One of the main ethical considerations we navigated as a team is the issue of our dataset not being fully representative of the demographics for the different types of ORCA cards available. For example, for a qualifying individual to obtain a LIFT card for low-income riders or a reduced fare card for disabled riders requires those individuals to have knowledge of the programs and the application process, which represents two barriers to full use by the people who are eligible for them. Many low-income riders use cash payments to access transit rides, which are missing from the ORCA database. Additionally, because there are many definitions of disability, and self-identification as disabled must preclude securing a reduced fare disability rider card, there are real concerns about using the subset of riders with disability cards to represent the whole disabled community.
Additionally, the use of individual-level transit data presents a potential privacy concern.
Following input from our meeting with our contact at Disability Rights Washington, we have decided to focus on the low-income rider data from LIFT cards rather than using the disabled rider card data. We recognize the intersection between the needs of the low-income and disabled communities in the Puget Sound region and feel that improvements that can benefit the low-income community will also benefit disabled riders. Using our limited data from the reduced fare disability riders program to make conclusions about the entire community of disabled transit riders runs the risk of misidentifying transit needs based on a non-representative subset of riders. To account for privacy concerns related to our data, we have taken care to not publicly share any disaggregated data that could potentially lead to identification of an individual. Along that line, we have also avoided sharing any data that could identify companies that provide business passport ORCA cards to employees to prevent that data from being accessed by competing companies.