Equity-Advancing Practices at Public Transit Agencies in the United States

Consistent with federal anti-discrimination and environmental justice law and guidance, public transportation agencies must evaluate the extent to which their decisions benefit and burden different people and groups and they must also conduct public engagement during decision-making. Assessing benefits and burdens and facilitating engagement are critically important for achieving transportation equity. In practice, quantitative analyses of plan impacts can be used to highlight and mitigate disparate benefits and burdens, but analyses are often conducted after major decisions have already been made and agencies have substantial flexibility in data collection and analysis. Public engagement can also affect equity-related outcomes, but agencies still rely heavily on public meetings and one-way information dissemination approaches that alienate potential participants. Considering the shortcomings associated with quantitative analysis and traditional public engagement as well as the open-ended nature of existing regulatory guidance, there is a need to understand the broad range of approaches that public transit agencies use to pursue equity-related goals. In this review of practice, we summarize six measures that agencies are using to advance transportation equity. Each measure is described using information gleaned from semi-structured interviews and primary source materials. We also identify challenges and shortcomings inherent in each approach using perspectives from the academic literature. The results will be useful for practitioners seeking equitable public transit systems and desiring to go beyond the standard approaches suggested by federal law and guidance.

Approaches and Barriers to Addressing Equity in Transportation: Experiences of Transportation Practitioners

The importance of advancing transportation equity has become more visible as other structural inequities in our society have received increasing attention. Articulating approaches that practitioners use to address equity in their work, including experience-based strategies and research-developed equity metrics, contribute to supporting the achievement of transportation equity goals. However, a gap exists between knowing these approaches and integrating them into regular professional practice, in part because of barriers that span across different transportation-related contexts. To investigate practitioners’ approaches to transportation equity, as well as barriers they encounter in trying to achieve improved equity, interviews were conducted with 59 transportation practitioners from the public, private, non-profit, and academic sectors. Findings revealed that a majority of the transportation practitioners in the study engaged in addressing equity in their work, including through collaborating with other organizations and sectors, integrating non-transportation-related data, and considering the contextual needs of vulnerable communities. They identified key barriers to their implementation of transportation equity approaches, including the lack of sufficient and quality equity-related data, challenges with accessing and collecting data, and a lack of standards and metrics for measuring equity-related outcomes. These findings can guide work that supports the explicit integration of transportation equity approaches into practitioners’ practices.

Transportation Equity

Transportation equity is a way to frame distributive justice concerns in relation to how social, economic, and government institutions shape the distribution of transportation benefits and burdens in society. It focuses on the evaluative standards used to judge the differential impacts of policies and plans, asking who benefits from and is burdened by them and to what extent. Questions of transportation equity involve both sufficientarian and egalitarian concerns with both absolute levels of wellbeing, transport-related poverty and social exclusion as well as with relative levels of transport-related inequalities. Ultimately, the study of transport equity explores the multiple channels through which transport and land use policies can create conditions for more inclusive cities and transport systems that allow different people to flourish, to satisfy their basic needs and lead a meaningful life. Transportation equity issues broadly encompass how policy decisions shape societal levels of environmental externalities and what groups are more or less exposed to them, as well as how those decisions affect the lives of different groups in terms of their ability to access life-enhancing opportunities such as employment, healthcare and education. Equity is a crucial part of a broader concern with transport and mobility justice. The call for transport justice goes beyond distributive concerns, and yet justice cannot be achieved without equity.