For decades, social scientists focused on environmental justice, critical geography, and transportation and regional planning noted infrastructure’s ability to shape historically underserved and socially vulnerable communities. Infrastructure and equity are intrinsically linked, yet the engineering and scientific community has not engaged with the dynamic interactions that exist between them. This has begun to change. Climate-driven crises fuel critiques of systemic inequities perpetuated by aging infrastructure and the failure to incorporate human elements in resiliency planning for extreme events. For example, in Jackson, MS, severe storms caused floodwaters to overwhelm the city’s largest water treatment facility, which operated for years under marginal conditions with limited redundancy; over 180,000 residents lost access to safe drinking water. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) opened a civil rights investigation to determine whether Mississippi agencies caused disparate impacts to Jackson’s predominantly Black population through oversight of the city’s water system and administration of its Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds. We also see shifts in the state’s response to social movement attempts to draw linkages between infrastructure and equity – the Dakota Access Pipeline, Union Hill and the People’s Tribunal on Natural Gas Infrastructure, and Flint, Michigan, among them.
In each case, systemic inequities are brought to light through failed assessment, siting, provision, financialization, or maintenance of infrastructure. In the U.S., the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and infrastructure provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act aim to address aging infrastructure while prioritizing equity considerations. For a quarter century, traditional definitions of environmental justice as “fair treatment” and “meaningful involvement” were only partially integrated across agencies through screening, project review, and enforcement. Now they are linked to an array of measures such as grants and revolving funds, loans, investment and production tax credits, and procurement that target infrastructure buildout, innovation and national security, climate adaptation, and nature-based mitigation. Such policy change mirrors what critical geographers emphasized for decades – that environmental justice cannot be pursued through a focus on single points of decision (e.g., air permit or implementation plan approval), acts of racial animus, or findings of disparate impact. Rather, community racial formation proceeds through public and private practices that create material effects over time at multiple spatial and temporal scales.
In California, there are growing efforts to embed and integrate transportation equity principles and community-driven solutions across all stages of municipal, county, regional, and state plan development and implementation. This shift generates conflict around problem definition, goal setting, intervention priorities, and measures of success. For example, the Community Air Protection Program (CAPP), administered by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), provides a valuable test of the promise and challenge of seeking transportation equity through community-led planning. Since its launch in 2018, CARB has selected disadvantaged communities to develop community air monitoring plans (CAMPs) and community emissions reduction plans (CERPs) as directed by Assembly Bill 617 (AB 617). Although transportation emission sources feature prominently in CAMPs and CERPs (e.g., freight transport, zero-emission technologies, alternative modes), existing AB 617 evaluation studies do not investigate the role that transportation concerns played in community selection, goal setting, and outcome assessment beyond acknowledging transportation agencies as stakeholders and transportation systems as overlooked. Further analysis is needed to understand the opportunities for advancing transportation equity by investigating how the transportation sector can integrate community-driven processes into plans and programs in collaboration with agencies and other stakeholders across multiple scales of impact and influence.
Current Projects
CLEANR works with Central Valley Air Quality Coalition (CVAQ) to understand the challenges and opportunities for advancing transportation equity through community-driven planning. CVAQ led a regional process before the first AB 617 community was selected. It designed a detailed scoring matrix to prioritize and nominate a subset of 40 communities for air monitoring and emissions reduction planning through AB 617. Community air pollution concerns were dominated by transportation infrastructure; mobile sources of PM2.5, diesel particulate matter, and ozone precursors such as nitrogen oxide; and indirect sources of criteria and toxic air emissions such as ports, logistics and distribution centers, and related truck routes. We consider how transportation infrastructure, emissions, and related authorities, policies, and practices remain underspecified as communities move from pre-selection to design, approval, and implementation of monitoring and emissions reduction plans. We conduct a retrospective evaluation of equity principles and processes in the selection, development, and implementation of community air monitoring plans and community emissions reduction plans in four San Joaquin Valley communities. Together, we work to advance understanding of the dimensions of transportation equity and justice in community-led planning, the barriers – legal, institutional, analytical, and design among them – to adoption of community-led planning efforts to achieve transportation equity, and the means by which disadvantaged communities can evaluate the influence of transportation and commodity flow trends such as supply chain restructuring, transportation access, and regional and intraurban change on neighborhood-scale air quality. For more information, please contact Dr. Gregg Macey, CLEANR Director.
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