Equity-oriented Criteria for Project Prioritization in Regional Transportation Planning

Transportation inequities, consequences of decades of auto-oriented planning alongside discriminatory land-use and transportation planning and policy decisions resulting from structural racism, severely impact opportunities for people of color and other marginalized populations. While a growing body of work has examined inequities with respect to long-range transportation planning, less research examines how equity is incorporated in short-term planning processes via the Transportation Improvement Program. This research reviewed how the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that serve the 40 largest US urbanized areas used equity-based criteria for transportation project prioritization in regional planning. Just over half deployed at least one equity criterion for allocating transportation funds, which fell into one of six categories with varying degrees of complexity and potential for impact. While most MPOs included equity in their prioritization criteria, the methods could be improved to better align with more complete definitions of transportation equity, focusing on how targeted groups are defined, more comprehensive methods for equity evaluation, and an increase in the weight that equity is given in prioritization. MPOs and other agencies implementing transportation projects should adopt a justice-oriented framework for project prioritization that ensures that projects first affirmatively remedy historical inequities and work with affected communities to adopt appropriate and meaningful solutions

Equity-Oriented Criteria for Project Prioritization in Regional Transportation Planning

Transportation inequities, the consequences of decades of auto-oriented planning alongside discriminatory land-use and transportation planning and policy decisions resulting from structural racism, severely limit opportunities for people of color and other marginalized populations. While a growing body of work has examined inequities with respect to long-range transportation planning, less research examines how equity is incorporated in short-term planning processes via the Transportation Improvement Program. This research reviewed how the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that serve the 40 largest U.S. urbanized areas used equity-based criteria for transportation project prioritization in regional planning. Just over half deployed at least one equity criterion for allocating transportation funds, which fell into one of six categories with varying degrees of complexity and potential for impact. While most MPOs included equity in their prioritization criteria, the methods could be improved to align better with more complete definitions of transportation equity, focusing on how targeted groups are defined, more comprehensive methods for equity evaluation, and an increase in the weight that equity is given in prioritization. MPOs and other agencies implementing transportation projects should adopt a justice-oriented framework for project prioritization that ensures that projects first affirmatively remedy historical inequities and work with affected communities to adopt appropriate and meaningful solutions.

Proposing an integrated accessibility-based measure to evaluate spatial equity among different social classes

Fair spatial distribution of services has always been a challenge for urban planners to supply sufficient accessibility for individuals and to consider the needs of vulnerable social groups. Nevertheless, equity assessment literature has mostly focused on measuring the accessibility through distance-based variables, and social stratification based on just income, as well. Accordingly, this study intends to employ an accessibility measure that considers non-distance-based variables along with distance-based ones. It uses multi-criteria decision-making to propose an accessibility index to assess vertical and horizontal equity of residents’ accessibility to a range of public facilities, in the district 6 of Tehran, Iran. Therefore, using the integration of geographical information system-based spatial analysis, wider people specification, and the Gini coefficient, this measure proposes a novel framework to examine the equity level of individuals belonging to the lower, middle, and upper social classes. Results imply a 0.228 Gini index for horizontal equity, which indicates a low level of inequity among residents. Besides, for vertical equity evaluation, Gini index of 0.097, 0.249, and 0.167, respectively, for lower, middle, and upper groups show people in the lower class experience very low levels of inequity, therefore higher accessibility is well distributed among groups with higher social needs. This approach can help planners to choose the right analysis method and prioritize urban decisions toward the equitable distribution of facilities.

Equity to Urban Parks for Elderly Residents: Perspectives of Balance between Supply and Demand

As population ages, ensuring that the elderly get their due rights has become a common concern of scholars in many fields. However, as an important public service facility in daily life of elderly, the research on the equity of urban parks is mostly based on the evaluation of accessibility. The equity of the elderly's access to urban parks services has been rarely discussed from the perspective of supply and demand balance. In the context of the concept of spatial equity, we used urban parks in the main city of Harbin as a case study, the actual travel mode of the elderly was considered in the evaluation, adopted an Integrated Spatial Equity Evaluation (ISEE) framework, quantitative evaluation of the equity of different levels of urban park under multiple traffic modes. In this study, the results showed that under the three modes of travel, the degree of spatial equity was higher for non-motorized trips than for the other two modes. In terms of urban parks hierarchy, the spatial equity of urban parks at district level were much higher than those at the neighborhood level and street level. The inequity between supply and demand for urban park for elderly people was significant and varies between administrative districts. The empirical evidence in this research may provide references and suggestions for urban parks planning and decision-making. In cities where the scale of land use is basically stable, such as Harbin, we can start from the spatial configuration of park green space system and public transportation system to improve the efficiency of urban parks provision. Thereby promoting the construction and development of an “old age-friendly” society.

EQUITY EVALUATION OF URBAN PARK SYSTEM: A CASE STUDY OF XIAMEN, CHINA

Urban parks play a distinctive and important role in satisfying residents’ demands on leisure and recreation, and thus have become the focus of research in the field of urban planning and sustainable development. This paper used equity as indicator to combine both the supply and demand sides of urban park service. Taking Xiamen as the study case, the relationship between spatial distribution of population and park services was analyzed. The results show that while population density has a significant spatial relationship with urban park service level at the city scale, Xiamen has the problem of neglecting the equity of urban park service between people and regions within the city. The proposed approach builds up the linkage between urban park service and urban population in order to evaluate the performance of urban park. Although the mechanism remains to be discussed, this study provides a useful auxiliary tool for constructing a guideline for urban green space planning, since urban park is increasingly seen as a kind of restricted public resource and ensuring its equity should be an important task for city mangers.