Environmental Justice in the Transportation Planning Process: Southern California Perspective

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. This law underpins federal regulations and policies collectively referred to under the label “environmental justice.” Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which receive federal funds for transportation planning, must demonstrate that their plans and programs comply with environmental justice expectations. The Southern California Association of Governments, an MPO in Los Angeles and the largest MPO in the United States, employed a number of new analytical techniques to assess the distribution of benefits and burdens of its 2001 Regional Transportation Plan, a 25-year blueprint for regional transportation investments. In general, the analysis showed that the plan would not cause inequitable distributions of benefits or burdens for minority or low-income residents of the region. A disproportionate aviation noise burden was identified in the analysis and influenced regional policy makers to pursue a distributed regional aviation policy to minimize this and related aviation impacts.