Quantitative Approach to Assess Social Equity in Road Networks

Highway agencies are increasingly directed to broadly incorporate social equity goals into infrastructure planning. To better accommodate these goals in their decision making, it is essential for practitioners to assess the current level of social equity in road network performance. However, social equity in road network performance has primarily been assessed qualitatively in the existing literature, making objective assessments difficult. This work addresses this gap by proposing a quantitative approach to assessing social equity in a road network. This is achieved by formulating an assessment approach and exploring numerical measures to evaluate social equity for road network performance. The proposed approach is implemented on the street network of two cities in the United States: Seattle and New York. With the help of GIS-based visualization, the street network is studied in conjunction with the socioeconomic demographics of the city to gauge its current levels of social equity. The formulations and measures proposed in this study expand the use of quantitative metrics of social equity to support decision making. An objective evaluation of social equity levels can assist needs assessment and guide decision making.