Ethan Maldonado won the Student Showcase Audience Award from the Southern California Association of Governments.
Student’s research exposes hidden toll of LA’s infrastructure gap
Ethan Maldonado grew up breathing Boyle Heights air — thick with diesel, highway exhaust, and the low hum of freeways that were deliberately routed through his neighborhood decades before he was born.
He didn’t have a car until last summer. Before then, he would spend seven to eight hours on a Metrolink train and Greyhound bus to visit his family in Fresno. His exhausting cost of living in a city built for cars while being unable to afford one until recently became the foundation of an award-winning research project that stopped a room full of regional planners in their tracks.
Maldonado, a 20-year-old urban studies and environmental science & policy double major at UC Irvine, was recognized at the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) 2026 Regional Conference and General Assembly, where he received the Audience Award for his ArcGIS StoryMap titled “Cycling, Collisions, and Contamination: The Burdens of Environmental Injustice and Infrastructure Gaps in Los Angeles County's Communities of Color.”
The annual Student Showcase challenges students to use open regional data to explore planning and equity issues. Maldonado’s project met the challenge and brought it home, according to attendees.
“I just want to see people care,” Maldonado said in an interview following the May 8 conference. “It’s so easy for politicians to say they’ll do something, and then we always see, time and time again, they never follow up. I want to see actual concrete action — not buzzwords… I grew up in LA and a lot of the examples I pulled from were from Boyle Heights. I grew up living in smog and not having safe, reliable, active transportation.”
His StoryMap opens with a quote from USC Urban Planning Professor Geoff Boeing: "We all suffer from air pollution here — we just don't all suffer equally."
It is a thesis that Maldonado does not merely argue. He maps it, layer by layer, until the pattern becomes undeniable.
Using CalEnviroScreen 4.0 pollution data, SCAG regional bikeway and collision datasets, and U.S. Census demographic data, Maldonado overlaid pollution burden, bicycle infrastructure density, and auto-bicycle crash rates across Los Angeles County’s census tracts. What emerged was a picture that was, as he put it, “pretty normal — which is sad to think about.”
Maldonado literally and visually mapped it out using publicly available regional datasets to show not just that inequality exists, but exactly where it lives, block by block, census tract by census tract, collision point by collision point.
The findings are stark. Communities that are predominantly Latino, Black, and low-income — South Gate, Florence-Graham, Central Los Angeles, Boyle Heights — consistently scored in the top percentiles for pollution burden while sitting near the bottom for existing bike lane density.
Meanwhile, protected and well-maintained cycling infrastructure clustered in the whiter, wealthier corridors of West and North Los Angeles.
In 2022 alone, 85% of cyclist fatalities in the county occurred on roadways without bike lanes, according to Bike LA’s 2023 Bicycle Safety Report.
Maldonado’s research found that in South Gate–East Los Angeles, a corridor running along Interstate 110 Southbound, his spatial analysis identified 54 priority investment areas — the highest concentration in the entire county — in a neighborhood where roughly 95% of residents identify as Latino.
“It just confirms what I’m studying,” he said. “It is very shocking to see these disparities, but it’s also what I expected.”
The project also documents a human toll that goes beyond statistics.
On a four-block stretch of North Figueroa Street in Downtown Los Angeles, three cyclists were killed between 2021 and 2022.
Near the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and South Figueroa, two fatalities occurred within a quarter-mile radius in a single year — at the precise point where a bike lane abruptly ends before two major roadways converge near the 110 freeway.
These are not random accidents, Maldonado argues. “They are the predictable consequences of infrastructure designed around vehicles, not people.”
To illustrate the disparity in design philosophy, Maldonado places two images side by side: a crumbling sidewalk inches from traffic at the Interstate 5 and 10 underpass in Boyle Heights, and the wide, tree-lined, pedestrian-friendly overpass on Main Street in Santa Monica.
“Same county. Same freeway system. Same guidelines,” he notes. “The difference between these two crossings is not in feasibility, but priority.”
His solutions are as layered as his analysis:
- Green Comfort Streets with vegetated medians that absorb pollution and physically separate cyclists from traffic;
- Clean Transit and Mobility Hubs that close the "last-mile" gap in transit deserts; and
- a Community Trust, funded by polluting industries, that ensures new infrastructure does not displace the residents it is meant to serve.
The first-generation Guatemalan American said he hopes his work opens more space for communities to be the loudest voice at the planning table. Several conference attendees — including, he noted with some astonishment, a handful of veteran council members — encouraged him to consider public office.
“I think having indigenous voices in city politics is my biggest goal,” he said. “If you’re not having the community as your biggest stakeholder, then planners aren’t doing their jobs properly.”
— Mimi Ko Cruz