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Volume 56 Issue 4 Page 574-586, November 2004
To cite this article: Michael T. Most, Raja Sengupta, Michael A. Burgener (2004)
Spatial Scale and Population Assignment Choices in Environmental Justice Analyses1
The Professional Geographer 56 (4), 574-586.
doi:10.1111/j.0033-0124.2004.00449.x
Abstract
Environmental justice laws protect certain populations against discriminatory actions that may result from a myriad of enterprises, including transportation activities. Previous environmental equity studies examining the effects of transportation-engendered externalities have been criticized on several points, including (1) that the choice of a reference population for comparison to the criterion variable may influence the outcome of research results and (2) that the selection and use of inappropriate methodologies intended to identify and characterize populations may foreordain research outcomes. This article examines the potentially confounding effects of selected spatial scale and population assignment strategies as applied to a study of excessive noise levels at a large Midwestern airport, finding that reported outcomes can vary significantly as a function of methodological choices.
Measuring Change in Small-Scale Transit Accessibility with Geographic Information Systems: Buffalo and Rochester, New York
Journal Transportation Research Record
Publisher Transportation Research Board of the National Academies
ISSN 0361-1981
Issue Volume 1887 / 2004
Category Public Transit
DOI 10.3141/1887-02
Pages 10-17
Online Date Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Abstract
A new method has been developed to measure directly changes in transit accessibility—the combined spatial effect of shifts in land use patterns and transit service—between metropolitan jobs and census tracts with high proportions of the people who most depend on good transit. Through focused analysis of transit routes serving one neighborhood in Buffalo and one neighborhood in Rochester, New York, two main questions are addressed. First, did transit-dependent poor people who lived in inner-city neighborhoods lose capacity to access jobs by transit during the 1990s? Second, if so, how much of the reduction in accessibility was due to changes in transit service rather than to dispersion of land use? Steps include formulating a gravity model using geographic information systems (GISs), calculating an accessibility index at two times during the 1990s at the census tract level, and disaggregating the accessibility change into subcomponents of change in land use and change in transit service by holding relevant variables constant to a base year. Findings do not support the a priori expectations: the transit component of change does not appear to contribute to a loss in accessibility from high-poverty neighborhoods. The model provides insights into the causes of accessibility change, the geographic distribution of accessibility change, and better assessments of whether transit agencies are successfully adapting to changes in land use.
Castiglione, Hiatt, Chang, Charlton
Application of a Travel Demand Microsimulation Model for Equity Analysis
TRB 2006 Annual Meeting
ABSTRACT
This paper describes the application of a state of the art tour-based travel demand microsimulation model to estimate impacts on mobility and accessibility on different populations to support development of a countywide transportation plan. Equity analyses based on traditional travel demand forecast models are compromised by aggregation biases and data availability limitations. Use of the disaggregate (individual person-level) San Francisco tour- based microsimulation model made it possible to estimate benefits and impacts to different communities of concern based on individual characteristics such as gender, income, auto availability, and household structure. In this paper, the concepts and policy context of equity analysis in transportation are first presented. Identifying communities of concerns and relevant measures of transportation system performance are then outlined. The San Francisco Model structure is briefly described, and finally, the results of the equity analysis are presented.
Authors: Chakraborty, Jayajit; Schweitzer, Lisa A.; Forkenbrock, David J.
Source: Transactions in GIS, Volume 3, Number 3, June 1999 , pp. 239-258(20)
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing
Abstract:
Although environmental justice research has typically focused on locations of industrial toxic releases or waste sites, recent developments in GIS and environmental modeling provide a foundation for developing measures designed to evaluate the consequences of transportation system changes. In this paper, we develop and demonstrate a workable GIS-based approach that can be used to assess the impacts of a transportation system change on minorites and low-income residents. We focus specifically on two adverse affects: vehicle-generated air pollution and noise. The buffer analysis capabilities of GIS provide a preliminary assessment of environmental justice. We integrate existing environmental pollution models with GIS software to identify the specific locations where noise and air pollution standards could be violated because of the proposed system change. A comparison of the geographic boundaries of these areas with the racial and economic characteristics of the underlying population obtained from block level census data provides a basis for evaluating disproportionate impacts. An existing urban arterial in Waterloo, Iowa, is used to illustrate the methods developed in this research.
Environmental Justice
Case Study: Air Toxic Releases in New Jersey
(from Mennis, J. and Jordan, L., 2005. The distribution of environmental equity: exploring spatial nonstationarity in multivariate models of air toxic releases. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2): 249-268)
Introduction
Geographic information systems (GIS) and multivariate regression are used to analyze socioeconomic inequity in the spatial distribution of New Jersey air toxic release facilities listed in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).