Public Transportation in New York City, A Demographic.

Public transportation, usually funded by the government, is one of the main support to lower-income Americans in urban areas. Without access to cars, many Americans rely on public transit on a daily basis. According to a  report  by the Department of Transportation, 50% of the trips done by passengers in the US were family with a household income of less than $20,000. This shows the importance of public transportation to lower-income families in America. Serving for the people, the government that runs this 8 million people city needs to make sure that there is equality in access to public transportation regardless of race and income while balancing the cost that is associated with the daily operation.

In this report, we want to look at the relationship between income, ethnicity, population, and type of housing with access to transportation in order to accurately evaluate equality in public transportation access in New York City.

Income is a huge factor in the "choice" of transportation. Without access to public transportation, lower-income Americans not only loses the freedom of transport but also the opportunity to improve their quality of life by seeking better paying job elsewhere. They are essentially trapped in a "transit desert."

• Transit Desert: Where residents have at least a 15-minute walk to the nearest subway or rail station. (Defined in this  report  by the New York Times)

To investigate the income distribution as well as the transit desert location, I utilized the following sources:

• Income Distribution: American Community Survey by US Census Tract
• Transit Desert: 15-minute walking distance (3 quarter-mile) buffer around stations

From our findings above, we can see that the dark grey area is the "transit desert" in New York City. Because of New York's massive subway transit network, more of the neighborhoods, regardless of income, are within a 15-minute radius from one or more transit stations. In the Bronx area, which is located in the north of New York, we can see that the average income is relatively lower than the other area. However, the neighborhoods in the Bronx are well covered with transit stations like the rest of the city. However, on the east side of New York City (Queens), where the Long Island Railway passes, we can see that many neighborhoods are located in the transit desert. We will investigate that in a bit.

From the map, we can conclude that there isn't noticeable discrimination against lower-income households in New York City in terms of transportation access.

Additionally, below is an interesting report was done by the Magazine The New Yorker which demonstrated the income inequality by the subway line. It details the median income where the subway station locates by Census tract, which is the same as what we did in the published map. Very interesting perspective for people who want to learn more about inequality and transportation in NYC.

In this part, we examine the distribution of different ethnicities populations and compare it with the access to transportation and "transit desert" distribution.

The map above compares the distribution of African Americans and the coverage of New York's transportation network. African Americans account for around 25% of the population in New York City according to the American Community Survey in 2019. From the picture below, we can see that the majority of the African American population is centralized in the Bronx Area (The northern tip) and by Jamaica Bay (The southern bay with numerous islands). When comparing that to the transportation access, we can see that the public transportation service covers most of the city and most African Americans enjoy access to the New York Subway as well as the Long Island Railway. However, it seems like the east side of the city (Queens Area) suffers from transportation coverage. While the Long Island Railway passes through the black neighborhoods, the coverage is not as ideal as the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn.

We can see similar patterns for access to transportation for the White Americans. White Americans are 44% of the population in New York City. Most of the White American households have access to the subway network as seen below. However, we observe similar patterns in the east side of the city, where the major railway transportation is the Long Island Railway and the coverage of such is not as broad

From what we observed, there are no evidence of racial bias against the certain ethnicities. However, we observe a coverage gap due to geographical location.

From what we found in the comparison of transportation and income as well as ethnicity, we noticed that while there is no obvious discrimination against income or race, there are several transit deserts on the east side of New York City. I suspect that it is due to population density. I collected the population data from the American Community Survey and the transportation access data from Open Data NYC.

From the map below, we can see that the transit desert area are often places with low population density. Usually below 20,000 people per square mile.

This is a sensible reason because in order for public transportation is sustain in terms of revenue and profit, it is important that the services are provided in densely populated area. According to MTA (New York's Transit Authority)'s fiscal report, the New York City Transit (Subway) has been consistently losing half a billion dollar a year. If services were to be expanded into lower density neighborhood, the financial status of MTA will further deteriorate.

The population density is also reflected in the type of housing. In the map below, the blue land is low-density (single-family) housing while the green lands are high-density housing. These types of zoning are determined by the city. We can see that most of the single-family housing is located on the east side of the city, which matches with the low population density. The transit desert in this case covers mostly the low-density housing due to the low demand. Similar to the population density map above.

From what we have researched, we can see that the transportation service that the city provides to its inhabitants is provided to people regardless of race and income. However, because of the feature and limit of public massive transportation, there are certain areas that are not covered. This is mainly due to the low population density derived from the zoning by the city. Therefore, we can conclude that the transit system in New York is a combination of careful consideration of cost as well as demographics.