Social and environmental justice implications of flood-related road closures in Virginia

Abstract

Environmental justice research historically focuses on assessing and understanding direct impacts of environmental risk on socio-economically varied areas. Limited work has addressed indirect impacts such as how flooding of transportation networks may disproportionately influence different socio-economic groups. Our objective addresses this by investigating how flood-related road closures influence Virginians differently across the state. Firstly, we retrieve flood-related road closure information from the Virginia Department of Transportation along with race and poverty data from the US Census Bureau and aggregate socio-economic data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Analytically, we then explore best-fit linear models between these variables, including spatial comparisons of coastal vs. inland and urban vs. rural areas, to assess how flooding may disproportionately be impacting people of different socio-economic status. Overall, we find more flood-related road closures in areas with less poverty and more white people. Inland areas experience more closures in whiter, less wealthy areas, while coastal areas see more racial diversity subjected to flood-related road closures. We further find that rural areas experience more closures than urban areas, with a bias in coastal rural areas towards census tracts with fewer white people. Our findings show noticeable differences when considering the relationship between flood-related road closures and various socio-economic factors and geographic categorizations in Virginia, though note that our findings are contingent on reported road closure data and therefore are susceptible to biases in reporting. These findings have implications for transportation infrastructure maintenance and prioritization of transportation network improvements from social and environmental justice standpoints.