Integrated Urban Modeling in Support of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Community Planning in California

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, attention has increasingly been focused on social justice issues, mainly human health and access to services. With the Clinton executive order in 1994, Federal agencies were mandated to avoid disproportionate adverse environmental impacts to United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) rules expanded this order to include all social and economic impacts in transportation planning and project funding. Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are the relevant agencies, in terms of this equity analysis, and generally have not used their existing modeling tools to project plan or project impacts on protected groups in any detail. The authors will use California as a case study, because a recent State law requires the State's 18 MPOs to adopt Sustainable Communities Strategies to reduce greenhouse gases in their Regional Transportation Plans, starting in 2012. This law requires certain environmental justice analyses and also substantial improvements in MPO modeling capabilities. California's largest four MPOs are developing improved travel models and land use models. The authors evaluate if these improved models will be capable of evaluating the equity effects of regional plans.