Environmental Justice for Long-Range Regional Transportation Plans: Using Census Data to Target Communities of Concern
Rachel Gossen
Assistant Transportation Planner/Analyst
Metropolitan Transportation Commission
101 Eighth Street
Oakland, CA 94607-4700
Tel.: 510.464.7819
Fax: 510.464.7848
ABSTRACT
As the metropolitan planning organization for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) is charged with measuring the distributional effects of the transportation investments outlined in the region’s long-range transportation plan. One analysis MTC performed to satisfy this responsibility was to assess whether minority and low-income populations were disproportionately burdened by the region’s planned transportation investments. MTC used three Census data sets to perform this analysis: Summary File 3 (SF3), the 5-percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), and the CTPP2000 package.
SF3 and PUMS data were used to identify high concentrations of minority and low-income residents of the Bay Area. Additionally, these data were used to stratify residents by vehicle availability and means of transportation to work. Jobs held by low-income individuals were extracted from the CTPP2000 Part 2 data to explore the relationship between jobs and housing for low-income residents.
Using Census data allowed MTC to identify target communities, or communities of concern. Once these communities were defined, indicator variables associated with access and travel time to jobs and essential destinations, user benefits, vehicle miles traveled, and emissions were extracted from MTC’s travel forecasting system. A comparison was then made between communities of concern and the remainder of Bay Area communities (non-minority and non-low-income areas). This allowed MTC to evaluate the different transportation investment alternatives and determine whether minority and low-income communities shared equitably in the benefits of the investment packages without bearing a disproportionate share of the burdens.
The only problem encountered using the data sets was a slight mismatch in the definition of low-income residents. Due to the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, 200% of the federal poverty level was used to identify low-income residents. In the CTPP2000 data, jobs held by low-income individuals only considered those residents earning below 150% of the poverty level. While the CTPP2000 data still provided useful information, it would have been more beneficial to the equity analysis to have information on jobs held by residents earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level.
Abstract submitted for the Conference on Census Data for Transportation Planning: Preparing for the Future, Beckman Center, Irvine, California, May 11-13, 2005