Measuring Access to Opportunities to Advance Equity
Source: Conveyal
Urban passenger transportation’s fundamental purpose is connecting people to destinations that matter to them. Yet traditional guidance on quantifying equity has often missed the mark, focusing on narrower benefits, such as access to intermediate points (e.g. the nearest bus stop) rather than peoples’ true destinations. In the United States, policy related to federal civil rights laws (Title VI) endorses simplistic stop catchment-area demographic methods.
Instead of considering only who lives around stops or rides certain routes, improvements should be measured in terms of how they “improve access to opportunities for people of color and in low-income communities,” requiring practitioners to “go beyond baseline compliance with federal Title VI requirements.”
