Two Steps Toward Clean Transit Equity
Environmental justice advocates have long appealed to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to fight unjust project sitings and reverse legacies of unevenly distributed environmental benefits. Unfortunately, their efforts have met with little success. On paper, Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance, and federal agencies have Title VI guidelines for their recipients. In practice, however, federal agencies have virtually never responded to Title VI complaints by finding recipients noncompliant, withdrawing funding, or requiring significant changes to project design.
The Biden administration’s government-wide focus on advancing environmental justice introduced the possibility of progress. In November 2021, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) released a request for input on updating its Title VI Guidelines for transit providers receiving federal funds. Complementing other groups who responded with suggestions on increasing fare equity and public participation practices, the Institute for Policy Integrity offered recommendations on how FTA’s Title VI Circular could be updated to prepare for the shift to clean transportation. Specifically, our comments provide a roadmap for how the agency can ensure an equitable distribution of electric vehicles and their associated air quality benefits.
Since FTA’s Title VI Circular was last revised in 2012, the political and technological landscapes have shifted dramatically in ways that necessitate updated guidelines. There is now greater political will to address climate change and environmental injustice and greater acknowledgment of the fact that communities of color are exposed to the most transportation-related pollutants, including particulate matter and nitrogen oxides. Moreover, clean transportation technology has become significantly more technologically and economically viable over the last decade, such that FTA recently announced plans to allocate $5.6 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law toward grants for low- or no-emission vehicles. This could help bring pollution-free electric buses to neighborhoods around the country, among other projects.
As FTA and its partners roll out electric transit across the country, the agency should ensure that the Circular explicitly requires nondiscrimination in the distribution and routing of such clean vehicles. Ideally, the communities most overburdened with air pollution would be prioritized to receive the lowest-emission vehicles — and these vehicles would be routed on the paths most useful to community members, including by connecting them to as many economic opportunities as possible. At the very least, FTA should ensure that the distribution of clean transit does not favor wealthier, white communities. Our comments recommend two steps FTA can take to advance clean transportation equity.
Step 1: Equitable Distribution Requirement
FTA should specifically designate the equitable distribution of electric and low-emissions vehicles as a key component of transit providers’ Title VI compliance. Currently, the Circular requires these transit providers to set nondiscriminatory “system-wide service standards and policies” to “ensure equitable distribution of transit amenities across the system,” where service standards include the “age and quality of vehicles assigned to routes.” In other words, a transit provider would be prohibited from, for example, exclusively assigning new buses to routes in a majority white community and older buses to routes in a majority Latinx community. The Circular rightly considers vehicle quality a component of “the benefits of the program or activity,” and requires recipients to “take affirmative action to assure that no person is excluded from participation in or denied the benefits of the program or activity on the grounds of race, color, or national origin.”
To ensure that low- and zero-emission vehicles are distributed in a nondiscriminatory manner across the system, FTA should explicitly designate vehicle emissions as an integral part of vehicle quality. Specifically, FTA should require that transit providers allocate no fewer clean vehicles per capita to transit lines and areas serving communities of color than to majority-white lines and areas. Given that transit providers are permitted to consider race, color, or national origin when the provider is attempting to remove or overcome prior discriminatory practices, FTA should also clarify that distributing more clean vehicles per capita in communities of color is justified when those communities have historically been underserved by transit services and overburdened by pollution.
The equitable distribution requirement will encourage transit providers to consider transportation emissions as another aspect of equity while planning and implementing transit projects.
Step 2: Reporting Requirement
Alongside allocation requirements, FTA should create reporting requirements that will allow the agency to monitor recipients’ distribution of clean vehicles. Using its existing authority, FTA can easily incorporate vehicle emissions into the Title VI Program reporting that it already requires from recipients. In their programs, recipients must submit comparative data on the distribution of service quality, including the age of vehicles and their on-time performance, across lines and areas with low and high minority populations. FTA should also 1) require such comparative reporting on vehicle emissions and 2) include examples of such reporting to guide recipients — as it does for other elements of service quality. Expanding existing reporting requirements to include data on the distribution of clean vehicles will enable FTA and the public to more easily identify inequities in the distribution of clean vehicles.
Together, the distribution and reporting requirements can help to ensure that people protected under Title VI receive equitable access to the benefits of lower emission vehicles.
This post is based on recommendations from comments co-authored with Attorney Meredith Hankins at the Institute for Policy Integrity.
