Assessing Environmental Justice in Transport at the Regional Level

Over the last twenty-five years, the environmental justice paradigm has gained ground within the environmental movement. From environmental justice's beginnings as a reaction against disparate siting of toxic wastes, activists have broadened their approach to investigate other kinds of injustices, including disparities in the provision of transportation. Political pressure led President Clinton to issue Executive Order 12898 regarding environmental justice in 1994. The Executive Order called on all federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their missions and to develop new regulations to ensure this mission was carried out. The Environmental Protection Agency took the Executive Order very seriously, and the U.S. Department of Transportation has developed environmental justice regulations that have to be carried out when regions did their regional planning. This paper will give some historical background on the first attempts to apply environmental justice to regional transportation planning. The second part of the paper will look briefly at how Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) in the U.S. have coped with this charge to incorporate this new planning responsibility into their other duties. Then the focus of the paper will shift to an examination of how environmental justice issues are applied in a specific context: applying for and administering federal Journey to Work and Reverse Commute (JARC) funds. This program was selected as the stated goal of the program was to support projects, primarily transit-oriented, that would assist low-income individuals to travel to work. Thus, advocates of environmental justice planning were particularly interested in JARC funding. Chicago, Kansas City and San Francisco will be compared, with a focus on how different local contexts, including different political pressures, have resulted in a very different approach to environmental justice planning in the three regions.