Case Study:

San Francisco Bay Area, California

The MTC suggested a number of lessons drawn from their experience that might be useful for other areas conducting a similar equity analysis:

Work out a general strategy with citizen and technical advisory committees in terms of how to measure accessibility, equity, and environmental justice. Expand or condense the analysis to meet the committee's expectations. Don't overwhelm or underwhelm the committee with numbers, analyses, and maps.
Keep the analysis and measures tractable and understandable.
Build in flexibility in terms of describing existing and future neighborhoods that might be termed disadvantaged. Bring in other information that may be useful in describing disadvantaged neighborhoods (e.g., households by auto ownership and household-income-level forecasts).
Describe data sources and availability. What census data are available? What can and cannot be forecasted at the neighborhood level, and why or why not? Take the time to map and explore the racial/ethnic diversity of the region using available census data.
Mapping of accessibility patterns using a GIS is very valuable. Mapping can also assist the transportation analyst in debugging the network definitions (e.g., discovering zones with lower accessibility due to miscoded transit lines).