Integrating social equity into urban transportation planning: A critical evaluation of equity objectives and measures in transportation plans in North America

• We examine how social equity is considered in North American transport plans.
• Social equity objectives are often not translated into clearly specified objectives.
• Appropriate social equity measures or indicators are often lacking.
• The local environment and congestion are given greater importance than social equity.
• We discuss how to better integrate social equity in urban transport plans.

Urban transport policies are characterized by a wide range of impacts, and trade-offs and conflicts among these impacts. The task of integrating and reconciling these impacts poses challenges, because they are incommensurable, and they affect different groups differentially. Further, impacts such as those related to social equity are hard to define and measure. In this paper we address two inter-related questions: How is social equity conceptualized, operationalized, and prioritized relative to environmental and other objectives; and how might social equity be more effectively integrated in urban transportation plans in North America? We critically analyze how social equity is incorporated into transportation plans in 18 large North American metropolitan areas, in terms of the quality of the related objectives, how meaningfully their achievement is assessed through the choice of performance measures or indicators, and their prioritization relative to other objectives. We observe that social equity goals and objectives are in many cases not translated into clearly specified objectives, and appropriate measures for assessing their achievement in a meaningful, disaggregated manner are often lacking. At the same time, there are good examples of social equity objectives and measures in several plans. In general, there is a stronger focus on the local environment (and congestion reduction) than on social equity in the plans. We end the paper with a discussion related to considerations for generating objectives and measures for better integrating social equity into urban transportation plans.