1. In the United States, The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced the availability of approximately $10 million in competitive grant funds through FTA's Pilot Program for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Planning.
2. FTA says the funds will support comprehensive planning efforts that help connect communities, improve access to public transportation and affordable housing, combat climate change, advance environmental justice, and promote equitable delivery of benefits to underserved communities.
3. FTA says the agency will prioritize projects that will help improve air quality in non-attainment and maintenance areas for certain criteria pollutants under the National Ambient Air Quality Standards and promote equitable delivery of benefits and services to underserved communities.
4. The Pilot Program for TOD Planning funds comprehensive planning to increase transit access and to encourage ridership with mixed-use and mixed-income development near public transportation projects.
5. Examples of eligible projects include comprehensive planning studies around station areas for new fixed guideway projects, such as light-rail, heavy rail, commuter rail, or bus rapid transit systems that have a designated right-of-way.
6. In order to apply for program funding, an applicant must be an existing FTA recipient—either a project sponsor of an eligible transit project or an entity with land use planning authority in the project corridor. To ensure that work meets the needs of the local community, transit project sponsors and land use planning authorities must partner to conduct the planning work.
7. The pilot program started in 2019, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced the availability of $19.2 million in funding to support comprehensive planning that improves access to public transit.
EQUITABLE, JUST AND INCLUSIVE TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
1. Every year the National Complete Streets Coalition puts out Dangerous by Design, which highlights trends in fatalities and serious injuries around the country. In 2019, they found “while traffic deaths impact every community in the United States, states and metropolitan areas across the southern continental United States, older adults, people of color, and people walking in low-income communities bear a higher share of this harm.”
2. Distributive justice is how equity is often examined. Transportation professionals may conduct a demographic analysis of the community and determine where to allocate resources to improve safety.
3. While there may be studies and projects in those communities, a tension that transportation professionals face is being able to make drastic and lasting change by reallocating space used by cars for storage (on-street parking) or travel to other modes that can carry more people.
4. Transportation networks that provide people no option except for single-car occupancy continue to perpetuate unjust and disproportionate impacts on low-income communities. A better metric for decision making is determining how many people can safely move through the corridor and evaluating the trade-off using a lane to store vehicles versus using it to move people by biking, walking, or public transit.
5. Interactional justice reflected in whether people are being treated in a discriminatory way, or whether they are targets of harassment, insults, or other rude behavior. Many transportation professionals may think our only responsibility is the planning and design of the public right-of-way (ROW). Often, we are involved in policy decisions about how the ROW is managed and enforced. For example, “jaywalking,” a term once promoted by the automobile industry, is a law that came about to regulate pedestrians who once ruled the streets. Now it is generally not enforced until it is enforced.
6. Procedural justice refers to the way that the process of negotiation and decision-making influence perceived fairness by individuals.
7. While in principle, we host a public meeting that is open to the public, if we are hosting a public meeting in the middle of the week during the evening, people are being left out of the decision-making process. Depending on the community, you can predict who will show up, and attendees are probably not reflective of the entire community.
Source: https://www.roadsbridges.com/fta-announces-funding-opportunity-transit-oriented-development-planning
https://www.roadsbridges.com/equitable-just-and-inclusive-transportation-systems-are-within-our-reach
