22 Nov 2024
Social Equity of Bridge Management study wins Journal of Management in Engineering 2024 Best Paper Award
Research published in September 2023 found that bridge maintenance in the U.S. is more greatly associated with wealthier and less marginalized communities
The Journal of Management in Engineering's Award Committee recently selected the paper Social Equity of Bridge Management for their 2024 Best Paper Award. The paper, written by Professor Daniel Armanios (University of Oxford) along with Cari Anne Gandy and Constantine Samaras of Carnegie Mellon University, implements novel techniques that advance and integrate bridge condition degradation modelling with social equity assessments to identify associations between community demography and bridge condition.
Transportation infrastructure can enable prosperity but also disproportionately burden underserved and vulnerable communities, and yet there is a scarcity of research around whether engineering management funding and programmes are equitably distributed. The paper’s authors conducted a comparison of established bridge deterioration with community demographics surrounding the bridges. They found that bridges located in lower-income, as well as in predominantly Black or African American, or disadvantaged1 communities, are more likely to be in poor condition.
The paper recommends that racial equity should become one of the components that inform bridge maintenance funding and prioritization to ensure greater equity in the planning process. A critical step for this is to develop data-driven methods and approaches that explicitly incorporate community demography into maintenance planning and performance evaluation. The study further seeks to develop and apply social equity-driven methods towards bridge management.
Daniel Armanios is a Faculty Member of Engineering Science, a Professorial Fellow of St Anne’s College, and the BT Professor and Chair of Major Programme Management at Saïd Business School. His research integrates civil engineering and sociology to better understand how organisations coordinate to build, manage, and maintain infrastructure amidst complexity.
1 Identified by the Climate and Economic Screening Tool (CEJST)
