Exploring Road Infrastructure Inequities Across the Conterminous U.S.

Keywords: equity, cyberGIS, road infrastructure, evacuation
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Recent work in geography has examined how systemic biases and inequities can seep into seemingly objective data and analyses. In the context of disaster management and evacuation planning, these biases can cost lives. Despite this, much of the literature on evacuation planning and modeling does not account for equity or assesses equity as an afterthought. In this work, we analyze the road network structure across the conterminous United States and compare our results with social vulnerability metrics to uncover structural biases within the road infrastructure. These biases are crucial because they may create inequitable evacuation results when equity is not explicitly considered. Using cyberGIS techniques, we were able to parallelize and scale our analysis to calculate evacuation vulnerability for the conterminous United States. Our findings show statistically significant associations between evacuation vulnerability and social vulnerability, highlighting biases in U.S. road infrastructure, and demonstrating the need to explicitly consider equity when planning for or modeling evacuations.