Stefanie Brodie

Impact of Environmental Justice on Transportation: Applying Environmental Justice Maturation Model to Benchmark Progress

Presidential Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice (EJ) was signed in 1994, and the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) issued regulatory guidelines for addressing EJ in transportation in 1997. Transportation agencies have since adopted a range of policies, programs, and activities to identify and address disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects of their policies, programs, and activities on minority and low-income populations. On the basis of the relevant literature and structured interviews, this paper assesses how state DOTs are addressing EJ issues in their decision-making processes and identifies common and effective practices. The results show that several state DOTs have implemented public involvement programs and other procedures to assess the burdens of transportation investment. However, fewer agencies assess the equity of benefits, fewer assess outcomes of EJ actions, and fewer still link EJ analysis outcomes with future funding and policy decisions. On the basis of existing practices and regulatory guidelines, the researchers formulated a performance-based, maturity-scale model that agencies can use to benchmark the effectiveness of their external and internal EJ activities in achieving EJ outcomes in transportation. The model was applied anonymously to selected agencies to demonstrate different maturity levels in addressing EJ.

Review of Sustainability Rating Systems for Transportation and Neighborhood-Level Developments

Over the past 10 years, there has been a proliferation of methodologies and tools for rating the sustainability of transportation-related projects both in the United States and internationally. These tools provide the ability to evaluate the sustainability of alternative transportation and land development policies, plans, and projects. The tools therefore facilitate the process of making transportation and land development decisions that contribute to community sustainability in practice. This study reviews and assesses approaches to rating the sustainability of transportation systems and neighborhood developments by highlighting the state of the practice, outlining similarities and differences in the existing approaches, and determining which tools are more appropriate for various contexts and when it is valuable to combine different tools. The study also identifies opportunities for improving the existing practice.

Transportation System Health: Meeting Deficiency Needs and Growth Aspirations Systemically

Different concepts of health have been applied to transportation and other built infrastructure systems in the literature and in practice. The 2012 national surface transportation legislation, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, established a performance-based planning framework requiring the development of performance measures and targets with progress reporting by state, metropolitan, and local agencies toward achieving seven national goals. Although performance-based planning offers a formal platform on which to plan systematically to achieve goals, one of the key challenges is how best to manage transportation system performance in nonuniform metropolitan regions and local jurisdictions to achieve uniform statewide and national goals. Motivated by this issue, this study developed the concept of transportation system health (TSH) with a focus on fulfilling both basic needs and beyond-basic needs of the communities that transportation systems serve, with Maslow’s theory of human motivation as a foundation. Potential applications of the TSH framework are discussed, with examples highlighting their significance for multiscale and context-sensitive planning and decision making. This paper is potentially useful to practitioners looking for systematic approaches to support identifying strategic goals, determining priorities, selecting performance measures, and setting targets in nonuniform regions to achieve uniform statewide goals.

Performance-Based Methodology for Evaluating Equity for Transportation System Users

Planning for equitable outcomes in transportation requires the development of evaluation methods that support the integration of equity in planning processes. This paper presents a methodology for equity evaluation that addresses limitations in current practices by analyzing transportation system outcomes regionally for the full range of demographic groups over time to incorporate the results into performance-based planning processes. This work applied current equity evaluations and a proposed methodology to a case study of the Atlanta, Georgia, metropolitan region. The results illustrate the current methodological limitations and provide an application of the proposed method that shows its ability to address the limitations. The proposed methodology is a comprehensive approach to analyze and characterize transportation system impacts that can be incorporated into performance-based transportation planning at the regional level to improve equity of transportation outcomes.

Goal-Oriented Analysis of Transportation System Performance: A Corridor-Level Study of Georgia’s State Routes

AbstractThe concept of goal-oriented analysis of transportation system performance presented in this paper captures multiple stakeholder and sociopolitical views of system performance, while simult...