Equity in Transportation Research

As C2SMART heads into its sixth year of projects, we seek to develop and fund projects which will be bigger and bolder than ever before. We are looking for projects which showcase possibility, address complex challenges, broaden collaboration, and directly strengthen the transportation field. Research and development projects will be external industry/agency driven, including an additional emphasis and reserve of funding for non-traditional research in the form of workshops and workforce development. There will also be dedicated funding for student-focused initiatives including cooperative education programs, student-led research projects, student entrepreneurship, and summer programs for graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 students.

Across and underlying each of these themes, however, will be an emphasis on transportation equity. Each proposal will, in some form, need to be prepared to discuss how the project will directly address equity concerns, or else include an equity performance measure of some kind.

To help researchers conceptualize what this means, and to set guidance around how UTCs can lead the way in solving transportation equity problems, C2SMART will be hosting an Equity in UTC Research panel to:

1. Better educate our network of PIs and researchers towards ensuring that each project has a meaningful equity component and how to  factor equity concerns into its overall methodology,
2. Directly engage with and answer outstanding transportation equity problems that are not being addressed by the wider research community, and
3. Engage with both traditional and non-traditional equity partners on our projects.

POST-EVENT RESOURCES 

• Equity in Transportation Research
• Speaker presentation: Luis Artieda Presentation
• Speaker presentation: Alice Grossman Presentation
• Speaker presentation: David Bragdon Presentation
• Speaker presentation: Amy Fong Presentation

SPEAKERS

Amy Fong is a mathematical statistician at the Department of Labor Office of Disability Employment Policy. Amy does research on the employment outcomes and labor force participation of people with disabilities. She is interested in how access to services, utilities and the built environment (such as public transportation and broadband internet) affect the well-being and socioeconomic status of people with disabilities. She is set to discuss how the US Census Bureau measures disability and why disability is a function of the built environment; illustrate how disability prevalence (rates of disability) by age, race and gender varies across New York City; and explain where researchers can access the data themselves.

Alice Grossman is a Research Scientist with the Center for Advancing Research in Transportation Emissions, Energy, and Health at Texas Transportation Institute. Her research and project management experience covers various areas of multimodal transportation with a focus accessibility, technology in transportation, vulnerable road user safety, and performance measurement. She was previously a Senior Policy Analyst at the Eno Center for Transportation and is currently a Science, Technology, and Policy Fellow with the Inter-American Institute for Global Change and was a 2020-2021 Science Technology and Policy Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS STPF) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Luis Artieda is an Inclusion and Sustainability expert with 10 years of experience in development at an international and local level. He focuses on the intersection of community economic development, inclusion, and sustainability. He was responsible for the strategic launch of the global campaign Cities For All, as well as organizing diverse stakeholder events and high-level roundtables to global international forums (UNHabitat World Urban Forum, Forum of Latin American Ministries of Housing, UN High-Level Political Forum, etc). He has facilitated high-level capacity-building workshops about inclusion and sustainability to city officials such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Abu Dhabi, as well as the Inter-American Development, World Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

David Bragdon has been at the helm of TransitCenter since 2013, leading a NYC-based civic foundation dedicated to improving public transportation to make cities more just, sustainable, and prosperous. TransitCenter conducts applied research and supports community-based advocacy. David spent the early part of his career in the maritime and aviation freight industries. During 2002-10, he was elected to two terms as President of the Metro Council, the regional government for the Portland, Oregon area. He served as Director of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability 2010-12. Transportation is a passion and a vocation for David. He drove a taxi cab for a year, has jump-seated a 747 freighter into a remote airport in the far eastern steppes of the then-USSR, rode a Dutch container ship up the Strait of Malacca, and twice (once for five minutes in Minnesota and once for ten minutes in Iowa) has been allowed to run the engineer’s throttle on freight trains. He likes to move big things.