efforts are staffed or structured, transit agencies are especially well positioned to make positive changes and gauge the impacts of their decisions to iterate on success or make corrections to practice as needed.

Summary of Transit Agency Goals and Non-Traditional Performance Metrics

Many transit agencies and stakeholders [e.g., cities, Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), or neighborhood groups] actively work on developing and implementing equity-focused goals and performance measures. Appendix A includes background on these achievements. This section is a summary of the literature review findings included in Appendix A organized by the themes discovered.

According to the literature review, transit agencies are more likely to have established equity-related performance measures than they are to have equity-related goals. These goals are defined as broad achievable outcomes that the agency can work toward by delegating objectives to various departments. The objectives are specific and measurable actions that, when completed, move the transit agency closer to reaching its goals. However, five transit agencies published goals that touch on equity aspirations, as shown in Table 1 (simplified without agency-specific language). The agency-level equity goals include the following:

• Balance service and provide connections between urban and suburban areas so that equity-community members in both locations receive the service they need.
• Ensure efficient and equitable transit service for customers in urban and rural areas.
• Improve access to service with headways of 15 minutes or less in areas with high concentrations of equity community members.
• Improve service in neighborhoods with high concentrations of households with low incomes, people of color, residents with disabilities, and households without personal autos.
• Improve social service outcomes and support success through mobility management.
• Increase service proximity by ensuring convenient access to bus stops.
• Minimize wait times for pick up and improve overall trip experiences.
• Provide accessible and inclusive transportation options for customers with disabilities.
• Provide specialized service to meet the needs of specific vulnerable groups to help those individuals achieve specific outcomes.
• Reduce the time required for social service recipients to reach their goals.

Transit equity performance measures were discovered at eight transit agencies during the literature review process. These measures gauge three main aspects of transit service—Access, Service Design, and Personal/Community Benefits. Access measures are presented in Table 2, Service Design measures are presented in Table 3, and Personal/Community Benefit measures are presented in Table 4. The measures presented in these tables are simplified versions of the measures discovered during the literature review (see Appendix A for additional details). Table 2 also includes definitions relevant for all tables. Notably, many equity-related measures are similar to traditional transit measures but are differentiated from traditional measures by either the method of data collection and/or processing (e.g., surveys and interviews) or the level of data disaggregation (e.g., comparing service quality received by communities of color with the service in the general transit service area).

Personal/Community Benefit measures were developed to track the success of transportation programs designed to meet the needs of specific populations. However, these measures provide useful examples of how to target a performance measurement program to acquire a meaningful understanding of unique needs within the larger community.

• Promote investments that are accessible to all people regardless of ability.
• Promote investments that support transportation for all ages.
• Provide affordable and direct transit options for work commutes.
• Reduce transportation barriers in the city and region with a focus on improving crossings and shortening barriers to enhance connectivity between sides of the city.
• Reinforce access to basic goods and services.
• Understand commute needs by analyzing the home and workplace locations of equity groups and their connectivity via transit services.

Stakeholders’ goals to minimize negative impacts include the following (these goals are simplified versions of those discovered during the literature review—see Appendix A):

• Eliminate transportation impacts that negatively affect marginalized communities.
• Minimize the potential harmful environmental, health, and safety effects of funded projects for all equity populations.

Like transit agencies, transit stakeholders establish performance measures to track the progress toward equity that the transit and transportation networks in their area have accomplished. In total, six stakeholder entities published performance measures that are relevant to public transit. Stakeholder measures can be organized by the same themes as the transit performance measures presented previously (i.e., Access, Service Design, and Personal/Community Benefit), though stakeholder measures are more focused on access than transit measures because of the city/regional perspectives of the organizations that developed them. These measures, including the method of processing the measure and the level of data aggregation used, are presented in Tables 5 through 7. The measures presented in these tables are simplified versions of the measures discovered during the literature review (see Appendix A for additional details). Table 5 includes definitions relevant for all tables.

Table 5. Stakeholder Access measures.

Table 6. Stakeholder Service Design measures.

of neighborhood, immigration status, disability or primary language used for communication.” King County’s objective in reducing barriers to engagement was to “have a consistent, shared, and proven suite of tools for effective engagement with community members on critical topics and issues” measured by measuring progress toward establishment of tools to overcome barriers by 2020 (Office of Equity and Social Justice 2016a).

The City of Minneapolis uses performance measures to track progress as part of the Racial Equity Framework for Transportation (released in March 2023). The City of Minneapolis specifies that engagement is a key part of the measure development and that the measures will “continue to evolve through our work and continued engagement with communities citywide” (City of Minneapolis 2023). Of the five measures developed as part of the Racial Equity Framework for Transportation, one specifically measures engagement by tracking the number of engagement contracts let and the total dollar value of those contracts.

The Boston Region MPO tracks engagement by monitoring the rates of participation in the MPO’s transportation equity forums and surveys and by counting the number of engagement activities it hosts with environmental justice communities. Similarly, the City of Oakland tracks the rate of attendance and participation in its engagement activities.

Impacts and Changes for Riders

Many of the impacts and changes experienced by riders as a result of equity goals or performance measures are not specifically documented by transit agencies beyond graphs that show high-level analysis results over time (e.g., region-wide instead of corridor or neighborhood-level information). Other documentation of the impacts and changes experienced by riders is by inference—something that the agency intends as an outcome but does not explicitly state. For example, more reliable access to jobs might be expected to result from better service reliability and shorter headways. However, this expectation is often not stated, nor is there a clear measurement of whether the expected outcomes actually occur. Therefore, due to this kind of disconnect, it is difficult to identify tangible improvements to service that result from many of the current equity initiatives pursued by transit agencies. However, this is not always the case. The following list presents the impacts and changes for riders tracked among the transit and stakeholder agencies in the literature review:

• The online public engagement tool developed by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) and Massachusetts Department of Transportation (MassDOT) is designed specifically to address the need for better public engagement. Additionally, the first goal of MBTA’s Better Bus Project Bus Network Redesign is to “prioritize the needs of those who depend on buses and need frequent, reliable service.”
• Cecil Transit introduced service to support substance use disorder treatment and recovery that also facilitates improved access to general needs (e.g., jobs, healthcare, groceries and other shopping, socialization). Additionally, the transit agency anticipated integrating the on-demand service concepts to serve the entire community and/or service area.
• Denver Regional Transportation District’s (RTD) Service Optimization Plan is designed to provide “high frequency service to those areas where the highest concentrations of equity community members [people with low incomes, people of color, and people in zero-car households] live or work and balance the need to restore service to corridors that exhibit high ridership with the need to connect less densely populated areas so that riders can travel throughout the District.” The plan includes intentions to provide improved access to 15-minute-or-better service.
• Durham Region Transit (DRT) uses inclusive policy and planning intended to eliminate barriers to transit for everyone. As such, the agency provides 24-hour access to seven-day service in urban areas and seven-day service in rural areas with nearly 24-hour availability of curb-to-curb demand response. Additionally, the transit agency is committed to providing

convenient access to bus stops in urban areas with no more than an 800-meter (∼1/2 mile) walk for 95 percent of households.

• EMBARK in Oklahoma City, OK, developed a service specifically to provide access to transportation and supportive mobility management and/or travel training services for people navigating the foster care system (as well as access to responsible habit training and transportation incentives to use for other trips). These services help reduce the time it takes for families to be reunited and improve outcomes by helping parents meet the expectations of the court system (e.g., attendance at parenting classes and hearings).
• In 2017, after assessing the age of the vehicles that served routes used by a majority of people of color and learning that the vehicles on these routes were, on average, 12 percent older than the average age of vehicles on other routes, the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet) initiated the retirement of vehicles and adjusted processes to assign vehicles differently, with the goal of sharing newer and/or nicer vehicles more equitably across the service area. This assessment, as well as similar analyses of passenger amenities, is ongoing and influences vehicle assignment and capital investments in stops and stations.
• King County’s Low Income Transit Access, Youth ORCA (smartcard), and Night Owl bus programs were developed as a result of agency and regional equity initiatives.
• The City of Minneapolis Metro Transit’s Speed and Reliability projects prioritize improvements on routes serving areas with high percentages of residents who identify as Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC), people with low incomes, and renters and those areas with a higher number of low-wage jobs. Additionally, the agency reports transit performance disaggregated by race, which allows riders and the general public to act as an oversight body for the transit agency.
• The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) 2014 Muni Service Equity Policy requires biannual Service Equity Strategies to be developed. These strategy documents prioritize enhancing Muni Service in neighborhoods with high concentrations of low-income households, people of color, residents with disabilities, and households without personal automobiles.
• The recent redesign of the bus network in Los Angeles—NextGen—was focused on improving access to transit for riders with low incomes.

Impacts and Changes for Agencies

To respond to equity goals and performance measures, transit agencies often have to adjust their internal processes and the service they plan to provide. The following list summarizes the impacts and changes associated with equity initiatives among the transit agencies documented in the literature review.

• Beginning in 2017, the Wasatch Front Regional Council amended its practices related to scenario analyses, project prioritization, and the review/scoring criteria for transportation projects to include Access to Opportunities analyses to incorporate equity considerations.
• Cecil Transit hopes to extend its Cecil On-Demand Mobility Platform and Service Solution (COMPASS) program (i.e., an on-demand transit service developed to support people seeking treatment for substance use disorders) to other populations, such as older adults and people with disabilities, as part of the agency’s long-term sustainability plan, which aligns with the transit agency’s broader goal of exploring and implementing mobility solutions for different target groups. This expansion will require additional vehicles, drivers, and revenue to support such growth.
• Denver RTD’s equity-focused 2027 Service Optimization Plan will affect all of the agency’s services, as it makes changes to provide better service to people with low incomes, people of color, and people in zero-car households.

• Durham Transit actively and regularly adjusts services to adhere to its Social Equity and Service Guidelines, including changes to and from demand response to fixed route service depending on the levels of demand and service expansion to provide transit in growth areas.
  • Economic Vitality: Determining the share of jobs accessible by auto and transit in congested conditions, within and outside Communities of Concern (CoCs).
  • Economic Vitality: Measuring the share of middle-wage jobs in the region within and outside CoCs.
  • Equitable Access: Assessing the share of affordable housing in Priority Development Areas (PDAs), Transit-Priority Areas (TPAs), or High-Opportunity Areas (HOAs) within and outside CoCs.
  • Equitable Access: Comparing the share of income consumed by transportation and housing costs for lower-income households with that of higher-income households.
  • Equitable Access: Examining the share of low- and moderate-income households in PDAs, TPAs, and HOAs at an increased risk of displacement within and outside CoCs.
  • Healthy and Safe Communities: Measuring health benefits and burdens related to air quality, road safety, and physical inactivity for both high- and low-income households.
• In response to the 2014 SFMTA Muni Service Equity Policy, the transit agency began developing the biannual Service Equity Strategy, which is aligned with SFMTA’s budget process. This strategy is intended to address transit service performance issues in low-income and minority neighborhoods, monitor improvements over time, and link improvement strategies to funding requests; it is reviewed and approved by SFMTA every two years. To support the Service Equity Strategy process, SFMTA revamped its engagement process to include neighborhood-based outreach efforts to identify service issues and refine proposed strategies and leveraging, including open houses, focus groups, and engagement with community-based organizations. This outreach contributes to neighborhood profiles, which highlight needs in each of the agency’s priority neighborhoods. Community-based groups are included specifically to help the transit agency focus on engaging customers with limited English proficiency and disabilities. SFMTA also incorporates information collected from its transit operators.
• King County’s Equity and Social Justice Strategic Plan and Metro’s Mobility Framework prompted the transit agency to change the way it engages communities and shapes decisions about service, including a focus on priority populations, by using demographic data and past engagement experiences to design engagement strategies.
• King County’s Equity and Social Justice Strategic Plan includes a Pro-equity Policy Agenda, which aims to expand access to various determinants of equity within the county, such as child and youth development, economic development and jobs, environment and climate, health and human services, housing, information and technology, the justice system, and transportation and mobility. Additionally, Equity and Social Justice goals and measures are incorporated into department director contracts and/or agreements, ensuring a commitment to equity and social justice at the leadership level. The transit agency’s Equity Impact Review process helps guide transit decision-making via social equity service guidelines.
• LA Metro’s NextGen bus network redesign includes system-wide changes to frequent bus routes intended to improve access to transit for riders with low incomes.
• MBTA’s Bus Network Redesign will increase bus service by about 25 percent and include new destinations and/or stops, transit priority, and enhanced transit infrastructure—all with equity as the redesign’s first goal. Additionally, the Boston Region MPO introduced a number of equity-related performance measures that MBTA is expected to respond to in the design and provision of transit services, including travel speed for bus routes; volume-to-capacity ratios for bus and rapid transit lines; affordability of monthly transit passes relative to income; availability of employment, education, and healthcare within specific travel time frames; rates of participation in MPO-hosted transportation equity forums; responses to the MPO’s transportation equity surveys; and engagement with environmental justice communities.

• St. Paul, MN, adjusted its process for permitting development projects in the city’s West Side area to include a community-led approvals process in response to advocacy and organizing led by the West Side Community Organization (WSCO), which also developed the approvals process/criteria.
• The City of Oakland’s Department of Race and Equity was established in 2015 to formalize a commitment to embedding racial equity into the city’s decisions and policies and disrupting outcomes that perpetuate disparities. The 2018 Oakland Equity Indicators Report revealed that Black residents were most severely affected by racial disparities, with other communities of color also experiencing significant impacts. To improve these conditions, all departments were instructed to analyze policies, procedures, and practices that contribute to or can improve these disparities.
• The Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s (MTC) Plan Bay Area 2040 includes equity-related performance measures that SFMTA and other Bay Area transit agencies are expected to respond to in the design and provision of transit services.
• TriMet strategically increased the size of the staff available for equity-related work.

Big Picture Challenges for Agencies

Many of the literature review takeaways relate to the various challenges that may hamper the success of transit agencies working on equity. Challenges include political and planning influence, disparate definitions of equity in transit and how it should be approached, limited guidance for working on transit equity, limited financial and technical capacity, data availability and interpretation, and implementation of meaningful public engagement. Each is described in more detail in the following sections.

Politics and Planning

As with any public priority, political trends affect transit—a fact that is exacerbated when considerations of fairness are involved. Similarly, planning priorities both within a transit agency and in the city or region in which an agency operates can affect transit decisions related to equity. This section highlights the political and planning challenges that affect equity goals and measures.

In their research on equitable transportation in four MPO regions, Stacy et al. highlighted the difficulty of improving transit/transportation equity because multiple jurisdictions are often responsible for funding, planning, implementing, and maintaining systems. Fragmentation is, according to Stacey at al., a “large barrier in addressing equity concerns.” These authors also pointed out that land use decisions (e.g., where to locate housing and the level of density in a specific area) can either limit services like transit due to a difficult operating environment or enhance transit service by improving density. However, without proactive coordination between transit providers and those that make land use decisions, improvements in density and transit/transportation can cause displacement (Stacy et al. 2020). Similarly, Linovski, Baker, and Manaugh determined that without policies and goals in place to ensure the availability of affordable housing and avoid displacement, economic development initiatives (such as Transit-Oriented Development) may limit or reduce equity. Linovski, Baker, and Manaugh reviewed bus rapid planning projects to evaluate the equity of the concepts and learned that “differences between types of actors on certain key issues points to further gaps between normative goals and planning in practice . . . more political actors discussed transit equity as related to disadvantaged groups and cost of fares. In contrast, professionals focused largely on providing the same level of service to all, not acknowledging that providing the same resources may not be sufficient for certain communities and groups” (Linovski, Baker, and Manaugh 2018).

While reviewing equity initiatives at LA Metro, Buchanan et al. indicated agency structure as a challenge. LA Metro is a large agency responsible for transit planning and provision, capital

construction of transit and highways, and regional plans and programs to distribute tax revenue to local municipal governments. As such, inconsistencies arise between agency divisions due to differing principles, priorities, goals, and relevant stakeholders. The authors’ example succinctly presents an equity consequence of such divisions: “[LA Metro’s] long-range transportation plan also identifies equity neighborhoods, but with different criteria than those used in NextGen [the agency’s bus network redesign]” (Buchanan et al. 2021a).

Similar to the differing priorities within LA Metro, many transit agencies are challenged by the need to address political desires to serve as many people as possible and achieve high returns on investment while also providing services specific to the diverse needs of their riders. This need is especially difficult to fulfill without explicit goals or measures (Linovski, Baker, and Manaugh 2018).

The pace of innovation within the transportation sector was identified by staff at case study sites as something that causes leadership to “overlook the complex and interconnected nature of barriers to equitable service provision” (Stacy et al. 2020). Linovski, Baker, and Manaugh heard similar feedback: When discussing micromobility advancements, one of their research participants indicated that public entities may be led to believe that the private-sector side of the transportation industry has the solutions without considering how those solutions affect equity (Linovski, Baker, and Manaugh 2018):

In their work to assess the impact of equity work in California, McCullough and Erasmus spoke with transportation professionals from across the state who identified as either Black or a person of color. During their conversations with these professionals, a distinction between performative and authentic equity work became clear. As the authors summarized,

The authors suggested that before authentic equity work can occur, the industry must reckon with the ways transportation has been complicit in perpetuating systemic racism “at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels” and implement changes informed by historical discrimination “at all levels of the matrix of domination” (McCullough and Erasmus 2021).

Disparate Definitions and Limited Guidance

It is difficult to make progress on anything, let alone something as complex as transit equity, without a shared understanding of what is envisioned as success and how to proceed. Often, equity is defined within the context of someone experiencing inequity; however, a clear, high-level definition of equity in transit and general guidance on how to measure and track equity could help further equity work in the transit industry.

While assessing equity work in California, McCullough and Erasmus noted that underinvestment in equity and leadership failures seem to stem from a limited understanding of equity. Furthermore, this limited understanding appears to contribute to tokenism—hiring applicants of color and from other “diverse” backgrounds to work on equity without laying the groundwork for them to be successful and empowered within their roles (McCullough and Erasmus 2021).

Many of the respondents in the equity analysis in MPO planning from Stacy et al. “emphasized that equitable decisions should use data that incorporate a metro region’s specific needs and questions” and that such data are key to informing service decisions on short timelines or when the decision is particularly difficult (e.g., suspending service due to limited revenue). These researchers learned that budget cuts to transit funding were often dealt with by maintaining high ridership routes instead of emphasizing fairness among rider groups. They also learned that up-to-date information on the negative impacts of service cuts, had it been available, would have helped incorporate equity into such decisions (Stacy et al. 2020). Matching the right data to the analysis tasks is also a challenge that limits the effectiveness of equity analyses. For example, “most transit equity analyses use data on where people live, not where they travel; this obscures trips made by riders with low incomes between high-income areas” (Buchanan et al. 2021a). To obtain useful results, transit agencies would be better served by searching for, or developing, appropriate data sets. This task can be particularly challenging for smaller transit agencies, those without access to the right systems for collecting and processing data, and those without effective internal collaboration between relevant departments (Unger et al. 2019; Buchanan et al. 2021a). According to Unger et al., some performance measures are not included in equity analyses because of the difficulty of obtaining the data necessary to run the measures, changes in reporting requirements that force different processing that might not be possible for the agency, and “misalignment” with the other data and/or measures that a transit agency tracks (Unger et al. 2019).

Data on gender present a useful example of data availability and applicability challenges. In their research on women’s travel needs in Los Angeles, CA, Galicia et al. determined that gender data are sometimes collected but not disaggregated in a way that shows “the unique travel patterns and preferences of women.” Additionally, these authors learned that data on travel needs have not been collected for women and other genders. This lack of data availability and nuance limits transit agencies’ ability to understand the needs of over half of their riders. It is impossible to understand the trip-making habits and/or needs, safety concerns and perceptions, or transportation costs borne by women and other genders without asking them about their experience (Galicia et al. 2019).

In addition to data not always being available (or available but not collected), it is challenging to develop measures related to social factors that can be quantified in a meaningful way (Karner and Levine 2019; Unger et al. 2019). This task is complicated by the fact that each transit agency is left to decide on their own analysis granularity, scope, and interpretation methods without guidance or industry-wide standards. As Karner and Levine stated, “there are widely varying approaches toward its achievement and few systematic reviews that seek to understand just how effective different measures are at advancing equity goals.” Furthermore, much of the qualitative data collection and analysis in the transit industry is done to adhere to compliance requirements, which are not inherently geared toward influencing equity improvements. These traditional methods of public engagement have been shown to be “unsatisfying” and to have limited impact on influencing decisions (Karner and Levine 2019).

It is also important to establish a data collection process that is responsive to the intervals of the performance measures necessary to fully understand a transit agency’s progress toward equity and the needs of its riders. As Unger et al. put it (Unger et al. 2019):

• Be creative in how you connect: Just because youth are unfamiliar with zoning doesn’t mean they don’t have a vision for their community. Just because an elder doesn’t resonate with a small area plan doesn’t mean there isn’t significant knowledge in the richness of her lived experience. Create opportunities that immediately inspire people’s sense of belonging and power—whether that’s a talking circle or an art project rather than making community conform to systems and language that are exclusive and disempowering.
• Embrace the unexpected: Truly listening and seeking to share power with community often isn’t linear. Be humble about and grateful for new directions or course corrections that bring more community creativity, agency, and ownership into the process.