Alexandra Murphy on Measuring Transportation Insecurity

Siers-Poisson [00:00:05] Hello, and thanks for joining us for the Poverty Research and Policy podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I’m Judith Siers-Poisson. For this episode, Dr. Alexandra Murphy joins us to discuss her recent paper, titled, “How Does Transportation Insecurity Compare and Relate to Other Indicators of Material Hardship in the US?” That was co-authored with Natasha Pilkauskas, Nicole Kovski & Alix Gould-Werth. And you can find a link to the paper in the program note for this episode. Alex Murphy is a sociologist at the University of Michigan where she is an Assistant Research Scientist at Poverty Solutions in the Ford School of Public Policy. She is also the Associate Director of Social Science Research at Mcity.

Alex, thanks for joining us today.

Murphy [00:00:53] Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Siers-Poisson [00:00:55] I’d like to start with a very basic definition of material hardship and the different types of indicators that are used to assess that.

Murphy [00:01:05] Sure, so the idea of material hardship is that it’s really a term that’s used to capture foregone consumption of things that are really important for everyday life and well-being, like food, housing, and medical care. And the term and sort of the concept emerge from people who are interested in expanding the measurement of poverty and really understanding what deprivation look like in ways that just income-based measures couldn’t capture. So, when we think about what things are counted as material hardship measures, this is kind of an area of research where it’s not exactly settled. A lot of the things that are most studied or most considered are hardships like food insecurity, housing insecurity, going without necessary medical care, having problems paying for bills like utilities or telephone services. And then there is some research that sort of expands or looks at other kinds of indicators. So, some people look at whether people own consumer durables like a refrigerator or a television. Some people look at housing quality, household crowding. Some people look at neighborhood conditions and crime as measures of material hardship. So, it varies, but there is sort of a core set that are usually considered.

Siers-Poisson [00:02:08] Thanks for sharing that. I did notice that transportation wasn’t on that list. What does transportation insecurity look like in real life?

Murphy [00:02:18] Yeah, well, before I answer that, I think I just want to call out that it’s interesting that transportation hasn’t been, to me it’s interesting that it hasn’t been on the list. In the US, it ranks as the second biggest household spending category in people’s budgets. We know that not having good transportation makes it very difficult to do things important for well-being, like get to the doctor and go to school, go to work. And for these reasons, people have continuously called out that we should try to find a way to measure transportation as a form of material hardship. It’s long been noted that it’s been excluded as material hardship. In terms of what it looks like in real life, I like to think about actual people, and I think a great example of someone who sort of encapsulates a lot of what transportation insecurity looks like is James Robertson. He is a Detroiter. His story was made famous a few years ago because he was a man who lived in Detroit and he worked in the suburbs of Detroit and he had a job at a manufacturing plant for 10 years, and during that decade he went to work every day five days a week, taking a bus and walking a total of 21 miles to work. This meant that his commute was 10 hours daily. He had to arrive at work an hour and a half early every day and wait until his shift started because that was the difference between the shift and the public transportation schedule. On his commute, he reported that he was regularly exposed to harsh weather, whether be it the heat or snow. He had to walk, some of his commute was in the street when there was no sidewalks. Sometimes it was in in the dark, especially early in the morning. He had one instance of being mugged on his way home. So, I think his story is a really great example of transportation insecurity. This is a hardship that often involves significant time costs, right? So for him, this meant he had a very long commute. He was arriving early at work, he had to wait. For others, it means that they end up arriving places late because of the schedule of a bus or their friend who’s giving them a ride. It can often involve traveling in unsafe conditions. So that can be walking when there’s no sidewalk, right? You’re sharing a street with the cars. It can mean walking in the dark when there is not adequate street lighting. It can be driving in a car that doesn’t have adequate brakes, driving in the car where you can’t afford brake lights. And so you might be at risk of being pulled over for that. But then, you know, for him, he’s gotten to work. He’s held his job for 10 years. But for other people who are transportation insecure, what their insecurity looks like can be very severely constrained travel. So, some are unable to regularly go places, they have to skip trips like going to the grocery store or the doctor. Some have to routinely reschedule appointments because they might have a ride fall through. Some people might have to spend a lot of time at home just because they can’t really get around at all. They have no public transit, no money for bus fare or gas, no car, no friends or family who can either have cars or who could pick them up. There’s also people who spend a lot of time just arranging trips. So the hardship can be spending a large amount of your day calling your friends, trying to figure out how you even get to the places you need to go. And then there is a pretty significant relational component to transportation insecurity. So on the one hand, many people often use friends, family, neighbors to get around and having to rely on people for your transportation can create a lot of stress and strain in those relationships. On the other hand, when you can’t get around, you can’t see people can’t nurture those relationships and that can cause its own kind of stress and strain. So people, you know, often report they feel bad, they can feel left out, left out of relationships, left out sort of society. So, it really runs the gamut from sort of how people travel, if they can travel, and the kind of worry and stress that being transportation insecure can induce.

Siers-Poisson [00:05:53] Before we get further into the actual topic of transportation insecurity, I want to ask, Alex, what prompted you to take on this research?

Murphy [00:06:02] Well, my colleagues and I were doing qualitative work into the lives of people with low incomes. And what we were observing was people having tremendous trouble with transportation. And we were, we are sociologists, and we were sort of unprepared for what we were seeing. And we began to wonder why, you know, we knew transportation mattered, but the profound ways that shape people’s lives really hit us. And we realized that in the social sciences and in sociology, people don’t really study transportation at all. You know, we tend to study housing, we study food insecurity, we study mass incarceration, we study employment, we studied education, we studied the family. But transportation has been sort of seen as something that’s sort of auxiliary to all of those things and really been in the domain of engineers and planners. And so we looked at a bunch of surveys that poverty researchers had to use and we realized there’s sort of a single measure of car ownership on them. And that doesn’t really speak to the idea of transportation insecurity. And so we were interested in better understanding transportation insecurity, better measuring it, and then really understanding it as a form of material hardship, just based on the fact that it is so profound for people and seems to be an important dimension of poverty that was missing.

Siers-Poisson [00:07:10] Alex, you were one of the creators of the transportation security index, which you developed to gauge how common transportation insecurity is, who’s affected and how it intersects with those other forms of hardship that you mentioned earlier. What does that index measure specifically?

Murphy [00:07:30] So let’s first start with the definition of transportation and security. So for us, how we have defined it is that it is a condition in which a person is unable to regularly get from place to place in a safe or timely manner because they don’t have the resources for transportation. And when we think about resources, we define that very broadly. So that could mean you don’t have money for bus fare, to fix your car, for car insurance. It could mean that you don’t have the physical health to walk or ride a bike to someplace. It could mean that you live in a place where the built environment doesn’t make it safe to walk. It could mean that you don’t have friends and family that have cars who can give you rides. So that’s how we define transportation and security. What the Transportation Insecurity Index does is it measures people who experience transportation insecurity. It’s an individual-level measure. And when we created it, we modeled it after the food security index. And so what that means is that we measure transportation and security with a series of questions that asks people whether they’ve experienced several unique symptoms of transportation insecurity. So we think about the symptoms as being material in nature. So these are things like, have you skipped trips? Have you spent a long time waiting for your transportation? Have you had to arrive early and wait? Have you gotten places late? Have you to reschedule appointments? Then there’s a series of relational symptoms. So these, these are the things like have you worried about getting around? Have you worried about inconveniencing ride-givers? Have you felt left out because of your problems with transportation? Have your problems with transportation affected your relationships? So the index is comprised of these questions that tap into the symptoms. And one of the things I think it’s important to note is, you know, we don’t ask whether people get to very specific destinations like the doctor or employment, and we do that so that the index can be used in a causal inference framework as an independent and dependent variable so people can look at what’s causing it. And then on the other end, what are the consequences? Can people get to the doctor? What does it mean for people’s actual health outcomes?

Siers-Poisson [00:09:28] Is it adapted to different environments? Because I’m thinking about how different transportation can look in urban versus suburban or rural areas.

Murphy [00:09:39] So when we designed the Index, we came up with a long list of sort of candidate questions, candidate symptoms, and how we developed our questions is both based on qualitative research, but we also consulted with social service agencies in urban and rural and suburban areas. We talked to researchers who study these kinds of contexts, we talked to all kinds of professionals to see if we were missing anything to help us develop sort of what transportation insecurity would look like in those places. We also did 52 cognitive interviews with people in urban, suburban, and rural places to make sure that the questions we were developing actually worked in those contexts.

Siers-Poisson [00:10:10] And actually, what is a cognitive interview?

Murphy [00:10:17] So a cognitive interview is an interview technique that survey methodologists use where they want to understand whether the questions that they’re asking are actually being understood by the people who are the respondents and then whether… The way that they’re responding is actually eliciting the kinds of feedback that you’re looking for, right? It’s about, we’re trying to get good quality questions. And so when you go out and you do a cognitive interview, what you do is you take your survey questions that you’ve drafted and you have people read them out loud. There’s a couple of different ways of doing that. But one way is you’d have people read them out loud and as they’re doing that, you ask them to sort of speak out loud what they’re thinking about when they’re reading it. So, take for example, we have a question, how often in the past 30 days have you had to skip a trip? Because of problems with transportation. So someone would read that question and then we’d ask them, okay, what does skip a trip mean to you? Have you had to skip a trip in the last thirty days? You said often, what is often? How many times? What trip have you had skip? Are the last 30 days an anomaly or is that in line with your general experience? We’re trying to make sure people understand the questions and that when would they say often or sometimes or never that we’re not getting false positives or false negatives. That is a technique that is really used to refine your questions once you sort of have a draft. And so the questions really are designed to work in urban, suburban, and rural places. And the beauty of the Index, so the Index is mode agnostic. It doesn’t ask what mode of travel, you know, are you taking a car? Are you taking bus? And the beauty of that is it can be used to look at, so what is driving transportation insecurity in an urban area, right? Versus what might be driving in a suburban area versus what might driving in rural area. Those could all be very different and are important to pinpoint, but the questions in the Index itself. Don’t get at that, but it allows you to ask those questions.

Siers-Poisson [00:12:03] If I’m remembering correctly, people are not asked about whether the transportation insecurity they are experiencing is tied to financial resources or not, which I think is asked in other cases, maybe like food security. Why was that decision made?

Murphy [00:12:19] That’s a great question. So when we first developed all of our questions for the index, each question was tied to finances. We thought that if you skip trips, if you were skipping going places, all the questions said basically, have you skipped a trip because you couldn’t afford the transportation you needed? Or have you worried about getting to places because you can’t afford the transportation that you need? So when we design those questions, we had this thinking that if you had an abundance of money, you could always find a way. Money will buy you whatever transportation you need if you have enough of it. When we did the cognitive interviews, however, what people said to us is we would ask them a question. We would say, read aloud a question of the Index. So they’d read aloud, in the last 30 days, how often have I had to reschedule an appointment because of problems with transportation? And some people would say never. And then we’d interview them about their transportation situations and their experiences in the past month. And they would say oh yeah, I didn’t go to these places or I did have to reschedule a trip. And we would say, well, why did you say you didn’t? And they said, well it wasn’t because of the cost of transportation. It was because the bus never showed up or my friend had to cancel taking me someplace. And so we realized that transportation is one of these kinds of hardships that for people, they don’t think about it as always tied to financial constraint. They think about as tied to the constraints of their friends or family, right? Or the bus schedule. So we got rid of that part of all the questions. And our questions really just ask people broadly, have you experienced these symptoms because of problems with transportation? In the course of the paper that we’re talking about, you know, writing this paper made us realize that there’s in fact a big debate in the material hardship community about whether we should be asking these questions and tying them to financial constraints or whether we care about just whether people have the experience of the hardship itself, regardless of where it’s coming from.

Siers-Poisson [00:14:08] So you develop the questions for the Transportation Insecurity Index to gauge how affected people are. How do you then get information from people in having these questions answered?

Murphy [00:14:21] So once we identify the questions, right? Once we had the validated Index, what we did is we put it on a survey, a nationally representative survey, of people who were over the age of 25. And we did that because we were concerned or we were worried that people under 25 would have transportation needs that may be very different during college or on what their life situation is. So we put on a survey of a nationally representative sample. And once we got the data back, we used that to generate the first ever national prevalence estimates of transportation insecurity.

Siers-Poisson [00:14:53] So given that, in this paper that we’re discussing, what was the estimate of how many people in the US would be expected to be experiencing transportation insecurity?

Murphy [00:15:04] So in this particular paper, which draws on data that we collected in 2022, what we found is that one in five or roughly 19% of people in the United States are experiencing transportation insecurity.

Siers-Poisson [00:15:17] How does that compare to what we know about the rates of other types of insecurity, like we’ve mentioned food, housing, or unmet medical needs?

Murphy [00:15:26] Yep. So, in this paper, we looked at that. And what we found is that transportation insecurity is one of the leading, it has the highest rates of prevalence among all the hardships that we looked at. So if 19% of people are experiencing transportation insecurity, we found that the second most prevalent hardship was food insecurity. So 16.4% experienced that, followed by medical needs, followed by people who had housing insecurity, followed by difficulty paying for bills, and then the least prevalent that we found was utility shutoffs.

Siers-Poisson [00:15:58] It seems like transportation insecurity would influence at least those first few that you were talking about. For instance, food security would be a lot harder to maintain if you can’t get to the grocery store or the food pantry.

Murphy [00:16:12] Exactly. And that’s one of the things we were really interested in. So with this paper, prior to this paper we had been studying transportation insecurity, but we didn’t have a sense of what kind of material hardship it was. We just sort of knew how many people were experiencing it and what they look like. But we didn’t know how to think about it as a form of material hardship. And one of questions that we had was, is it its own material hardship? Because it could be so central to things like going to get food, right, or accessing housing. Going to get needed medical care, all of those kinds of things. And so one of the things we did in this paper is we looked at the degree to which it was correlated with these other hardships. And we found that the correlation was pretty small, that it was most correlated with food insecurity, but even that was small, which really tells us that each of these hardships that we’re studying, including transportation insecurity, is they’re their own distinct hardship and likely had their own distinct underlying processes that are driving them, even though they are very related to one another.

Siers-Poisson [00:17:08] Alex, did you find that there are any population groups that are more likely to experience transportation insecurity than others?

Murphy [00:17:17] We did, so we found that rates of insecurity are really highest among people who have low incomes, people who tend to have less education, people who are Black or Hispanic, it’s highest among who are younger, women, people who living with children, people who are foreign born, people with disabilities, and then also people who live in urban areas.

Siers-Poisson [00:17:39] I think maybe the urban area one might be surprising to some people, including me.

Murphy [00:17:45] It’s very surprising and it’s something that we consistently find across all the surveys that we’ve done and people who want to do more research into this, I think that this is a really important area. We’ve had a lot of questions about what’s driving this and one is whether transportation is such an important need for people in rural areas given the lack of density or accessibility to destinations, that people in those areas really privilege transportation, perhaps at the expense of other kinds of needs. And so that’s an empirical question we don’t know the answer to. But another question we have about this is whether the degree to which people in rural areas may be more transportation secure but may have more cost burden, right? So if you think about, people may be transportation secure but at a great, great, great expense, right. And so, that’s also a form of hardship that we need to account for. So this is, it is a surprising finding and it’s something that requires a lot more research to really understand what’s going on.

Siers-Poisson [00:18:42] Since in this paper you’re looking at transportation insecurity in relation to other forms of material hardship, did you find any connections or correlations between transportation insecurity and another form of hardship?

Murphy [00:18:58] Yeah, so we found that there is a lot of overlap with transportation insecurity and all the forms of hardship. So if you are someone who experiences more than one hardship and you experience transportation insecurity, there’s a high degree of co-occurrence with these other hardships. I think the thing that stood out to us, wanting to better understand transportation insecurity as a form of hardship, what stood out to us is the degree to which transportation insecurity, there was very striking similarities between that and food insecurity almost across all of our analyses. So first thing we found is that these are the two most prevalent forms of hardship among people who live in the US. The second thing that we found was that the pattern of overlap with other forms of material hardship are very similar. So what we see is that both for people who experience food insecurity and transportation security, there’s a high degree of co-occurrence with these other hardships. We don’t find that pattern among the hardships that are more uncommon, so utility hardships, for example, people who have the less prevalent hardships, if they are experiencing that, they have a high degree of experiencing all the forms of hardship. So we see a similar pattern with food insecurity there. We see that the correlates for transportation and food insecurity are nearly identical, whereas there’s some differences for other hardships. And this sort of suggests that there might be similar processes for these forms of hardship. We also see that along with having unmet medical needs, that transportation insecurity and food insecurity are associated with health and having depressive symptoms and they’re associated with those two outcomes at a similar magnitude. And I think these findings are interesting for a number of reasons. And one is they really raise important questions about the causes of different forms of hardship. So there’s a debate in the material hardship literature. Prior research has really shown that some hardships are related to smaller everyday expenditures, so like food insecurity. And then there’s other hardships that are really related to larger and less frequent and more rare expenditures. So here we think about housing and security and unmet medical needs. And that those are hardships that arise from very longer-term kind of economic constraints versus sort of short-term things. When we started this paper, it wasn’t clear what kind of hardship transportation is, right? So you could think on the one hand that it could be driven by small income shocks, right? So something like I couldn’t pay for the bus fare I couldn’t pay for my friend to give me a ride. Things like that. On the other hand you could imagine that there are very large costs that are related to getting around right so purchasing a car is probably the biggest one be able to pay for car repairs perhaps gas so it wasn’t clear to us where things would fall. The fact that we find that there are so much sort of similarities between transportation insecurity and food insecurity makes us wonder whether it’s a form of hardship that, you know, is more subject to the sort of small fluctuations in income. And I think this is an area that’s really ripe for future research. We would really love to understand better the kinds of income shocks that are driving transportation insecurity and all the kinds other forms of material hardship.

Siers-Poisson [00:22:05] Going back to the Transportation Insecurity Index, how is it being used to improve the understanding of transportation insecurity and who’s using it?

Murphy [00:22:15] We’ve seen it being adopted in a number of ways. So we have seen states and localities use it for planning. One of the things that they’re using it is to create a baseline. So the State of Minnesota has put it on a statewide survey to just understand rates of insecurity in the state, and then they are planning to administer it in future surveys so they can track it over time and see whether rates are going up or down. States and localities are using it for planting purposes to understand the needs of priority populations. We’ve seen people use it to look at public opinion data. So looking at, you know, whether people express wanting more expenditures for public transit or, you now, based on their level of insecurity helps people see like, oh, that perhaps the majority of people say they don’t want to invest in public transit. But if you look at the people who most need it, they actually want it. We have seen it used for evaluation purposes. So people looking to evaluate a project or a program to see whether it’s moving people from transportation insecurity to transportation security. Um, we’ve seen people use it to evaluate free bus fare programs, mobility wallets, which are kind of new programs that allow people to use, uh, money across different transportation systems. So the bus, maybe the train, micro-mobility scooters, people are using it to evaluate, you know, whether using Uber rides to get to work is, is getting people there on time and reducing work absences. People have used it to look at the effects of universal basic income. So rather than evaluating actual transportation projects, asking the question, if we just give people cash, what does that do to their transportation insecurity? There’s been a lot of people who have used it in the health field. So there’s people who are really interested in using it as a screener to just identify whether people are insecure. But also in research, there’s one person who is doing work on kidney dialysis. So to see if transportation and insecurity is making it difficult to get to dialysis and then being able to measure what that means for actual health outcomes.

Siers-Poisson [00:24:07] What do you see as any further policy and practice implications of the Index and its application? Because it sounds like it’s being used in some very concrete ways already.

Murphy [00:24:19] Yeah. And I’m really excited to start seeing the results of what people are finding. I mean, I think that there’s a lot of applications and a lot of them look probably very similar to how people have used the Food Security Index, but as it relates to transportation, you know, one of the things that this index can do is really help us understand whether transportation infrastructure is meeting people’s needs. And and I think Prior to this, a lot of ways that we studied this was like, oh, we built five bridges or we built a highway and this many people used it. But that wasn’t telling us whether the infrastructure is actually meeting people’s needs. So I think that that is a space for a lot of understanding in terms of policy and practice. I think there’s a lot work to be done. And I think, you know, it’s being done on evaluating these different programs that are being tried and seeing what’s moving the needle in terms what actually works to move people from being transportation insecure to transportation secure. Again, using it to monitor over time. I think there’s a lot of things that we are facing that is potentially going to affect transportation insecurity. So if you think specifically to transportation, tariffs are increasing the cost of car ownership, cost of use cars, we’ve got, insurance costs for cars are rising. Many, many public transit agencies are facing steep fiscal uncertainty, which would have huge implications for people who are transportation insecure. All of that’s happening while… you know, there’s a lot of other programs that are being cut. And so I think just being able to understand how it’s changing the needs of people over time, is really important, especially in this moment.

Siers-Poisson [00:25:48] And as we wrap up, what further research would you like to do or see done on the topic of transportation insecurity?

Murphy [00:25:56] There is a ton of research to be done, whether it’s me or someone else, but I think this is really a new and emerging area. And if I think about a couple of things that I think would be interesting, one coming out of this paper that we just did is to understand what kinds of income shocks are shaping transportation insecurity. That’s definitely needed. Another kind of future research that I think comes out of this paper is really better understanding the sequencing of hardships, right? So… If we can disentangle whether people’s experiences with transportation insecurity lead people to experience other forms of material hardship or whether experiencing other forms of material hardships are leading people to experience transportation insecurity, or whether people’s experience with transportation insecurity in other forms are arising at the same time. I think that’s a really important area for future research because it would help us understand from a policy perspective where should we be putting our money into to better help address all of these types of hardships. There’s definitely work to be done to understand whether transportation insecurity is a household measure. So it’s been defined and conceptualized as an individual level measure, but I think there’s much work to understand, whether we can think about it as a household measure. All the work that has been done to date has really used mostly nationally representative samples to understand transportation insecurity. It would be great to be able to field a survey that is largely people who are below the poverty line or just above it so that we can really have a large enough sample size to get into these questions and better understand the relationships between these different forms of hardship. I think a great area of research that I personally would love to do or love to see done is better understanding the effects of having a parent who’s transportation insecure on children, right? So what does that do to people’s experiences as children but also sort of how does that impact their long-term trajectory, you know, whether it’s employment, education, and things like that. Another area we talked about a little bit before when we talked rural areas is this relationship between transportation insecurity and cost burden. So if we find that 19% of people in the US are transportation insecure, that leaves a lot of people who are secure, but at what cost, right? We don’t want to get people to transportation security at huge financial cost. Luckily, we’re starting to see people putting the index on publicly used surveys. So it’s going to be on a module on the health and retirement study run by the University of Michigan, which will give people a chance to sort of dive into transportation insecurity among older populations. It’s a new area and there’s a lot to learn and so I’m looking forward to learning more.

Siers-Poisson [00:28:24] Well, Alex, thank you so much for taking the time to discuss your research with us. It’s really, really interesting and really important.

Murphy [00:28:31] Thanks so much for having me.

Siers-Poisson [00:28:33] Thanks so to Alex Murphy for joining us to discuss her recent co-authored paper titled, “How Does Transportation Insecurity Compare and Relate to Other Indicators of Material Hardship in the US?” You can find the link to the paper in the program note for this episode. Please note that views expressed by our speakers don’t necessarily represent the opinions or policies of the Institute for Research on Poverty or of any other sponsor, including the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Music for the episode is by Poi Dog Pondering. Thanks for listening.