Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Disaggregated data is essential to transportation equity

Investments in infrastructure and services can advance racial equity, but success depends on having a clear understanding of each community’s needs.

Racial equity and disaggregated data

Disaggregated data is one of the most powerful tools public agencies can use to assess inequities in the built environment. It’s not enough to know the demographics of neighborhoods, census tracts, or transit riders as a group — a fact the Biden administration notes in its Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity:

Revealing and responding to transportation inequities

Some inequities in transportation are clear, like major highways cutting through poor neighborhoods while bike and pedestrian investments concentrate in wealthier ones. Other inequities are less obvious, but just as real. Here are a few examples of how high-quality data can assist agencies in their efforts to improve transportation equity.

Replica visuals show where low-income Latino residents in the Bronx work or go to school, allowing further equity studies of how well transit systems serve these residents.
Replica shows where walking and biking trips are most common in El Paso.
The Brookings Institution used Replica to study commuting patterns of majority-minority tracts in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

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Replica is a data platform for the built environment. Our mission is to make complex and rapidly-changing cities easier to understand.

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Replica

Replica is a data platform for the built environment. Our mission is to make complex and rapidly-changing cities easier to understand.