Planning for transportation equity in small regions: Towards meaningful performance assessment

Regional transportation planning agencies seek to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously including consensus on key issues, compliance with relevant laws and regulations, and improvements in the congestion, air quality, and safety performance of the transportation system. Some performance areas lend themselves well to operationalization while others do not. One area that has received comparatively little study is the assessment of a plan's impacts on environmental justice and social equity. Although research on regional planning usually emphasizes larger metropolitan areas and agencies, these issues are especially relevant in smaller regions where planners lack the capacity for innovation and careful analysis. Further, the transit services on which disadvantaged populations depend are often lacking or non-existent in less-populated regions. Understanding how planners in these locations undertake social equity-related analyses and providing suggestions for improvement is thus an important endeavor. While prior work has assessed whether, and to what extent, equity objectives are included in plans, there are few detailed investigations of the key analytical choices that shape equity outcomes. This paper fills this important research gap, providing such an analysis of existing practice in a largely rural region in California, the San Joaquin Valley, as well as recommendations for future analyses aimed at improving the consistency between equity analyses and the real-world impacts of transportation plans.