Developing Standards for Equity in Transportation Planning and Policy

program at McMaster University. I began my PhD in September 2023 and have been part of the PhD MJ Researchers team since then. In a previous post my research was in its very early stages, and I shared an idea about planting a path of flowers for transportation researchers.

Back then, I introduced an R package designed to facilitate the analysis of transportation data obtained from the 2021 Canadian Census of Population. The package, called CommuteCA, is now available for installation. Named in reference to the commuting section of the Canadian Census, it allows researchers to conduct job accessibility analyses for any city in Canada using the 2021 Census as the primary data source. It also provides datasets that enable users to calculate and visualize job accessibility for all Canadian Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) and Census Agglomerations (CAs) without needing access to a Research Data Centre. Figure 1 illustrates an example application of the package, in which we used CommuteCA to calculate the spatial availabilityof jobs in the city of Toronto, Ontario, by transportation mode.

Figure 1- Job spatial availability in Toronto, by transportation mode.

Accessibility analysis is important because improving people’s accessibility is the main purpose and benefit of the transportation system (Pereira & Karner, 2021). Accessibility refers to the ease of reaching opportunities (Hansen, 1959) that are spatially dispersed and include a variety of destinations, such as employment, healthcare, education, religious institutions, museums, parks, and other places essential to living a meaningful life. In my thesis, I’m expanding the focus from accessibility analysis to the development of equity standards in transportation planning.

An equity standard refers to a set of tools used to address concerns about the distribution of the burdens and benefits across society. Usually, a standard is defined by an authority or by a general consent as a model, example, or rule to measure amounts, values, extension, or quality. In this sense, setting a standard means defining a level of what is considered acceptable. For an equity standard, it means defining a level of fairness and acceptable inequality (Soukhov, Anastasia et al., 2024).

As I mentioned in my previous post, Canada lacks established standards for equitable distribution of transportation benefits. This absence complicates current efforts to address transportation poverty (Palm et al., 2023). Additionally, transportation planners receive limited formal guidance in assessing the equity implications of their projects. Although there has been an increasing use of accessibility measures in transport planning in recent years, it is still necessary to create stronger evidence to relate accessibility to various outcomes (El-Geneidy & Levinson, 2022). Few studies have explicitly demonstrated connections between levels of accessibility and individuals’ outcomes such as completing daily tasks or accessing healthcare services. These gaps make it difficult to develop standards that ensure accessibility and fairness in both planning and policy.

This research is aligned with the objectives of the Data Driven Equity Standards MJ Working Group and aims to identify thresholds in the relationship between job accessibility and individual outcomes. By doing so, it contributes to defining accessibility standards that support equitable transportation planning.

The general objective breaks down into six subobjectives, each of them forming a part of my methodology (Figure 2): modelling job accessibility (achieved with the construction of the CommuteCA), selecting disadvantaged population groups with lower accessibility, predicting employment outcomes using accessibility, setting equity standards for transportation, defining priority geographical areas for policy interventions, and applying equity standards and measuring transportation equity.

Figure 2 – Main steps of the methodology to identify equity standards.

Identifying minimum accessibility requirements in practice would facilitate the implementation of normative criteria that can guarantee minimum accessibility standards for disadvantaged populations, preventing them from being excluded from the labour market. Additionally, accessibility thresholds can provide policymakers with an understanding of how much accessibility is needed to meet the fundamental needs of the greatest number of (disadvantaged) people.

Ultimately, this approach aims to increase the potential for government adoption by linking equity standards in lived experiences and individual outcomes, enhancing the comprehensibility and relevance of standards for community members and those experiencing unequal mobility. It has a focus on fully reproducible research, meaning that it will be available for application to any city in Canada. With some adaptations, the tool should also be of interest in similar urban contexts internationally, particularly in the United States, Australia, and Europe, as well as providing valuable guidance to Global South countries where data to develop equity analysis methods are often limited.

References

El-Geneidy, A., & Levinson, D. (2022). Making accessibility work in practice. Transport Reviews, 42(2), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2021.1975954

Hansen, W. G. (1959). How Accessibility Shapes Land Use. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 25(2), 73–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944365908978307

Palm, M., Teel, S., Tiznado-Aitken, I., Soukhov, A., Paez, A., Farber, S., & Hain, M. (2023). Developing Data Driven Equity Standards: Stakeholder Perspectives (No. 1; p. 26). Mobilizing Justice. https://mobilizingjustice.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Developing_Data_Driven_Standards_FINAL_2023_06_06.pdf

Pereira, R. H. M., & Karner, A. (2021). Transportation Equity. In R. Vickerman (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Transportation (pp. 271–277). Elsevier. https:/-/doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102671-7.10053-3

Soukhov, Anastasia, Tiznado-Aitken, Ignacio, Palm, Matthew, Farber, Steven, & Páez, Antonio. (2024). Searching for standards of fairness in the transportation justice literature (No. MJ-0001; p. 22). Mobilizing Justice. https://mobilizingjustice.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/tools-report-2.pdf