Data-driven decision-making is coded with "smarter", "more efficient", "responsible", and "rational". That last word, rational, confers weighty intellectual and political legitimacy. Rationalist decision-making assumes, broadly, that decisions improve when problems are clearly defined, relevant evidence is gathered and analyzed, alternatives are evaluated, and action follows from that analysis.

From that assumption, data-driven decision-making should redress past harms and prevent future ones. It should support more agile, dynamic, and targeted interventions. It should structure and legitimize the inputs and outputs of the planning process.

Data is supposed to improve decision-making, yet there are still massive discrepancies in political action. This is because data itself is political.

What data gets used, and how, if at all? What type of data receives political legitimacy? Whose data gets used, and to what end?

Rationalism, in practice, strongly favors the quantitative. The political tension is then readily apparent when communities who bear the heaviest burdens of socioeconomic and environmental injustice have long expressed a degraded quality of life.

Extensive public health and environmental justice research has documented that transportation-related pollution, traffic danger, and other externalities are distributed unevenly, with lower-income communities and communities of color frequently bearing disproportionate burdens (Lu, 2023; Martens et al., 2019; Elliott and Smiley, 2017).

Even with the abundance of quantitative and qualitative data corroborating what impacted communities have articulated for decades, policy remains tardy in addressing the inequities.

Conversely, well-resourced communities advance their political objectives without needing to justify their interventions with quantitative data. Perception and preference have long proven sufficient for political action.

Case Study: Interstate 580 Truck Ban and Demands for More Data

Interstate 580 snakes along the Oakland hills and has a long-standing ban on large trucks dating back to 1951. Large trucks were banned along MacArthur Boulevard near the hills (the roadway over which Interstate 580 was superimposed in the 1960s, hence the name, MacArthur Freeway). The Oakland City Council, beholden to the interests of the predominantly white middle and upper-middle class residents along the corridor, successfully lobbied to extend the truck ban to the interstate. In 1999, an Oakland City Councilmember "thought that keeping trucks off of 580 was a good thing based on traffic safety." The following decades saw advocacy from the California Trucking Association to lift the ban. Caltrans has taken a neutral stance over the years, leaving the decision to maintain or lift the ban up to localities. Council members representing constituencies in the Oakland hills have successfully lobbied local and state support to uphold the ban. A former state Assemblymember representing the district even argued, erroneously, that 580 was not designed for trucks, a claim soundly debunked by Caltrans, who responded saying that "the freeway was designed to be safe for all vehicular traffic" (Klivans, 2021). Misinformation was used to maintain a policy with deleterious consequences.

"Are the senses of those living along the MacArthur Freeway more acute than those living along all the other freeways in the state? Are the schools and hospitals more valuable?" Richard Zeller, California Trucking Association

All the while, in the flatlands along the Bay, Interstate 880 functioned (and continues to function) as the primary conduit for large trucks through the city and has been a persistent source of environmental health hazards for the predominantly minority populations who live in the vicinity of the freeway. The Alameda County Public Health Department reports that residents along the 880 corridor in East Oakland experience some of the highest rates of respiratory hospitalizations in the county. The diversion of truck traffic away from 580 onto 880 through Oakland is a classic example of environmental racism (Self, 2005). The aforementioned assemblymember wrote Assembly Bill 500, which permanently banned large trucks on 580; it was signed by Governor Davis in 2000, becoming law (California State Legislature, 2000). The bill's author claims to have not heard from her constituents who lived around 880. This social and political dynamic conforms with the decades-long pattern of wealthier communities insisting on policies that protect their interests at the expense of vulnerable communities, the latter of whom are often shut out of the decision-making process. In recent years, however, a growing number of elected officials in Oakland and San Leandro have considered taking steps to overturn the ban given its public health consequences on minority populations. Presently, Caltrans is conducting the Interstate 580 Truck Access Study to understand the network impacts on safety, operations, emissions, and noise of removing the truck ban.

There's a cruel irony in commissioning a study to remove a ban that causes harm.

Intervening without Evidence: Los Altos Hills

In Los Altos Hills, residents wanted to prevent through-traffic from travelling down residential streets. The idea was rightfully grounded in safety concerns around speed and volumes. They petitioned local officials to install "No Thru Traffic" signs on the streets to prohibit non-residents from using residential streets as through-routes. However, no study was ordered by the city to evaluate the status quo and the projected outcomes of reducing pass-through traffic on their streets.

The Burden of Proof

The difference is not that one community had data and the other did not. The difference is what each community was required to prove before the government treated its concerns as actionable.

Rationalism, in practice, should answer for these asymmetries in political power, the burden of proof, and legitimacy of experience. However, those asymmetries operate within a political construct of rationalism that is infused with bias, inequity, and social exclusion.

If data is granted legitimating authority within institutional decision-making, its political weight should not depend on whose interests the evidence supports.

The formal inclusion of qualitative data into decision-making processes alongside the application of quantitative methods to apprehend the conditions of traditionally underresourced communities has not led to policies that equitably redress past harms, underscoring the uneven burden of proof.

When calling for more data, ask:

• What do we need more evidence for?
• Would we demand the same standard of evidence from a more politically powerful constituency?
• What decision are we making by choosing to wait for more evidence and what is the cost of inaction?

Commissioning costly time intensive studies and demands for more data should not be abused as political procrastination tactics (or to provide a mask of neutrality) that preserve a harmful status quo.

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