Distance Value Model: Geospatial Implementation of Environmental Justice

Jurisdictions that receive Federal funding must be responsive to issues of environmental justice. Environmental justice requires that protected classes (e.g., minority and low-income populations) are neither disproportionately denied the benefits of transportation projects nor subjected to the detriments of transportation projects. However, there has been very little research on the financial distribution of transportation resources as a form of environmental justice. The objective of this paper is to describe a financial model for the measurement of environmental justice that can be used by transportation planners at both metropolitan planning organizations as well as state departments of transportation in the development of both short- and long-range transportation plans. The paper begins with a review of environmental justice domains and recent research in those domains. Then the Distance Value Model is described, including its two fundamental constructs: the Ideal Distribution and the Planned Distribution. The Ideal Distribution is the proportional allocation of transportation project values to a protected class in a transportation planning area. The Planned Distribution is the allocation of project values to a class in a planning area adjusted by the distance between the class and the projects. A statistically significant difference between the Ideal and Planned Distributions may indicate environmental injustice. The paper concludes with an application of the model to data from a metropolitan planning organization in the western United States and a discussion of the results.