{ "culture": "en-US", "name": "", "guid": "", "catalogPath": "", "snippet": "USDOT's Equitable Transportation Community Explorer is an interactive web application that explores the \ndisadvantage communities experience, resulting from underinvestment in transportation, in the areas of \nTransportation Insecurity, Climate and Disaster Risk Burden, Environmental Burden, Health Vulnerability, and \nSocial Vulnerability. The index computes cumulative disadvantage by normalizing indicators associated with \ndisadvantage, summing the percentile ranks of these indicators into components, and then summing the \npercentile ranks of the sums of each component to determine an overall score.", "description": "
The Disadvantaged Community Index, which drives USDOT Equitable Transportation Community Explorer, is a composite measure that defines census tracts as being disadvantaged communities in the US based on several dimensions of disadvantage. The index is based on multiple publicly available government data sources that include indicators such as the percent of households without a car, average commute time, walkability index, frequency of transit services per square mile, jobs within a 45-minute drive, calculated average annual cost of transportation as a percent of household income, traffic fatalities, and air quality indicators like ozone and particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) levels.<\/SPAN><\/P> The index also considers socioeconomic indicators, such as poverty level, education, employment, housing, health, language proficiency, and age demographics, as well as data on disaster risk, climate change, and land use, such as estimated annualized loss due to disasters, increase in number of hot days, change in precipitation patterns, risk of coastal flooding, and impervious surface area. The aim of the index is to provide communities with the data to understand how they are experiencing transportation disadvantage, using multiple dimensions of disadvantage including transportation insecurity, social vulnerability, health vulnerability, environmental burden and climate and disaster risk burden.<\/SPAN><\/P> The compilation of the index involved integrating data from various sources, which differ in format, type, source, completeness, units of measurement, and spatial and temporal resolution. To address these challenges, USDOT has created a system for harmonizing and standardizing these datasets. The system includes careful consideration of time and space misalignment between different datasets, as well as variable normalization, to ensure that the index provides a comprehensive definition of disadvantaged communities in the US.<\/SPAN><\/P>