Session Description: As researchers, transit agency leaders, advocates, and transit planning practitioners, we want to share data, personal experiences, best practices and recommendations for the current and future role of equity in transportation. We acknowledge that equity as a consideration, or metric in transportation planning processes and decision-making is quickly becoming a standard best practice. However, equity is often framed in the narrow context of low income, working class, BIPOC communities needing support and resources without the context of why that is the case. Rarely is equity discussed or evaluated in the context of the generations of people who have been and continue to be subjected to institutionalized inequity through policies of discrimination in redlining/zoning, exclusionary/predatory lending practices, disparities in policing, and disproportionate environmental burdens. The systemic and intersectional causes of inequity are rarely quantified or evaluated when equity in transit and transportation is considered. Identifying the problem without identifying these pervasive root causes results in ineffective approaches to building equity in transit and transportation programs and projects. This willfully incomplete understanding of the relationship between power, inequity, and equity disproportionately places the responsibility, or burden, of addressing equity in transportation on BIPOC communities, planners, consultants, and decision makers. We’d like to explore how expanding the conversation around equity to include inequity, its history, intersections, proponents and beneficiaries will allow communities, transportation planners, public agencies, and decision-makers to take on a broader perspective on why equity is important, what it should look like, and why it has been so hard to define and implement.

Session Moderator:

Ali H. Mir, Vice President and West Region Planning Director of STV, Inc