Posts Tagged "equity"
Thriving Together: A springboard for equitable recovery & resilience in communities across America
A new report—Thriving Together—takes a comprehensive look at how “we can convert our immense loss from COVID-19 and other crises into renewal.” This report represents the combined efforts of more than 100 people and organizations, including Transportation for America, to create a thoughtful guide for rebuilding a more equitable society with “all people and places thriving. No exceptions.”
Coronavirus will have huge impacts on transit systems—here’s how Congress should help
Congress and the president are considering ways to provide much-needed boosts to the economy due to the impacts of the novel coronavirus. But simply pouring money into the existing transportation program as a whole will fail to help the people who rely on transit to access the health care system and will have impacts on transit service that will last for years to come. Here are some ways Congress could provide targeted assistance to transit and the people that rely on it in the weeks and months ahead.
Rose Lanes get love from Portland City Council
The Portland City Council is moving forward with a plan to improve transit service through a series of targeted improvements to some of the city’s most delayed bus and streetcar corridors. Known as the Rose Lane Project, it’s designed to advance equity, reduce carbon emissions, and increase transit ridership with quick-build projects. It also offers lessons to other cities struggling with sluggish transit systems mired in a sea of cars.
To connect people to jobs and services, we need to measure what matters: people
Today we largely decide which transportation projects to build and where to build them based on how much delay vehicles experience, while entirely ignoring everyone not in a car in the first place. By ignoring walking, biking, or taking transit, we’re ignoring the impacts on everyone not using a car, particularly low-income persons, people of color, and older adults.
Safety over speed week: Our transportation system values some lives more than others
U.S. transportation policy focuses first and foremost on ensuring that drivers can travel with as little delay as possible. But this laser focus on speed sidelines other more important considerations like the preservation of human life and the health impacts of vehicle pollution. Prioritizing safety in our transportation policy—at the federal, state, and local levels—would be a major step towards a more equitable transportation system.
Changing the transportation paradigm, one project selection at a time.
Thanks to support from the Kresge Foundation, Transportation for America helped several regions around the country take tangible steps toward aligning their spending with their policy goals using performance measures. We asked them about it…here’s what they said.
Federal program that helps tackle health disparities threatened in ’18 budget
Congress is threatening to eliminate a small yet significant federal program housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that helps local communities take concrete steps to prevent someone’s zip code from being the most powerful determinant in their long-term health.
New national survey examines how metro areas use performance measures to evaluate their spending
Thanks to action taken by Congress, metro areas will be required to use a data-driven process to measure the performance of their transportation spending. But some metro areas already go far beyond the modest new federal requirements. T4America’s new national survey of over 100 metro planning agencies examines the current state of the practice — and where it’s headed.
A highly cooperative spirit is taking root within the 16 cities in the Smart Cities Collaborative
Just a few blocks from the Capitol dome in Washington, DC, the 16 members of our Smart City Collaborative gathered together again two weeks ago to learn, share wisdom and find ways to collaborate on thoughtfully solving their transportation challenges with new and emerging technologies.
Join us for the release of Planning for a Healthier Future
Thanks to 2012’s MAP-21 legislation, all metro areas and states will soon be using a limited array of performance measures. While the in-progress federal requirements will cover a limited range of measures, T4America is releasing a new resource to help advocates and especially metropolitan planning agencies utilize find ways to use performance measures to improve public health, address social equity concerns, and advance environmental quality.
It’s past time to elevate the national conversation about infrastructure beyond just the price tag. Learn more about T4America's three simple principles for federal transportation investment.
Read our new principles