Photo: City of Pittsburgh

What will mobility equity look like in practice?

27 September 2021

by Christopher Carey

As cities start to build back after the pandemic, equity is emerging as one of the most pressing concerns for transport policymakers.

With a 2015 Harvard study pinpointing access to reliable transportation as the biggest factor for determining economic mobility, it’s not hard to see why.

At a recent Cities Today online roundtable, transit leaders from across North America discussed the shift in how cities interpret equity, and how this might impact and influence decisions on the ground.

Mobility is key

“Transportation mobility is the key to social and economic mobility, and transportation mobility is wildly unequal across our city and many other cities in the US,” said Karina Ricks, who until last week was Director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI) and is moving on to serve as the Associate Administrator for Research, Innovation and Demonstration with the Federal Transit Administration in Washington, D.C.

“No household should have to spend more than 40 percent of their income on housing and basic mobility, that’s the ceiling that we should set.”

Pittsburgh’s DOMI recently announced the creation of two new initiatives designed to boost equitable access to mobility and expand the number of services on offer across the city.

Move PGH will see the creation of 50 mobility hubs where people can access all the city’s travel options – buses, bikes, mopeds and e-scooters – in one place.

The city says the programme is the country’s first integrated mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) project that connects traditional and emerging low-cost, shared transportation options into a single, easy-to-use system.

“We have a lot of offerings: bike, car and scooter-sharing services; carpooling; ride-hailing; and of course the trip-mapping services, but they all reside in their own silos,” Ricks added.

“So you can be a bike-share member, or a scooter-share member, but unless you’re really a savvy consumer and technologically savvy, you might not be able to really navigate that system as a singular form.”

“What the Pittsburgh mobility collective did was to take those different modes, and put them together into an integrated system.”

The second programme, Universal Basic Mobility, will provide up to 100 low-income residents with monthly transit subscriptions and shared mobility services for six months.

The initiatives are the result of more than two years of work by a public-private-nonprofit partnership led by the city’s DOMI and built around existing public transit and bike-share schemes.

Traditionally a car-centric city, Pittsburgh’s model will serve as a key testing ground for the expansion of people-centric MaaS initiatives in the US.

Charlotte’s Area Transit System is currently assessing the role mobility hubs could play in creating a more even distribution of services around the city for those without a vehicle.

Jason Lawrence, Senior Transportation Planner, Charlotte Area Transit System, said: “In the next year, once we finish a study about defining mobility hubs across Charlotte, we will have a typology of design standards that will hopefully include a kit-of-parts strategy enabling quick deployment of hubs.”

Strategic approach

In Houston, work is underway to develop a strategic approach towards equity that can incorporate other city departments to work towards the same goals.

“If you look at all the vision plans [of different agencies], their guiding documents, almost everybody uses the same words,” said David Fields, Chief Transportation Planner, City of Houston.

“Everybody in transportation believes in safety, and to some extent equity and sustainability, but we’ve actually realised those words don’t mean the same thing to everybody.

“What we’ve worked really hard is to figure out is what each agency is willing to trade off for to achieve their priorities – it is really easy to say what you want, but it is much harder to have your feet on the fire of what you’re willing to give up.”

Renewed focus

A renewed focus on equity has also become apparent in the private sector, with firms dedicating increasing amounts of time and resources to boosting initiatives for underserved communities.

Simple changes, like a more even distribution of micromobility services to cover all neighbourhoods, have increased during the pandemic.

“Of course we all want exciting innovations in mobility, but it’s clear that there is no future of mobility without equity,” said Angela Miller, Specialist Leader, Deloitte.

“Without the policy aspect to this, we’re likely to make decisions that are not necessarily thinking about the customer equitably.

“By that I mean if we allow start-ups to define where and how they’re going to incorporate their services or they roll over the overall transportation policy or an area, that’s a problem.”

Image: Move PGH

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