angeles are rather opaque. The Urban Movement Labs website, for example, includes only an anonymous contact form. LADOT’s Dockless Mobility Program offers some more specific points of contact for each service provider (including phone numbers and email addresses), but the section on the Mobility Data Specification is mum on which individual community members should contact to learn more (Dockless Mobility Program, 2019). One person who could fulfill with role would be the Transportation 2.0 program manager, a position proposed in the 2018 Urban Mobility in a Digital Age strategic plan. In addition to the technical management functions described in this strategic program, a key charge of this individual should be communication with community partners to understand how technological systems interact with needs on the ground. This person should also develop tools to better communicate what MDS and how it is used, including through development or support of data literacy curriculum for local advocates. For the broader public -- governments should better communicate what MDS is, how it works, and how the data is being packaged and used. Some public resources touch on it – for example in LADOT’s Technology Action Plan and the City Council reports about the Dockless
116 Mobility Pilots. Yet these resources provide only a cursory overview of how MDS actually functions, what is at stake, and how they can participate. Explaining the mechanisms itself in a public format can help bring about the ‘openness’ that is declared as a guiding principle by LADOT, OMF, and the new mobility movement at large – and suggest to the public that this is a place worth engaging. Communicating these ideas in both digital and analog format is important, too. Governments should also support meaningful data visualization. Data explorers like the one used by Austin, Texas are visually appealing – but they offer little information as to how scooters may actually be useful, or improved to better meet the needs of the community (Shared Micromobility Data Explorer, n.d.). Similarly, Uber’s New Mobility Heatmap is flashy – but the data it offers is aggregated to the hexagonal bin: a spatial unit that is convenient from a geostatistical analysis perspective, but meaningless for assessing spatial accessibility along street networks (Uber New Mobility Heatmap, 2020). Scooter trips would be better visualized if this platform also included more information on existing transportation infrastructure (it currently includes bike lanes) such as mass rapid transit lines. These would help demonstrate the mobility need that scooters are or are not meeting – and how they interact with existing systems. It would also benefit from revealing demographic information (readily available from the U.S. Census Bureau) that would indicate which communities might stand to win or lose. When visualizing data, governments should work to include some actual data analysis – not just a visual representation of where devices are located. Using again the example of Austin’s data explorer, the platform shows a choropleth distribution of trip starts and ends, but reveals little about how they have changed over time or the demographics of riders. The impact of scooters on the built environment, or the benefit they bring to users, is unclear. Data analysis, as has been argued throughout this paper, comes with its own subjective judgments, and thus his analysis should be done in consultant with community partners. And of course, tradeoffs exist between legibility and comprehensiveness. Nevertheless, including some more digested data in the visualizations can send a signal that there are valuable insights to be gained from open data – and that it is more than just a fun novelty. Increase sharing of historical operations data, aggregated in an appropriate way, is also essential. Concerns raised by the American Civil Liberties Union, Open Technology Institute, and Electronic Frontiers Foundation about the sensitivity of rider data are real and well-founded
117 (EFF, OTI Letter -- Urgent Concerns Regarding the Lack of Privacy Protections for Sensitive Personal Data Collected Via LADOT’s Mobility Data Specification, 2019). The California Electronic Communications and Privacy Act also places restrictions on the specificity with which cities can share data. Disclosing the precise coordinates of riders origins and destinations, for example, may not be appropriate. All the same, sharing aggregate historical trends can both preserve rider privacy and give advocates a resource to argue for more equitable distribution of technologies. Currently, no scooter companies do this – although precedent for this kind of historical open data-sharing already exists in LA, vis-à-vis the Metro Bike Share system. Austin, Texas provides a public API to historical scooter data via the Dockless Vehicle Trips dataset, which aggregates data to the level of council districts (Economic Development, 2018). Currently, Los Angeles only includes the analogous data in quarterly city council reports, in non-searchable PDF form (LA City Council File 17-1125, 2020), which raises the bar substantially for community groups to be able to assess how scooters are or are not responding to community needs. Finally, governments should organize more creative avenues for the integration of community-collected counter data into their plans. Metro Bike Share already does this with its station location suggestion interface, where users can flag useful locations for a new station (Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2019b). A similar approach could be helpful with regard to other equity issues – for example, allowing users to report where they had police interactions via scooter, or which streets are the most in need of infrastructure upgrades. Integrating these counter-narratives into planning processes can make for a more complete story of what is happening on the ground, as well as generate a sense of autonomy and trust among community partners.
Private Mobility Providers
Transparency
First, private mobility providers should generate an internal definition of equity, as well as a values statement. Many of the providers I spoke to described equity as a goal of their operations, but were unable to specify what definition they used as an organization. Given the complexity of ‘transportation equity’ demonstrated here, it is very possible that even internally, different staff
118 hold competing notions of what ‘equity’ means, which can produce confusion and worse outcomes on projects. Specifying what is meant by equity can lead to more effective outcomes, and also create a means for communities to hold private companies accountable. The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition’s Equity Statement is a good place to start (Commitment to Equity – LACBC, n.d.). Companies should also be transparent and limited in their definitions of equity. A scooter will not be able to completely undo historical housing discrimination or mitigate over-policing – but it may be able to make a contribution to a broader movement towards justice. Instead of dubbing a particular device as ‘equitable,’ private service providers should specify what need they are meeting for which marginalized groups, and how they believe their device can meet it. It is not reasonable for advocates to expect that a dockless bike, car or scooter company address every facet of urban inequality – but at the very least, mobility service providers should declare where they can lead, and where they can partner. Metro does this effectively in its Equity Platform Framework (Metro Equity Platform Framework, 2018). In so doing they affirm the limits of their expertise and create room for communities to contribute their lived experiences. Transparency should also be a guiding principle with respect to the sharing of operations data. One, companies should be clear about how much trips cost before riders download the app and share their data. This is a welcome addition to LADOT’s most recent iteration of the Dockless Permit (2020 Dockless Mobility Six-Month Permit Extension, 2020). Companies should also make their data handling practices legible. Instead of burying their data collection practices deep inside user agreements, companies should make it clear precisely what data is being collected, where it is being sent, and offer users the chance to opt out. If their concern about data privacy is sincere, they should extend that same concern to users and make it as easy as possible for users to decide how their data is used. Moreover, as collection of data is a major source of profit in today’s economy – so equity demands that users who are participating in a transaction are made aware of that, and have some autonomy over use of their personal information (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2018a).
Tailor technology to local needs.
119 One of the most promising elements of smart mobility is the speed with which transportation systems can adapted to new information. Already, private mobility providers adjust the way they rebalance both docked and dockless scooters in real-time shifts in demand. This reveals an ability to respond to subtle shifts in user patterns, and an ability to adjust operations as objectives shift. It also implies that it is within private mobility providers’ power to tailor algorithms for local context. For example – if a participatory process with one city reveals that racial disparities are particularly acute in the mobility sector, while racial disparities are most important in a different city – the algorithm should be adjusted accordingly. This could be as simple as changing the weights of variables in a spatial model; requiring only a few key strokes by the person in charge. Responding to hyper-local context to this degree also implies that private mobility providers should ensure that engineers and people with technical expertise are encouraged (or required) to actually tour the communities where their technologies are being deployed. Partnerships with community organizations could help engineers understand, precisely, what problems they are trying to solve – and also offer technical solutions that may not occur to staff members whose sole task is community engagement and equity. This approach could also improve community relations, as members of the public have the chance to meet the individuals constructing data systems – and see that they are the product of human invention and value judgments, rather than some infallible measure of reality. Showing up to events like ACT-LA’s annual Bus Tour is critical for generating the awareness needed for the rest of the approaches outlined here. Private providers may complain that tailoring their practice to local needs makes it prohibitively difficult to do business. But we must ask, compared to what? Already, municipal governance is fragmented and idiosyncratic – with each different city promulgating different regulations. MDS, as a governing tool, is a tremendous leap towards standardization. Provided that local additions to and modifications of the scheme adhere to the same syntax, technological conventions, and are implemented in the same repository and coding language, it should not be difficult for companies to adjust their business strategies accordingly. This is particularly so if they are already using proprietary algorithms. If they are not crafting policies by hand, it should be relatively simple for private mobility providers to simply integrate another consideration into their spatial model.
120 Contribute to a more equitable mobility system overall
Finally, private mobility providers should recognize that their devices are just one part of an integrated system – which depends on multiple providers, types of technology, and infrastructure to operate. Mobility service providers should provide resources to support the development of infrastructure on which their devices depend. For example, providers should not take measures not just to provide scooters and let riders fend for themselves, but also contribute funds to build bike lanes or parking areas to enable their use. Currently this function is being fulfilled by cities who provide the infrastructure to support profit-seeking enterprises. Lyft’s Community-Driven Placemaking partnership with TransformCA is an example of this type of initiative, in which Lyft is providing funding to the Scraper Bike Team and Transform CA – non-profits in Oakland CA – who will guide the implementation of public funds for parklets and bikeshare stations (TransForm and Lyft Announce New Partnership for Transportation Equity in Oakland, 2019). This is all the more important, as the micro-mobility industry shows signs of financial distress and will rely more heavily on public support in order to keep operating in the future. Private mobility providers should further support integration of mobility-as-a-service devices. This could include joining forces with other companies, to share data through platforms like the Transit App, as well as facilitating integration with public services, the way BlueLA did with LA Metro’s TAP Card. The ‘open mobility approach’ will ultimately produce more equitable outcomes, by enabling more user choice and more competition, than would the ‘walled garden’ approach which is evidence of monopoly-seeking behavior that could ultimately constrain user choices (Zipper, 2019). If the goal of private mobility companies’ devices is to help people get where they need to go – as their marketing materials suggestion – collaboration with other companies as well as citizens must be key to their work.
Conclusion
The inequities that exist in today’s transportation systems were not accidental, or inevitable – rather, they grew out of decades of planning that prioritized values of efficiency and speed over equity and justice (Crockett, 2018; Rothstein, 2017). Today’s planners can make
121 different decisions. Smart mobility systems and open data offer potential to serve marginalized groups in ways that that previous systems have not, but only if transportation planners to amend power imbalances. Code shift highlights this opportunity, and challenges planners to rethink what participation means in a digital age, as well as reflect critically on what is implied by the term ‘equity.’ I have outlined a handful of approaches for better community participation in the design of data-driven institutions, which only just scratch the surface of a much deeper literature on participatory design, data literacy, and innovation from the margins (Buolamwini, 2019, 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2020; Dev, 2019; Green, 2019a; Noble, 2018). Code shift is, most fundamentally, a theory of practice. Hard-wiring equity into smart mobility systems is an ambitious, yet critical, undertaking at this moment of disruption. In tandem with open data systems, new transportation technologies offer cities an opening to advance towards a more just and sustainable world -- but it depends on planners to make this so. As futurist Peter Ellyard summarizes,
The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found, but made.
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