Transportation, Urban Planning, and Racial Bias: Insights from Professor Michael Smart

Transcript:

Stuart Shapiro
Welcome to EJB Talks. I’m Stuart Shapiro, the dean of the Bloustein School. And the purpose of this podcast is to highlight the work of my colleagues and our alumni in the world in the fields of policy, planning and health are doing to make the world a better place.

For our fifth episode of this tenth season of EJB Talks, we’re talking to Professor Michael Smart from our world-ranked Urban Planning Program. Mike works in transportation planning, which is one of the strongest parts of that urban planning program. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Michael Smart
Thanks for having me, Stuart.

Stuart Shapiro
We’re excited to have you here. And we almost always start with origin questions. So let me ask you how you got interested in transportation in general, and how people use cars in particular?

Michael Smart
Yeah, so I’ve always been, I think like a lot of people in the transportation field. I’ve always been drawn to transportation, even since I was a little kid. Some of the earliest photographs of me are at a train museum and things like that. But more specifically, how I got interested in transportation and poverty, which is my area, is right out of college, I worked with people coming out of the prison system in New York City. And a big part of my job was helping these folks find and then keep jobs.

And one of the things that I kept noticing was that, many people would lose their jobs because of transportation issues. And these were folks who had very complicated spatial lives. They had, you know, we’d often find them a job somewhere in New Jersey, they lived in a shelter in the Bronx, they had a parole officer to visit in some other part of the city, and perhaps a sick mom in Brooklyn or something like that. And their lives were made much more complicated by the unreliable transportation system in, what is really one of the best places in the country, or the best place in the country to live without a car.

But you know, if particularly if you’re just out of the prison system and are working a low-wage job, employers are likely to let you go if you arrive late to work a few times. And so that happened again and again. And so I got interested in the role of transportation and economic upward mobility through that work and applied to a pursue master’s, and then a Ph.D., in urban planning to investigate those questions.

Stuart Shapiro
Right, that’s fascinating. I don’t think I ever knew that about your background. And as you were talking, I was gonna say, yeah, if that’s a problem in New York, it is a huge problem in New Jersey. And I would assume even more so in much of the rest of the country where there is no public transit to speak.

Michael Smart
Right. Yes.

Stuart Shapiro
So I want to talk about two of your papers, in particular, that I want to highlight. And thinking about the older one first. When you went to look at this issue, what was the conventional wisdom about people moving to more transit-accessible areas, like say New York?

Michael Smart
Yeah, so this paper on location affordability. That’s kind of the buzzword around it. Came out of an interest I had, or a suspicion I had, in reading the literature. Which throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a lot of, sort of, movement around a concept whereby–it comes out of classical urban economics–that people if they, you know, live somewhere that is more accessible, they will spend less on transportation and therefore can spend more on their housing or really anything else. But the focus is typically on housing.

And this notion made its way into policy. There were location-efficient mortgages that were introduced, whereby if a family or homebuyer bought in certain parts of a region that were deemed to be transit accessible, they could borrow more money for the home that they were buying. And so, this notion that people would save money if they moved to a transit-rich neighborhoods struck me as being somewhat suspicious or unlikely to be true. Just given what I knew about the United States. Where it’s, it’s sort of a stylized fact that once you own a car, you use it for just about everything.

And so, I looked at the data that people were using, which was all simulated data. It was, you know, not unreasonable, but was not based on actual survey data of what people were spending on transportation or housing. And I thought, you know, this looks a little too tidy. It looks like the conclusions are sort of driving the data. And so I set out with my co-author, Nick Klein, who’s at Cornell now, to use actual expenditure data, coupled with information about the neighborhoods where people live, to test whether this is true. And this was…we were sort of lucky that we were able to investigate this question just as a bunch of really great datasets were kind of coming on the academic market, so to speak.

And so we use high-quality transit-richness data coming out of the University of Minnesota. David Levinson and his team there put together that, using some of the data that like Google Maps uses to give you directions on public transportation. And then we used a long-standing dataset, The Panel Study of Income Dynamics to look at — it’s a true panel, so it follows people and their descendants, even since 1968 — and we were able to look at what does happen when people move from a less transit-rich place to a more transit-rich place.

And unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for me, and sort of citations and so forth, it turns out that the expectation that people had, and the simulated data that people were using, were wildly inaccurate. And that people who move to transit-rich places do not systematically spend more money on transportation. That there is essentially no correlation there at all. And that it really is the observation that we have. And we look across the United States and say, you know, people who live near transit today are spending less on transportation. That’s not driven by the fact of transit, it’s driven by the economic geography of the United States. Which is that, those places are also places where very low-income people live. And so they’re spending less on absolutely everything. But when we look at people who make that move to a transit-rich place, we see no effect at all.

Stuart Shapiro
And that’s… they keep their cars when they move from a from a transit-poor to a transit-rich area, if I get what you’re saying there?

Michael Smart
Yeah, so on average, people tend to keep their cars and there’s just enough people also who give up one of their two cars, but then they’re spending more on parking. And we looked at this a lot of different ways. This is something that I like to do in my own research. If you’re running a statistical model, it’s very easy to run it 10, 20, or 30, different ways. It’s all just code. And so we looked at a lot of different subsets of people, including the most extreme movers, people who move really from the middle of nowhere to the most transit-rich parts of this country. We looked at the very low-income people who you know, sort of stand the most to gain from from giving up a car, and spending less on transportation. We look just at gasoline itself. So just expenditures on gasoline. And so in all of these measures, we saw no systematic difference at all really. The R-squares are below .001. It’s really, there’s just there’s no pattern in the data whatsoever.

Stuart Shapiro
I love what you said about conclusions driving data. And one of the reasons I’ve always been an empiricist is because I hate the idea of conclusions driving data. And I liked the idea of data driving conclusions. And with that in mind, let’s move on to your your more recent work. And you’ve looked at a new way, a way that did not exist 10 or 15 years ago, of gathering data, which is using traffic camera data. What can you get from that kind of data?

Michael Smart
Yeah, so we used a couple of different new datasets to look at a question that has been studied quite a bit. So in this case, we sort of, you know, we’re adding to an existing literature that had come to a pretty strong conclusion. And that conclusion is that, the police stops of people driving cars are racially biased. And there’s been a lot of evidence for that over the years in various different settings. And using really clever methodologies. We had two new data sets that we used. One is traffic cameras, so red light cameras and speeding cameras in the city of Chicago. And another is data culled by a private company using cell phone data.

So all of the location-based services that we use, including Facebook, and anything that’s tracking where you are, which is essentially everything on your smartphone. Those data are aggregated and put together in a dataset that can estimate the racial composition of drivers. And separately transit users. That’s something we haven’t looked at yet. But on particular roads at particular times of the day. And so with these two datasets we were able to look at. One is, how much of the effect is about the human being, the police officer? So we could compare police officers to traffic cameras. And the other is what’s called exposure data. Which is something that’s very hard to get, typically. Which is, just what is the percentage of people driving on a road at a particular time of day who are white, black, whatever it is that you’re looking for.

So we can establish rates of stopping by the police. And so using these two datasets, we were able to show I think, pretty conclusively, that compared to… first of all, compared to traffic cameras, which don’t know anything about who’s driving the car, they just know if the vehicles speeding, or if it runs a red light, that police appear to be racially biased. And we were also able to show that these, the disproportionate stopping of black drivers was not just because there were more black drivers that happened to be on that road, at that time, of that day. And so this, again, I think is pretty different in what it adds to our understanding of a problem than the previous paper we talked about, which was kind of turning an idea on its head. This is adding to something that, quite frankly, we already knew the answer to, but it was providing even better data. And providing, I think more bulletproof evidence that can be used then by advocates or in courts or wherever you might want to use data. This is sort of stronger evidence than previously had been out there.

Stuart Shapiro
And you know, when I think about the purposes of academic research, one of the reasons I like that you sort of highlighted these two papers here is that, both of those things are purposes of academic research, right?

Michael Smart
Right.

Stuart Shapiro
Questioning existing wisdom, and also providing stronger evidence for what as you put, you know, we sort of know to be true. And that’s not to demean any of the work that went before you on the racial profiling data. It’s all good. But what you’ve done is sort of, put some more cement around around that relationship. And one thing I didn’t mention in the intro is that Mike is also the director of our doctoral program. So I do want to, before we wrap up, ask a couple questions about the research process there and educating doctoral students. When you go into a project, are you sort of thinking, I want to, you know, I want to upend existing wisdom, or I want to confirm? Or what sort of drives the questions you try to answer?

Michael Smart
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s something we just talked about. We had a doctoral research conference just a few days ago. And my opening remarks, I sort of challenged the students to think about what the purpose of research is. And it can be a lot of different things. And I think one of the cool things about working as an academic is that you can take these things as they come to you. And so sometimes my research ideas come because I read something and I think, you know, gosh, that doesn’t make sense to me, or, you know, I don’t think that that’s a valid conclusion. And I think there’s a better way of looking at it.

Other times, maybe it’s a new phenomenon, something new that’s happening in the world. There’s a tremendous amount of research happening right now in transportation just because there are new technologies. You know, a plethora of new ways of getting around. So that can be a reason for doing it. You know, we also do research in service of, for example, the state of New Jersey. Sometimes there are research questions that come from outside that piqued my interest. And so I follow through with those.

We’ve done some research for the state recently looking at homelessness on the transit system. Looking at transit-oriented development in the state. So it’s a really… it’s a cool part of being an academic that you can kind of occupy these different roles. You’re not just a consultant, you know, answering questions that others have, though, that’s part of it occasionally. You also get to just continue to read and see what other people are thinking, and respond to that. And sometimes I tell my doctoral students, you know, the most sustaining kind of research question, the one that keeps me kind of working the hardest and keeps my interest the longest is one that comes from a place of, I should think of a better word than this, but a place of anger. Where I just look at some, you know, some conclusion that’s been reached and think, you know, that’s not… that can’t be true. Or, that’s that’s poorly thought through, or the evidence is just not there for the conclusion that people are reaching.

And so yeah, (laughing) that’s, that’s oftentimes where my research ideas come from, is through reading. And I don’t mean just academic work, but also a sort of, you know, sort of think tank or nonprofit. You know, the kind of the others who are doing sort of policy and urban planning work outside of academia. I get just as many ideas from them as I do from reading standard journals.

Stuart Shapiro
Yeah, I might even expand on this. I think I talked about this at one of those doctoral lunches a long time ago, that one cannot exaggerate the importance of always reading. And I think it’s, you’re right, it’s not just academics. It’s not just, sort o,f things in your area. Just reading what’s going on in the world every day. Reading the newspapers, reading a blog, whatever source you want to get that from. I still read newspapers, but I’m very old-fashioned. It just, it will continually spark this thought process in you.

So let me end. You’ve touched on this a little bit. But let me give you one more chance to hit at the question of sort, of what you want your doctoral students to sort of come out of a doctoral education with in terms of the way they think about and approach research.

Michael Smart
Yeah, I think one thing that I stress to my students is that, the research that we do should be meaningful. Which is to say that it should be answering a pressing question. Something that there’s a reason to be investigating, that has a real impact on quality of life, or survivability of the planet, or something pressing. That it should be of interest to you, otherwise, you won’t sustain yourself through it. And that, you know, the research question has some timeliness to it, which I guess is related to the pressing question. But that it’d be something that can be used, either today or in the near future by someone.

And when I say used by someone, I think pretty broadly about that. So it doesn’t have to just be applied research. But I think a fair amount of the work that I’ve done, including this paper we talked about on location affordability. That some of the primary applications for this type of research is an education itself. So in teaching current and upcoming students about how the world functions. And so I think that those questions can also be pressing and timely as well.

Stuart Shapiro
Yeah, and in a program where you’re teaching planning or public policy or public health adjacent questions, this is the that approach. That’s the those criteria you outlined, I think are particularly important. Mike, thanks so much for for coming on and joining us today.

Michael Smart
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Stuart Shapiro
Also, a big thanks to our producer Tamara Swedberg and to Karyn Olsen. We will see you next week with another talk from another expert at the Bloustein School. Until then, stay safe.