Where
Seattle, Washington
When
Dec. 2024
Type
Individual Class Project
Tools
ArcGIS Pro
Inkscape
Skills Used
Spatial Analysis
Data Manipulation
Using ArcGIS Pro
OVERVIEW
Public transportation allowed me to get to school and ride along with various types of people from different neighborhoods, all going to different destinations. I became interested in these different neighborhoods and how their history compared to today's public transit. This sparked my interest in exploring the comparison between neighborhood demographics and Sound Transit's bus/light rail stops.
HISTORY
Seattle was one of many cities face with redlining from the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and numerous people of color (POC) faced discrimination and were forced to stay in more dangerous neighborhoods.
METHODOLOGY
For this map, I had to apply bus stop and light rail stop data from Sound Transit, alongside the route data for the express buses, the light rail, and the Sounder Train. To find the concentrations of people of color, I pulled data from Seattle's GeoData portal and subtracted the population of white from the total population and conducted a cluster and outlier analysis, also known as a Local Moran's I. That way, we can see the areas where POCs are clustered at alongside cold zones where less POCs are residing at.
FINDINGS
Looking at the map and based on the data given, we can see that there is a transit presence within the historically redlined city sections like Central District and International District and that there is a positive correlation on the clusters of people of color. More specifically, Sound Transit's light rail and express bus lines run through these neighborhoods. With the presence of public transit, people of color have the opportunity to have urban mobility around Seattle and surrounding areas without needing to possess a personal vehicle.
REFLECTION
Due to time constraints, I was unable to explore different forms of transit like shared scooters/bicycles alongside other transit lines like King County Metro and its bus lines. Additionally, I would have liked to go deeper into the accessibility of these transit stops to see if the people in historically redlined districts can easily get to these locations with ease. In the future, I would like to work on that and create additional map layouts or create an interactive web map to fully showcase the different kinds of public transit available to these redlined districts as well as their accessibility.