Equity Analysis in Regional Transportation Planning Processes PDF Download

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Equity
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
Transportation agencies that manage federally funded programs and projects are responsible for ensuring that their plans, programs, policies, services, and investments benefit everyone in their jurisdictions equitably. The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program's TCRP Research Report 214: Equity Analysis in Regional Transportation Planning Processes, Volume 2: Research Overview describes the results of the research effort and identifies ways in which equity in public transportation can be analyzed and adapted by Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) in partnership with transit agencies. This report discusses research findings and recommendations organized around a five-step equity analysis framework that is built upon a foundation of public involvement. A separate report, TCRP Research Report 214: Equity Analysis in Regional Transportation Planning Processes, Volume 1: Guide is designed to help MOPs analyze and address equity effectively in long-range, regional, multimodal transportation planning and programming processes. The reports provide information about methods, tools, and resources that agencies can use to support plans and programs that are compliant with equity-related federal requirements.

Author: Hannah Twaddell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Book Description
"Transportation agencies that manage federally funded programs and projects are responsible for ensuring that their plans, programs, policies, services, and investments benefit everyone in their jurisdictions equitably. The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program's TCRP Research Report 214: Equity Analysis in Regional Transportation Planning Processes, Volume 1: Guide is designed to help Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) analyze and address equity effectively in long-range, regional, multimodal transportation planning and programming processes. The guide walks through public engagement, identifying populations for analysis, identifying needs and concerns, measuring impacts, further understanding those impacts, and developing strategies to avoid or mitigate inequities. As the guide states, minority, low-income, and limited English proficiency populations have not benefited equitably from transportation investments and programs historically. A separate report, soon to be published as TCRP Research Report 214: Equity Analysis in Regional Transportation Planning Processes, Volume 2: Research Overview, describes the results of the research effort and identifies ways in which equity in public transportation can be analyzed and adapted by MPOs in partnership with transit agencies."--

Author: Hannah Twaddell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Equality
Languages : en
Pages : 31

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Book Description
"Transportation agencies that manage federally funded programs and projects are responsible for ensuring that their plans, programs, policies, services, and investments benefit everyone in their jurisdictions equitably. The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program's TCRP Research Report 214: Equity Analysis in Regional Transportation Planning Processes, Volume 2: Research Overview describes the results of the research effort and identifies ways in which equity in public transportation can be analyzed and adapted by Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) in partnership with transit agencies. This report discusses research findings and recommendations organized around a five-step equity analysis framework that is built upon a foundation of public involvement. A separate report, TCRP Research Report 214: Equity Analysis in Regional Transportation Planning Processes, Volume 1: Guide is designed to help MPOs analyze and address equity effectively in long-range, regional, multimodal transportation planning and programming processes. The reports provide information about methods, tools, and resources that agencies can use to support plans and programs that are compliant with equity-related federal requirements."--

Author: Alexander Anthony Karner
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781267968593
Category : Regional planning
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This dissertation investigates regional transportation planning in California from 1967 through the contemporary era, identifying advocates for regional equity as important actors for achieving desired planning outcomes including climate change mitigation. It begins with the creation of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). Replacing its predecessor organization in 1973, the creation of Caltrans was thought to signal the beginning of multimodalism in state transportation policy. Opposition from the public and the legislature to this new direction led to the establishment of regional transportation planning organizations that actually located authority at the local (city and county) level. California's transportation policy goals embodied in the contemporary Senate Bill (SB) 375 are similar to those of the 1970s - reducing vehicle-miles traveled through the promotion of compact urban forms - but the institutional arrangements established in the 1970s make progress difficult to achieve. Regional equity advocates are emerging as an important constituency in this fraught planning landscape. Buoyed by foundation funding and federal legislation enacted beginning with Title VI of 1964's Civil Rights Act, these advocates are seeking to ensure that agencies meet planning goals where the law is insufficiently prescriptive. A key method by which advocates access the planning process is through the "equity analysis" of regional transportation plans. A critical review of equity analysis practice reveals standard methods that are not responsive to public input and do not take advantage of recent developments in activity-based travel demand modeling. Improved methods are proposed that are developed in collaboration with equity advocates. Although these improvements will not ensure equitable outcomes, they represent an improvement over existing analysis techniques, more accurately reflect the concerns of advocates, and could be deployed nationwide.

Author: Tierra Suzan Bills
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Book Description
Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) regularly perform equity analyses for their long-range transportation plans, as this is required by Environmental Justice regulations. These regional-level plans may propose hundreds of transportation infrastructure and policy changes (e.g. highway and transit extensions, fare changes, pricing schemes, etc.) as well as land-use policy changes. The challenge is to assess the distribution of impacts from all the proposed changes across different population segments. In addition, these agencies are to confirm that disadvantaged groups will share equitably in the benefits and not be overly adversely affected. While there are a number of approaches used for regional transportation equity analyses in practice, approaches using large scale travel models are emerging as a common existing practice. However, the existing methods used generally fail to paint a clear picture of what groups benefit or do not benefit from the transportation improvements. In particular, there are four critical shortcomings of the existing transportation equity analysis practice. First, there is no clear framework outlining the key components of a transportation equity analysis at the regional-level. Second, the existing zonal-level group segmentation used for identifying target and comparison groups are problematic and can lead to significant biases. Third, the use of average equity indicators can be misleading, as averages tend to mask important information about the underlying distributions. Finally, there is no clear guidance on implementing scenario ranking based on the equity objectives. In addressing the first shortcoming of existing equity analysis practices, we present a guiding framework for transportation equity analysis that organizes the components of equity analysis in terms of transportation priorities, the model, and the equity indicators. The first component emphasizes the need to identify the priority transportation improvement(s) relevant for communities, as this guides the transportation benefits (or costs) to be evaluated. The second component is the model to be used for facilitating scenario analysis and measuring the expected transportation and land-use changes. The third component refers to the selection of equity indicators (ideally selected based on the transportation priorities identified), and the evaluation of these indicators. This three-part framework is also useful for outlining the research needs for transportation equity analysis. Among other key research needs, the literature indicates that the development of meaningful distributional comparison methods for transportation planning and decision-making and the use of more comprehensive measures of transportation benefit (for use as equity indicators) are critical. The primary contributions of this dissertation relate to the third component; we develop an advanced approach for evaluating transportation equity outcomes (as represented by the equity indicator(s)). Our proposed analytical approach to transportation equity analysis addresses the existing shortcomings with respect to zonal-level group segmentation and average measures of transportation equity indicators. In addition, our approach emphasizes the importance of scenario ranking using explicit equity criteria. Our approach leverages the disaggregate functionality of activity-based travel demand models and applies individual-level data analysis to advance the existing equity analysis practices. There are four steps in our proposed equity analysis process. The first step is to select the equity indicators to be evaluated and segment the population into a target group and comparison group(s). In this case we advocate for an individual -unit of segmentation and therefore individual-level equity indicators. This minimizes the biases associated with aggregate group segmentation and average equity indicators. The second step is to calculate the indicators from the model data output, which involves determining the exact measures (formulas) for the selected equity indicators. Here we advocate for measures that are comprehensive and sensitive to both transportation system changes and land-use factors, such as the logsum accessibility and consumer surplus measure. The third step in the process is to generate and evaluate distributions of the individual-level equity indicators. In particular, we advocate for the use of what we refer to as the "Individual Difference Density" comparison, which compares distributions of individual-level changes for the population segments across the planning scenarios. This comparison allows for the "winners" and "losers" resulting from the transportation and land-use plans to be identified. The fourth and final step in the process is to identify equity criteria (associated with the chosen equity standard (objective)) and rank the planning scenarios based on the degree to which they meet the equity criteria. We present two conceptual demonstrations of the advantages of distributional comparisons, relative to average measures. The first case uses a synthetic data set and simple binary mode choice model to show and the second case uses an empirical data set (the 2000 Bay Area Travel Survey) and more sophisticated mode choice model. These demonstrations show that distributional comparisons are capable of revealing a much richer picture of how different population segments are affected by transportation plans, in comparison with average measures. Further, distributional comparison provides a framework for evaluating what population's characteristics and conditions lead to certain distribution transportation outcomes. Our proposed process for regional transportation equity analysis is subsequently applied in a case study for the San Francisco Bay Area. We evaluate joint transportation and land-use scenarios modeled using the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's state-of-the-art activity-based travel demand model. We demonstrate the power of individual-level data analysis in a real-world setting. We calculate individual-level measures of commute travel time and logsum-based accessibility/consumer surplus using the model output and compare the scenario changes across income segments. We generate empirical distributions of these indicators and compare the changes associated with the planning scenarios for low and high income commuters. Further, we apply criteria for a set of equity standards (which represent alternative equity objectives) and rank the planning scenarios. There are four key takeaways from this case study. First is that our results show a significant difference in equity outcomes when using the individual-level population segmentation approach, compared to using the zonal segmentation approach done in practice. In fact we find opposite results. For average commute travel time, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's zonal segmentation approach indicates that low income commuters are worse off than all other commuters, while the individual segmentation approach (in our case) indicates that low income commuters are significantly better off than high income commuters. While the underlying causes for these results warrant further investigation, we hypothesize that this difference is due to the fact that the zone-based approach only captures 40% of the target (low income) group. The individual-level segmentation approach is able to capture 100% of the target group. Second is regarding the equity indicators evaluated. The commute travel time indicator results indicate that low income commuters are better off than high income commuters, while the accessibility/consumer surplus results indicate that low income commuters are worse off than high income commuters. The underlying causes for these results warrant further investigation, but we hypothesize that this difference in results to due to the fact that the logsum accessibility/consumer surplus measure by design is able to capture transportation and land-use related factors, while the travel time measure only captures one dimension of transportation user factors. Focusing on travel time may be misleading because it does not fully capture the true benefits of the transportation scenarios. Third is regarding the use of distributional comparisons, relative to average measures. We find that distributional comparisons are much more informative than average measures. The distributional measures are capable of providing a much richer picture of individuals-level transportation impacts, in terms of who gains and who loses due the transportation planning scenarios. Using the accessibility/ consumer surplus measure, the Individual Difference Densities show that as many as 33.3% of low income commuters experience losses, compared to 13.4% for high income commuters. Finally, we make the case that the use of equity standards for scenario ranking plays an important role in the equity analysis process. Our results show that different equity standards result in different rankings for the transportation planning scenarios. This points to the need for agencies (and communities) to make conscious decisions on what equity standard(s) should be used and apply this/these in the scenario ranking process. This dissertation work includes the first known full-scale application of a regional activity-based travel model for transportation equity analysis that involves distributional comparisons of individual-level equity indicators and scenario ranking based on equity criteria. We find that while the existing practice is to use average measures to represent how difference are affected by transportation plans, distributional comparison are able to provide for a richer evaluation of individual-level transportation.

Author: Rubén Cordera
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351361538
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Transport and the spatial location of population and activities have been important themes of study in engineering, social sciences and urban and regional planning for many decades. However, an integrated approach to the modelling of transport and land use has been rarely made, and common practice has been to model both phenomena independently. This book presents an introduction to the modelling of land use and transport interaction (LUTI), with a theoretical basis and a presentation of the broad state of the art. It also sets out the steps for building an operational LUTI model to provide a concrete application. The authors bring extensive experience in this cross-disciplinary field, primarily for an academic audience and for professionals seeking a thorough introduction.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Highway planning
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
This guide was written as a quick primer for transportation professionals and analysts who assess the impacts of proposed transportation actions on communities. It outlines the community impact assessment process, highlights critical areas that must be examined, identifies basic tools and information sources, and stimulates the thought-process related to individual projects. In the past, the consequences of transportation investments on communities have often been ignored or introduced near the end of a planning process, reducing them to reactive considerations at best. The goals of this primer are to increase awareness of the effects of transportation actions on the human environment and emphasize that community impacts deserve serious attention in project planning and development-attention comparable to that given the natural environment. Finally, this guide is intended to provide some tips for facilitating public involvement in the decision making process.

Author: Karen Lucas
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0128148187
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Measuring Transport Equity provides a methodology with the potential to shape the transportation decision-making processes, thus allowing for the adoption of more equitable transport solutions. Focusing on numerous applied methodological approaches to transport equity assessment, the book formalizes the disciplinary practice, definitions and methodologies for transport equity. In addition, it recognizes the different types of equity and acknowledges that each requires their own assessment methodologies. Bringing together the most up-to-date perspectives and practical approaches for assessing transportation accessibility, environmental impacts, health and wellbeing, the book sets standards for researchers, policymakers and practitioners for conducting social impact analyses. Written by a collection of top researchers in the transport field Shows how to apply transport equity measurement ideas in the real-world through case study examples Covers emerging transport topics, including the use of the Gini index for measuring inequality Includes learning aids, such as methodology, application, policy relevance and further reading

Author: Reid Ewing
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351211323
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Planning at a metropolitan scale is important for effective management of urban growth, transportation systems, air quality, and watershed and green-spaces. It is fundamental to efforts to promote social justice and equity. Best Practices in Metropolitan Transportation Planning shows how the most innovative metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) in the United States are addressing these issues using their mandates to improve transportation networks while pursuing emerging sustainability goals at the same time. As both a policy analysis and a practical how-to guide, this book presents cutting-edge original research on the role accessibility plays - and should play - in transportation planning, tracks how existing plans have sought to balance competing priorities using scenario planning and other strategies, assesses the results of various efforts to reduce automobile dependence in cities, and explains how to make planning documents more powerful and effective. In highlighting the most innovative practices implemented by MPOs, regional planning councils, city and county planning departments and state departments of transportation, this book aims to influence other planning organizations, as well as influence federal and state policy discussions and legislation.

Author: ITE (Institute of Transportation Engineers)
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118762355
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 1204

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Book Description
A multi-disciplinary approach to transportation planning fundamentals The Transportation Planning Handbook is a comprehensive, practice-oriented reference that presents the fundamental concepts of transportation planning alongside proven techniques. This new fourth edition is more strongly focused on serving the needs of all users, the role of safety in the planning process, and transportation planning in the context of societal concerns, including the development of more sustainable transportation solutions. The content structure has been redesigned with a new format that promotes a more functionally driven multimodal approach to planning, design, and implementation, including guidance toward the latest tools and technology. The material has been updated to reflect the latest changes to major transportation resources such as the HCM, MUTCD, HSM, and more, including the most current ADA accessibility regulations. Transportation planning has historically followed the rational planning model of defining objectives, identifying problems, generating and evaluating alternatives, and developing plans. Planners are increasingly expected to adopt a more multi-disciplinary approach, especially in light of the rising importance of sustainability and environmental concerns. This book presents the fundamentals of transportation planning in a multidisciplinary context, giving readers a practical reference for day-to-day answers. Serve the needs of all users Incorporate safety into the planning process Examine the latest transportation planning software packages Get up to date on the latest standards, recommendations, and codes Developed by The Institute of Transportation Engineers, this book is the culmination of over seventy years of transportation planning solutions, fully updated to reflect the needs of a changing society. For a comprehensive guide with practical answers, The Transportation Planning Handbook is an essential reference.