Moving Forward with Environmental Justice Analysis

Regional transportation planning organizations known as metropolitan planning organizations are required by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and other legislation to address environmental justice burdens and benefits to low income and minority populations. It is important to analyze and address inequities that manifest at the scale of the metropolitan region to fully understand and work toward improving equity outcomes for vulnerable populations. Current Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) plans tend to do a poor job contextualizing equity analysis, clearly identifying equity as a goal for policy and project prioritization, choosing appropriate equity measures to evaluate and monitor over time, and matching revealed disparities to appropriate policies that will counter existing or predicted future inequity. This project first examines common pitfalls that MPOs encounter in their equity analyses and then looks at the most recent research to suggest several strategies to improve these analyses, with a closer look at two case studies. Recent research has shown that appropriate analysis is best done with context sensitive measures, in an indexed form, using population-weighting, rather than threshold, methods for a more granular level of analysis. Finally, the report details how the two MPOs reviewed in the case studies can incorporate these recommendations in future analyses.Master of City and Regional Plannin