Fellowship Spotlight: Bonnie Fan

The following was written by Bonnie Fan as a part of the 2021 TechShift Summer Fellowship program.

PHOTO: https://www.pittsburghforpublictransit.org/media-roundup-photos-covid-fare-relief-rally-report-release/

Pittsburghers for Public Transit (PPT) is a grassroots organization that mobilizes and catalyzes community action towards preserving transit as a public right accessible for all. Due to historical colonial, inequitable urban renewal planning, Pittsburgh is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Coming out of that history, the agenda of redevelopment pursued by the city has largely centered private interests and developers, at the expense of displaced residents and reduced access and connectivity. With a broad chorus of neighborhood voices, PPT has acted as a key voice pushing for bottom-up agency and visions in contrast to top-down trends of tech-based gentrification and displacement.

I came to PPT after working in transit and seeing the slowness of pushing for internal change. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, I also closely contended with the serious impacts of technology on communities for which the university is often directly culpable. Borrowing from A Third University is Possible, I saw in PPT a path to reforging the power latent in technology, data and academia towards a more transformative project by becoming a part of PPT’s community and by making myself and my work accountable to my community.

This summer’s work was an accumulation of collaborative research I’ve had the opportunity to work on with PPT. The first was work that multiple members at Tech4Society helped push to fruition after PPT administered a displacement survey to examine the displacement effects of evicting over 200 families from the Penn Plaza development. The second was a report combating a tech-gentrification project, the Mon Oakland Connector. This report successfully countered the gaslighting of residents by university representatives and city officials who claimed residents were ignorant of data and technology, finding that the multimillion dollar publicly funded project primarily benefited the universities, with little benefit from a capacity and ridership standpoint. The next collaborative work was contributing research on critically needed fair fare programs during the pandemic.

Throughout each project, my collaborators and I (members of PPT, Tech4Society, and classmates at Carnegie Mellon), discovered important tools that reversed the concentration of urban planning decision making power in the hands of a few elite decision makers by identifying the resources needed to complement grassroots voices towards grassroots planning.

This was clearest in the Beyond the East Busway campaign, whose analysis became the focus of my summer. The Mon Valley region, also known as the Steel Valley, had suffered in the decline of the steel industry and faced further isolation after budget cuts whittled down significant transit lines to the neighborhood. In 2017, a federally funded BRT project proposed to cut routes further, concentrating instead on increasing service to downtown and university regions. 

This planning failure was a failure of top-down planning that failed to touch the needs and voices of affected communities. The typical government engagement process is perfunctory at best and performative at its most functional.

PPT instead engaged with Mon Valley residents to push back against service cuts, launching in response a read-lead engagement and planning process that asked residents what their transit barriers, needs, and hopes were.

(Credit: Pittsburghers for Public Transit)

A part of my research in studying government’s use of data in decision-making and execution of policy shows that the use of surveys for gauging public opinion and for decision-making hinged largely on the design decisions of the survey, particularly in its limitations capturing the voices and needs of those most impacted by a particular decision or policy. One example was the use of a survey by Chicago Public Schools that indicated robust support for police in schools; however, an investigation revealed that student voices and Black student voices especially were severely under-represented. 

In the Pittsburgh region, as is the case with many regional planning projects, engagement efforts are unfortunately the least effective with residents most likely to be disproportionately affected by planning changes. With PPT’s survey, however, I found in my analysis of its demographics compared to census data that the opposite was true. The Beyond the East Busway survey has a more representative sampling by reaching more Black folks in the region, which is recommended for studying under-represented populations and notoriously a failure point for traditional planning engagement.

The Beyond the East Busway Survey also had a very high engagement with ages 24-34. This distribution also closely matches APTA’s transit rider age distribution, according to their 2017 “Who Rides Public Transportation report.”

https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/a-rosy-cps-survey-on-cops-in-schools-falls-short/

Finally, another promising engagement metric is that over half of respondents identified as women, with an additional 3% identifying as gender non-conforming or genderqueer/non-binary. With women driving household needs such as childcare, groceries and health it is crucial to identify transportation options that fit their needs.

In finding these results, I point to another way to reclaim planning tools for the people. We’ve quantitatively shown that the methods used by PPT reached those most likely to be affected by planning decisions, that are additionally typically hard to reach populations by planning and government agencies. This was all possible due to PPT’s outreach, which hired and paid directly from the communities they were seeking to reach, employing direct community engagement to where residents were - at libraries, food banks, and other communities spaces - rather than waiting for people to show up at 6pm on a Wednesday.

(Credit: Pittsburghers for Public Transit)

The work that has gone into this summer helped push state representatives as a part of launching their statewide organizing campaign - Transit for All PA! Additionally, PPT has used survey analysis to respond to Port Authority’s NextTransit long range planning process.

Most importantly, this points to a one-of-a-kind planning process lead directly by the people themselves.

Going forward, taking the tools traditionally resourcing top-down planning, how can PPT work at the grassroots level to quantify and combat the extent of gentrification and displacement, then work in a participatory grassroots level to solicit community-driven proposals for development that center transit connectivity and affordable housing over private interests that further trends of gentrification and displacement? How can this process further center a reparations framework that accounts for the history of redlining and destructive anti-Black urban development in the City of Pittsburgh?

My work with PPT is still not done. We hope to put out the full Beyond the East Busway Report soon, as well as quantify more impacts of new mobility technology as a new wave of technology implementation emerges, to concern from our disability community.

I am beyond grateful to all the Pittsburghers for Public Transit staff - Laura Wiens, Dan Yablonsi, Josh Malloy (who has moved on to new, exciting things!), as well as fellow PPT members and researchers on the Beyond the East Busway Report including Jessica Benner, Rahul Amruthapuri and Matt Macar.