Promoting transportation equity through ethics-aware transit design

Funded by Northwestern University, 2022 – 2023

Transportation is a well-known barrier for many to access opportunities critical to their life outcomes, such as employment, education, and healthcare.  Vulnerable population in marginalized communities – low-income residents, minorities, and seniors – rely on public transportation to get around due to financial and/or physical constraints.  However, public transit systems rarely meet their mobility needs adequately.  As a result, the lack of accessibility disproportionately burdens marginalized communities.  This inequality arises in part because traditional transit design methodologies almost exclusively focus on the tradeoff between the level of service, as measured by mobility, and efficiency, as measured by the cost/budget, with little considerations given to accessibility and equity.  This project will develop and test a new strategic transit design methodology that places accessibility and equity at the center of the trade-off.  Importantly, the design will be ethics-aware in the sense that it embeds ethics theories as a guiding principle.  The current transit design paradigm is implicitly and decidedly informed by utilitarianism.  This project will examine how other ethics principles (e.g., egalitarianism) might tilt the balance of the underlying design trade-offs in favor of the disadvantaged.  To put the methodology into practice, we will conduct a comprehensive case study using public and proprietary data collected in the Chicago metropolitan region.   The project promises to bridge a critical gap in operationalizing ethical theories in engineering practice.  The results will help decision-makers better understand and compare the outcomes and social costs of various equity-enhancing transportation designs.