ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS AND EQUITY ASSESSMENT

CUSP-GX 7003 Civic Analytics and Urban Intelligence

Project: Understanding and Reducing Long-term Street Parking in Manhattan

Organizational Review Part II

MEMORANDUM

Re: NYC Department of Transportation Organizational Review – Culture, Bias, and Partnerships

Overview

The New York City Department of Transportation is charged with providing for the “safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible movement of people and goods” in the city. The agency has about 5,500 full-time employees and is currently led by Commissioner Henry Gutman, who was appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio in February 2021. In conversations with individuals both inside and outside the agency, as well as comprehensive document research, I have identified the key characteristics of the organizational culture at DOT and developed an assessment of the state of the organization’s data and technology readiness. My research has informed an overall understanding of DOT’s engagement with issues of bias and equity as well as community interaction and outreach.

In short, the NYC Department of Transportation has operated under a culture of fear for the last seven years. Under the control of Mayor de Blasio and the leaders he has directly and indirectly appointed to run DOT, public servants at all levels of the organization feel powerless to act independently of the mayor’s vision when it comes to transportation initiatives. While there are teams and divisions within DOT that are very effective and determined to make meaningful progress toward goals that they believe will help the city and its residents, the power structure and culture are pervasive. Under threats of being overruled by the mayor, having division-level budgets cut, or even termination of employment, operators within DOT are compelled to keep the status quo, do as they are told, and avoid projects or initiatives that are too bold. This culture has stifled innovation and exacerbated already-existing issues of bias and equity within the organization.

Race, Bias, and Equity Assessment

DOT has a checkered past when it comes to issues of bias and equity. Inside the organization, there have been several public incidents during the current administration in which employees of color were called racial slurs by supervisors, systematically denied promotion or advancement opportunities, and retaliated against for speaking out about racial discrimination in the workplace. These and other issues led to multiple employee-led lawsuits and ultimately a US Department of Justice lawsuit against the city, with the city ultimately admitting to issues of workplace bias at DOT in a June 2017 consent decree and settling for a $1.3 million in damages and payments to affected employees. The organization has taken steps in recent years to address institutional racism, and there have been no widely publicized employee-related cases since that ruling. Even so, the climate with DOT that tolerated this level of overt racism and bias persists to some extent today.

Externally, DOT pledged in the organization’s 2016 Strategic Plan to operate in a way that is “safe, green, smart, and equitable” (emphasis added). There have been a few DOT-led projects in recent years that have indeed had equity at their core, including reduced Citi Bike membership for NYCHA residents. In other areas, equity has suffered at the expense of politics. The recent Open Streets program, launched in the wake of COVID-19, has temporarily reallocated about 80 miles of streets for pedestrian and restaurant use over the last year. However, the median income for residents of newly created Open Streets locations is 34% higher than the city’s overall median income, and about 1.1 million New Yorkers (primarily in high-density low-income Black and Hispanic communities) are still not within a 10-minute walk of public open space, something that was critically important during the height of the pandemic. (Note that the fewer than 10,000 parking spaces converted to outdoor dining in the last twelve months represent less than 0.3% of total street parking spaces maintained by the city).

Community Engagement and Equity Assessment

To date, DOT’s community engagement strategy has largely centered around community boards. In New York City, community boards are appointed advisory groups of the 59 community districts, with 12 such community boards in the borough of Manhattan. Members are appointed by borough presidents and City Council members; while they have no binding power on legislation or policy, they are incredibly influential particularly when it comes to transportation initiatives. However, recent analysis has shown that there are significant racial, ethnic, gender, and age disparities between the makeup of community boards and the communities they purport to represent. Throughout the city, members tend to skew old, white, male, and wealthy relative to the populations of their districts. There are some community board members who have been serving for 30 years or longer; some districts in which over 60% of board members are white while the population of the district is less than 25% white; and others whose composition of males outnumber females by more than two to one.

For New York City transportation projects, municipal law requires that DOT “notify” community boards of plans to redesign the streetscape. The city is not legally required to adhere to community board recommendations, but under the de Blasio administration, the agency has in many cases interpreted “notify” to mean “get approval from.” This has manifested in outspoken community board members (many wealthy car owners) effectively blocking changes to the status quo of the streetscape, with de Blasio’s DOT totally acquiescing to community board concerns.

There is no shortage of examples of community board members effectively dictating DOT policy. In one March 2017 case, DOT proposed the elimination of one lane of car traffic on a 40-block stretch of Amsterdam Ave in the Upper West Side to construct safety medians for pedestrians, turning bays to slow vehicle traffic, and painted bike lanes. Long-time Manhattan community board 9 member Carolyn Thompson effectively blocked the proposal, claiming she did not “believe” city and Census data showing that 80% of households in the district do not own a car and therefore refused to allow the removal of a vehicle lane. After a pedestrian was killed by a speeding driver, the board finally allowed some of the safety improvements to be made.

Former DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg (who led DOT from 2014 through 2020) described community boards as “a great forum to bring projects, to hear community concerns, to find people who care deeply about their neighborhoods, and to get local input.” Even so, DOT’s 2016 Strategic Plan recognized the need to better “engage with the public in new venues” and expand public engagement efforts particularly to “groups traditionally under-represented at public meetings, including bus riders, non-English speakers, and low-income New Yorkers.” There have been no public updates on these initiatives since 2017, and while COVID-19 has shifted some of the agency’s short-term priorities, there does not appear to be an active strategy in 2021 to expand public engagement in transportation projects.

Data and Technology Readiness Assessment

The Department of Transportation has an annual operating budget of $1.1 billion, yet significantly lags in data and technology capacity for an organization of its size. Because of the “size and scale” of the city, DOT has deemed it infeasible to accurately track much of the information that would be useful for decision-making or to invest in technology that would enhance the understanding of the streetscape allocation and personal vehicle usage in the city. There are about 82,000 metered parking spaces in the city, for which DOT does collect and analyze some limited payment and usage data. However, DOT has only a rough estimate of the total number of parking spaces (about 3 million), let alone any data on relative street parking occupancy over time, the distribution of residential personal vehicles versus commercial vehicles versus out-of-state visitors, or statistics on long-term versus short-term parking. While the argument that accurately collecting such data in a city as large as New York is reasonable, it appears that decisions on parking policy are made largely by political desires and personal opinions rather than data or information.

Beginning in 2017, the agency has conducted an annual Citywide Mobility Survey which is used to assess the travel behavior and preferences of city residents. The most recent panel, conducted in October 2020, included 905 residents. It is difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from such a small sample size, but actively collecting survey data from citizens, in any capacity, is a step in the right direction. In the most recent survey, 88% of respondents either supported or were neutral about reallocating street space for additional bus lanes, and 87% of respondents either supported or were neutral about reallocating street space for protected bike lanes. 84% of Manhattan residents in the survey supported reallocating street space for outdoor dining.

In many instances, particularly around the agency’s parking management strategy, the lack of data and information has made it difficult for leaders to make informed, efficient, or equitable decisions. Mid- and lower-level civil servants are not empowered or motivated to expand the technological capacity of their teams or seek innovative ways for collecting information. Of course, technology is not a panacea for all the agency’s issues. Any new strategy or technology for collecting and analyzing information must be careful not to perpetuate existing bias, further exclude those without digital access or literacy, or attempt to transfer responsibility for equity in decision-making to algorithms or machines. Even with this caveat in mind, it is clear DOT would benefit from increased investment and focus on innovation.

Partnerships and Collaboration

New York City is home to some of the best educational institutions in the world, and DOT would benefit significantly from engaging with research centers at various universities to expand the data and technology capacity of the organization. To help advance understanding and reform of the city’s parking management strategy, the agency could collaborate with the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress and/or Center for Data Science. Researchers in both policy and at the cutting edge of technologies such as machine learning and computer vision could enable new data-driven projects and initiatives. From a data and technology perspective, the city could also partner with one or more of the leading innovative private-sector companies developing sensor and software products to monitor and analyze the streetscape. One of these, Sidewalk Labs, is currently developing a low-cost, privacy-preserving vehicle sensor product called Pebble that enables more informed parking and curbside management.

From an equity and bias perspective, DOT must better engage with community groups representing the historically underserved Black and Brown communities in the city. By actively recruiting and hiring from neighborhoods within the city for project management, planning, and new agency-wide community engagement roles, the agency could expand its capacity for understanding the needs and preferences of a wider set of the population, and increase the potential to connect with organizations in each neighborhood that might better represent their populations.

Strategies for Success and Potential Future State

A new mayor will be elected later this year; that individual will likely appoint a new DOT Commissioner. This change in leadership is an opportunity to newly define a vision and set of values for the organization. The various leading candidates have different priorities and leadership styles. However, regardless of who is elected, it is widely expected that the culture of fear that has pervaded DOT over the last seven years has the potential to significantly improve. Whoever is selected to lead DOT must take an active, deliberative approach to organizational culture. The new Commissioner must lay out a set of behaviors and values and lead by example in his or her decision-making. To transition from a culture of fear to a culture of collaboration and innovation, new mechanisms for communication and decision-making must be developed and implemented. A new hiring strategy will be useful, wherein residents of neighborhoods throughout the city are engaged and recruited (and thus have more skin in the game for projects and initiatives in the places they live).

Clear and honest communication has the potential to activate the changes necessary to improve the culture at DOT. To cement those changes, organization-wide training will be necessary. The agency needs to develop in its workforce an innovative and collaborative mindset that will foster new and contrarian ideas, open discussion, and willingness to engage with the public in new ways. Opportunities to work on exciting and challenging data-driven projects, such as rethinking the parking management strategy for the modern age, could serve as inherent rewards for workers and enable cross-divisional communication and collaboration. Instilling such a significant shift in the culture at the organization will require significant time and investment in initial and ongoing training. With new leadership and a culture of collaboration, innovation, and equity, DOT has the potential to become a modern and successful organization at the forefront of some of the most exciting and transformational projects undertaken by the city in the next decade.