Roads in the City of Syracuse have it rough. Every day, thousands of cars drive along them, they endure brutal weather conditions and let’s not forget the copious amounts of road salt used to help drivers during the region’s tough winters. During the construction season, the City of Syracuse undertakes road reconstruction projects to repave and patch some of its roads.
But how does the city decide which roads should undergo reconstruction? Earlier this year, API worked with Corey Driscoll Dunham, the Chief Operating Officer of the City of Syracuse, the Department of Public Works (DPW), and the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council (SMTC) to examine the City's road reconstruction process, better understand how factors like race and income are correlated with the roads the city has paved in the past and build safeguards into the process to ensure that historically under-served populations and demographic groups are not overlooked by the city’s road reconstruction efforts.
The Data Behind Road Reconstruction
Since 2019, the city worked with SMTC to introduce a data-driven approach to the City’s pavement prioritization process. To start, SMTC produces a rating for the condition of every road segment in the area. This rating is then weighted and combined with additional variables (daily traffic, proximity to major institutions, snow emergency routes, etc.) to produce a metric called the priority score for every segment in the city, with higher scores denoting roads that SMTC rates as a higher priority for reconstruction. Road segments are then removed from the list based on several additional factors (whether the road was paved in the previous year, Save the Rain projects, roads that are part of the upcoming I-81 project, etc.) which reduces the finalized list to around eight hundred road segments. SMTC provides the city with the twenty-five percent of remaining road segments with the highest priority score, around two-hundred road segments, as their recommended list to draw from to determine road reconstruction projects for the upcoming construction season.
The City and DPW take SMTC’s largely quantitative list of recommended road segments and weigh various operational considerations to produce a finalized list of roads for reconstruction. Early on, API knew we wanted to introduce equity to the process at a quantitative point before the non-quantifiable operational considerations entered the decision-making. With a better understanding of the process, it made the most sense to introduce equity as a new component of the priority score.
But the question remained, how should equity be factored into the equation?
Introducing Equity into Road Reconstruction
Syracuse is not the first city that has considered equity in its road reconstruction process, and in an effort to learn from our colleagues in other municipalities, we reached out to a handful of cities around the country. Drawing inspiration from the work of cities like Oakland, CA, we created a tool called the equity score, a metric that measures the proportion of historically underserved residents living in a census tract for every census tract in the city.
The equity score considers seven factors, with the largest weight on race and income. The percentage of residents below the poverty line and the percentage of non-white residents each account for twenty-five percent of the final value. The score also considers the elderly population, the population of single-parent households, the population of residents living with disabilities, residents with low educational attainment, and the number of rent-burdened households, with each of these variables accounting for ten percent of the total equity score.
The intent behind the equity score is to produce a quantitative measure of the proportion of residents from historically under-served populations residing within each census tract in the city. A census tract can receive a score from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating a greater proportion of residents from historically under-served populations residing within that tract while lower values indicate the opposite. For instance, a score of 1 would indicate that the entire population of a census tract was comprised of historically under-served populations.
Using the American Community Surveys 5-Year Estimates from the US Census produced a score for the fifty-five census tracts in the city ranging from 0.15 to 0.61 with an average score of 0.39. In the map below, darker colors indicate higher scores while lighter colors indicate lower scores.
With an equity score calculated for every census tract in the city, the next step was to determine how much weight equity should have in the City’s pavement prioritization model. To better understand the impact of incorporating equity into the pavement prioritization process, we compared SMTC’s selection of the top twenty-five percent of road segments with comparable lists with equity factored in at different weights.
As the equity score is given a larger and larger weight in the final calculation, the number of shared road segments with the list produced by SMTC that is just the priority score decreases. At ten percent equity score, ninety percent priority score, just under ninety percent of road segments on the two lists are shared. When the equity score and the priority score have equal weights in the calculation, fifty percent, just under sixty-five percent of road segments are shared when comparing the two lists. When the calculation is ninety percent equity score and only ten percent priority score, only a quarter of the road segments are shared with the list that is purely priority score. Finally, the last column, the list produced by selecting based on 100% equity and none of SMTC’s scoring, indicates that just over thirty percent of recommended road segments in 2022 come from census tracts with the highest proportion of historically underserved residents. *1
After consulting with the Mayor, Deputy Mayor, and other senior staff members, the decision was made to incorporate the equity score at 50% while also increasing the weight on road conditions to ensure it remains one of the driving factors in deciding which road projects the City undertakes each year. This new model will be used by SMTC as they prepare the priority score for next year’s road reconstruction projects.
Looking Beyond Road Reconstruction in 2023:
The purpose of this project was not to reinvent the city’s road reconstruction process or introduce equity as the sole determining factor in road reconstruction, but rather to place safeguards into the process to ensure the city does not overlook historically underserved populations. By learning from the work of our colleagues across the country, building our own equity metric, and analyzing the city’s road reconstruction projects, we devised a way to incorporate equity into the road reconstruction process as a major data point. Furthermore, while the motivation behind developing the equity score was so that it could be a consideration in the road reconstruction process, it is also a useful tool that can be utilized in future projects with a spatial investment consideration.
1 We conducted similar analyses using the priority score data for the previous two years and found similar results