(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 573: Civil Rights Enforcement in Transportation Projects

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined once again by Laurel Paget-Seekins of Public Advocates. Laurel discusses transit agency power dynamics, loss of public sector capacity, and how the administration is looking to gut civil rights enforcement mechanisms for transportation projects.

Links to Laurel’s website Laurel in Transit and the Transit Data Primer

LISTEN to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find every episode in the archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript:

What was then six years at the MBTA and luckily was given a fellowship with the leadership and government fellowship from Open Society Foundation. So got to have a sabbatical basically, and really think through what I had learned in my time in government and how to share back some of those observations.

And so I finished a board game that we had made while I was at the MBTA with my staff. I wrote a zine about. Working for equity with inside transit agencies, and I made a website about data and how transit agencies use data and how communities. Can engage with that with transit data. Moved back to California, which is where I’m from, and then, you know, was looking around for a job and ended up at this organization called Public Advocates, which is a 50 plus year civil rights nonprofit here in California.

And I am not a lawyer, but they work heavily on transportation and transportation justice. So it seemed like a really good fit for. My passion and my expertise.

Called home was Atlanta after college. Um, and really then that was where I understood how critical, because I don’t like to drive public transit, is for climate and energy and social justice and racial justice issues. And so then that is how I got into transportation was by moving to Atlanta and really seeing how critical transportation is like a lever and all of these other things that I thought was really important.

So there were so many different ways that our urban and transportation policy showed up in the physical form of Atlanta that I think it made it like a really critical place to learn about transportation and urban planning. And how that interconnects to all of these really deeply ingrained injustices in our society.

Working inside this agency, having been an advocate at an academic before and starting to understand just how complex it was and how hard it was to see from the outside, why things were so complicated. And so some colleagues and I were thinking about that. And we also had a lot of interns that become co-op with us in our department.

And so I was thinking about how to. Teach about the complexities of a transit agency or a government agency. And so the game became an idea of like, oh, this would be a way to teach that. But it was also an idea of how to, it became basically like a therapy tool for my team where we would. Make cards for the game based on things that happened to us as a way of having an outlet for them when we often didn’t have power in the situation.

And so it was kept alive by that, I think. And then we played it internally, but then tested it with other audiences to see if it would work with anyone and sort of made it a little less. Inside joke and more thinking about how you get things done in a really complex agency and how you help people understand what it takes to accomplish things.

And it was interesting ’cause they were like, well this is kind of a really niche, like, kind of boring game in their minds, uh, because it took so long to do anything. And I was like, no, that’s the. Point. That’s what I’m trying to have people understand. And then the zine, I think came from having grown up in the nineties and you know, pre-internet days.

And then, so sort of maybe a little bit of nostalgia, but also just thinking about freeform ways to share information. And I actually made it like a physical scene. It is now available on the internet, but for the first year or two, it was only available in like a print.

And so that was really fascinating to me, especially as somebody who’s generally on the outside, right? I’ve never been on the inside of an agency. I worked for a nonprofit that worked with agencies, but never inside.

Hierarchical situation, a hierarchical organization where many, many people in different parts of the organization felt very disempowered. And so I was trying to create processes within that structure that would allow people to feel less disempowered so that we could collectively solve some. Problems that sort of crossed silos within the agency, and that was part of what I feel most proud about my work in an agency, was being able to advance some very difficult projects, not just inside the agency, but working also with community advocates and writers and bringing those perspectives together to try to, you know, implement some things that really could benefit people.

Improvements or long-term projects, et cetera. Just fascinating. It’s also interesting because like of late, there’s been discussion about foundations, which are small, but very powerful parts of this ecosystem and their specific role in advocacy. And I know that you did some work for Transit Center and they’ve been talking about how they’re gonna divest or at least spend down all of their money.

There’s other folks that I’ve read about in like Next City and other places that have said like, well, I, I work for a foundation and I don’t think they should exist anymore. Um, I just find that interesting too. Thinking about from your standpoint of the inside the agency and the outside processes and kind of this discussion that’s going on about just the specific type of organization that exists and that funds a lot of advocacy groups, funds the outside game, for lack of a better term.

As an advocate and sort of being able to see what the different roles are. And then within the, and I think I talked about this in the zine as well, within the advocacy community, there’s also different roles. Like there’s a whole ecosystem of organizations and. That requires funding for that ecosystem of organizations.

And one of the fascinating things that I noticed coming from Boston and then coming to the Bay Area is that I can kind of map the organizations onto each other, across the cities that like there’s roles that different organizations play, whether, how closely they work with an agency are they. Sort of insiders, are they mostly outsiders or there’s organizations like public advocates that are using legal tools versus power building, grassroots organizations.

There’s a whole spectrum and they all seem needed, but there has to be a way that they are able to sustain themselves in order to do that tension with the folks. Trying to make change inside of agencies to be successful.

And you know, the lack of funding. I know that, you know, it’s hard to make change when you have to do it on weekends and nights and things like that if you don’t have full-time folks that are working on things. And so the money part comes in and that is part of the whole ecosystem, the issues that come about.

And um, I’m wondering your thoughts on that specifically too, because you’re at Port for Transit Center and you’ve been thinking about that a bit too.

Creates a mentality such that if you’re not in crisis, you’ve, you still feel like you are because it’s sort of in your body, in your ethos of, in your culture, of how you work as an organization. And I think transit agencies are particularly prone to this because it is a 24 hour operation where, you know, there are life and death decisions that can be made and emergencies can happen.

Um, so that takes a toll on people. And the physical act of like driving a bus takes a toll on people. And so. I think that public sector workers, even before the pandemic, were under a lot of stress. The pandemic added a layer of stress and then we never, we didn’t, I think, fully account for that and figure out how to address that.

And then we, we have now entered another layer of, you know, attacks on public sector workers with the Trump administration. Where, you know, there even some, some folks are intentionally saying that that is what they came in to do, right? Yeah. Right. Is to create

So we, yeah, I feel like there’s t, public sector workers are under tremendous amounts of stress and Yeah. Has to be addressed at some point because we, part of this. Tension, right? Is that we need government to perform in order for people to feel like it can work. And part of what this project, the sort of Trump administration project is doing is trying to convince people or building off a long term project of trying to convince people the government doesn’t work.

We know government can work, but in order for it to work, we have to invest in it, and we have to have people who are trying to figure out how to make it work. And that’s becoming increasingly hard given the pressures that. Public sector workers are under. I can give an example of, I have been trying to get a FOIA request from the Federal Transit Agency for like nine months now, and it took months and months and months to even get a response and finally getting someone on the phone and they’re basically said almost no one works here anymore.

It’s gonna take like another four months to get you what you’re asking for. Oh my gosh. Um, which. Totally blatant violation of the FOIA law. Um, but I can have some sympathy with the fact that I believe it to be true, that they don’t have a lot of capacity anymore. But the FOIA request actually is to try to understand, you know, what are all of these existing Title six complaints and how have they been resolved so that we can understand the impact of the changes that the Trump administration is trying to make.

But we can’t even get the basic data.

And if you don’t, then it makes the cost go up. So if you’re cost cutting by getting rid of staff, you’re actually making the cost of. Building things go higher, right? And so since the seventies, eighties, we have had this reduction in public capacity and government capacity to do these works. And so, you know, while they’ve been cutting staff, we’ve been paying more and more and more for constructing projects and building things.

And so I wanna go back to their a little bit because I think that that’s like an important point. And we’ll get into Title six in a second. But I just wanna make that point because I feel like. We do need to start thinking more about how we can kind of push back on this discussion about, you know, we don’t need the public sector or we don’t need the government to work, which is truly, uh, as you mentioned, very false, but it is, like you mentioned, a long-term project and frustrating at the same time.

The government employees as being inefficient,

And so that has been working its way through the federal government. The Department of Justice rescinded theirs in December, and then we got. A notice basically that the U-S-D-O-T is about to rescind theirs and it looked like they were gonna do it without even allowing any public comment. So that is what we think is going to happen any day now.

But we worked with Latifa Simon’s office, my congressional rep in the East Bay and 13 Congress members wrote a letter, uh, to U-S-D-O-T asking that they. Not rescind them, but if they did that, they would do public comment. So we’re hoping that that letter is gonna change their mind and they’re gonna release them in the proper standard way that requires notice and comment.

Maybe that that’s where like there could be violations of how they do it. So, you know, there’s considerations about. Whether to do those types of challenges, but the Trump administration seems to be violating the A PA all over the place in terms of how they’re releasing these regulations.

Uh, can you explain Title VI and some of like the History and Civil Rights Act and all that stuff? Yes.

For programs that are funded by the federal government. So there’s other parts of the law, but this is the part of the law that impacts programs that are funded by the federal government. So that’s how it gets into local transit agencies and transportation departments that receive federal funding, which almost all of them do.

So that is the basis of the law. And then from that. You know, federal agencies enact regulations that lay out how they’re going to implement a law. So that is what the U-S-D-O-T has, regulations that implement the law. And then, because USDT is so large, the Federal Transit Administration has a, what’s called a circular that tells transit agencies exactly how they have to implement the law.

But effectively, what is an issue here is that. You can have direct discrimination where it’s very clear that the intent that it’s an indiscriminate intent, or you could have what’s called disparate impact, which is showing that there’s a disparate impact to a law, even if it looks on the face of it, that it is not have a discriminatory intent.

And there’s a whole, you know, body of. Case law and regulations that are embedded and that the Trump administration’s executive order didn’t undo that. So it, there’s still legal precedent for disparate impact. Um, it still is valid in court, but that essentially what disparate impact does is it sets up a different sort of legal standard where you can do statistical analysis to say, does this policy have a disparate impact on protected classes?

And. If it does, then you have to check to make sure that there is a legally legitimate business interest to do that. And if there isn’t, then it isn’t allowed. But then if you have a legitimate business interest, you then also have to check that there isn’t a less discriminatory way to achieve that interest.

So it’s a sort of series of checks to make sure that there isn’t discrimination in how federal funding is used.

So, so just also, just clarifying, I, I’m not a lawyer, so, uh, let’s just smile like. Non-lawyer explanation of things. Just to give a little more so legal context is that, so initially there was the right for private action for individuals to sue around disparate impacts, and so the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union filed a suit against L-A-M-T-A because they were.

Taking funds that had been being used for bus service and they were raising bus fairs at the same time while investing sort of a similar amount of money in building out real capacity that was gonna serve wider communities. And so they did a, a lawsuit and there was. Basically a settlement, a consent decree where L-A-M-T-A had to add more bus service, work on addressing bus overcrowding, create an affordable weekly bus pass, invest in in new buses.

So this was an example where the law was used. Then after that, there was a Supreme Court case called Alexander V. Sandoval in 2001 that ended the right for people to file suits around Title vi. So. After that, the mechanism that people could use is to file a complaint with the federal government, and so can file a Title VI complaint with the Federal Transit Agency, the Federal Highway Administration.

If. You think that there’s a disparate impact over a policy and just can we sort of back up for one second to sort of talk about

It’s a site where people shared public space, but also transportation is a way that segregation is broken down by people being able to travel across parts of a region. And so transportation infrastructure can both be used to break down segregation. It also historically. In the case of highways and sometimes transit, even used to divide neighborhoods to create barriers between neighborhoods.

And so one of the reasons why disparate impact act analysis is so important is to be able to sort of illustrate not just where and how people might not be getting the access for transportation, but also. The burdens of transportation infrastructure more heavily following, falling on minority black and brown neighborhoods in a lot of cases around highway infrastructure.

So some of the sort of other examples are ways that Title Six has been used to push back on the negative impacts of a highway project like pollution, flooding, displacement from businesses, homes. Historical black churches being threatened by highway projects. So it is both about. The benefits of transportation and the burdens that transportation infrastructure creates.

And so even during, you know, the construction of Bart going through West Oakland, there’s those types of things as well. So. It’s not, you know, just coded as highway versus transit. It’s how these projects actually impact the communities that they pass through.

And often transportation projects are designed to benefit people going through neighborhoods and not the people who live in that neighborhood. That’s how you get speed, right, is by creating transportation infrastructure that whether it’s an arterial that you know, creates safety problems or a highway or a rail line, a heavy rail line, that it creates a barrier.

It creates. Pollution, noise, pollution, all sorts of impacts that are designed to have people travel fast through a neighborhood and not to benefit the people who have to live with those burdens.

I know that for some folks it might not have been, but Bard eventually built. They’re trying to build a rope way, basically a tramway that was pulled by ropes that went from the Coliseum BART station to the Oakland International Airport. So what role did public advocates and others play in discussing like why this actually had an impact on the communities?

Because it didn’t stop anywhere in between those two end points.

But then eventually filed a complaint with Federal Transit Administration, and I believe it was being funded with stimulus money after Obama was elected, was where the federal funds were gonna come from and. As you mentioned the project. Was really designed, intentionally designed for a certain type of transit rider, which was to get people to the Oakland airport and, and

And so it was both the service design and also that it had a very high fare. Which was maybe within the reach of a airport traveler, but wouldn’t be like a sustainable way to travel if your job was at the airport and you needed to make that trip every day. And you know, the demographics have probably changed a little bit, but the, you know, neighborhoods around the Coliseum Bar Station were majority black and Latino.

And so the argument was that. Those neighborhoods would not be getting the benefit of this federal investment because it wouldn’t be serving their needs, which would be to access not just jobs at the airport, but along the corridor. ’cause there’s a lot of like logistics and hospitality jobs, you know, around an airport.

So it would be going through their neighborhood, it wouldn’t be benefiting them. And the complaint sort of hinged on the federal government basically asked Bart to submit some required analysis. They didn’t do it. And so the. FTA administrator at the time decided to pull the federal funding from the project.

So there wasn’t like a clearly, like this project is discriminatory. It ended up being that they didn’t complete the required analysis and that that’s why the funding was pulled. But I do think it is a good example of how, if we think about like that analysis, it’s like, okay, so this project was designed, we think it has a disparate impact.

Is there a legitimate reason to build. A connector to the airport. Sure. But is there a less discriminatory way it could have been built? Right. So that’s the part of like we can, I think all imagine a way that it could have been built that would have gotten people to jobs as well as people to the airport in a reliable way.

And at the same time, as you mentioned. Because this was right after the Great Recession. Bus service was being threatened as well, that you would end up in a situation where you had this high cost, fast way to get to the airport for travelers, but reduction in service for people who lived along the corridor and needed to travel to jobs and other places along that quarter.

On that bus service. As you mentioned, the project did get built with state and local funding. And there is a bus line. I often take it from the Oakland airport, the 73, that that still travels in that corridor, but it definitely could have more regular service on it.

There’s like rental car stations and stuff like that that you can’t get to because the line doesn’t stop. And the weird choice of a ropeway as well was, was another thing that was frustrating at the time. But also I read the letter from FTA and it was kind of a blast from the past when I was like reading it, like looking at all these names on there.

Uh, like adorable Carter who ended up being the head of the CTA and Peter Roff, who ended up being the head of Sound Transit. Mm-hmm. And now is not there anymore. Anyways, it was like a memory hole going back in time. I also wanna chat about Houston because Houston’s near and dear to my heart. I grew up in Houston and know a little bit about what’s going on with I 45 and the expansion of highways all over the state.

We had Megan Kimball on the show to talk about her book related to those expansions, and we’ve also had other folks on who were a part of the process for trying to get it stopped. But I’m curious about that project specifically and the complaint that was filed and the continuation of freeway expansions, even though we know they’re harmful.

So there was no admitting that it was discriminatory, but there was a willingness on the part of, you know, the state DOT, in this case, Texas DOT, to agree to some mitigations in order to keep. The federal funding coming. And so that was the case in this Houston project during the Biden administration, uh, federal Highway Administration, you know, signed this agreement with them asking that they include more mitigation in the design of that project, including, interestingly enough, some funding for affordable housing and like thinking about other ways that, you know, what does it mean for people to be displaced?

Because as we increasingly think about, you know, the housing crisis, displacing. Housing for highway project, which is something that is currently still happening. There was a recent bill that was passed in California to sort of require Caltrans to release data to even sort of document and show those impacts.

So the thinking about like all the different types of mitigation that could be required that we are losing if we lose this ability to challenge the disparate impact of projects.

I mean, even, you know, secretary Buttigieg got involved, folks in his office got involved, and so we had a friendly administration, but it still kind of pushed through. So I’m wondering like what are the stars aligning needs that have to happen in order to get something like that killed off?

Um, I think, yeah, there’s so many interests, especially in a state like Texas that keeps pushing highway projects. And I think the other tension, and this is not a place where like I’m an expert, is around sort of how much power does the federal government have to tell states what they can do with their transportation money, right?

So Title VI is one example where it’s like you can’t discriminate, but they still have a lot of leeway.

They have a $55 billion or a hundred and something billion dollars plan to expand highways in the state. And it just doesn’t seem like a very useful way to spend money. And you know, this is influenced also by my, my recent trips to China where high speeded reality, they’ve built 50,000 miles of high-speed rail and it seems like, you know, we’ve actually run to the end of our.

Economic development potential for highway expansion. So we maybe should take it in a different direction if we want some value out of the money that we’re spending.

How dots are designed and sort of the types of thinking inside of dots. All of these systems are set up on sort of autopilot towards continuing to build highways. So it’s a sort of very big, going back to the beginning of this conversation of like, how do you make change inside of a government agency?

It’s like a very, very big project, even in a state like California, to think about how do we sort of change the mindset of a state DOT to actually be. Not a highway building department.

So as part of the clipper rollout. There were some decisions that were made by the region about the functionality of the system, right? And one of which is that you can use your contactless credit card to pay and not have to have the special clipper card, which is very useful for a lot of riders, especially visitors.

And then also agencies were able to make their own fair policy changes with the new software. And one of the functionalities is something that is called. Fair capping, or you know, weekly daily maximums. There’s many ways to try to explain it, but effectively, instead of having to buy a pass upfront for a week or a month, you pay as you go.

And then if you hit that cap, then you effectively bought a pass and the rest of your rides are free. So it is a great, fair policy. It has. Particular benefits for low income riders who may not have the cash flow at the upfront of a month to buy a monthly pass or a weekly pass. So on the face of it, great.

Fair policy, AC Transit adopted it. However, it’s only available if you have a Clipper card or you have a contactless bank card and not for riders who are paying in cash. And there still are a lot of riders who pay in cash on East Transit. And part of the reason why that is, is that there are very few places to add money to your Clipper card and large parts of the AC Transit service district.

In particular in East Oakland. But if you look at the map of where the Clipper card ad locations are, they’re, you know, clustered mostly around bar stations and downtown Berkeley. Downtown Oakland. So a lot of people still pay cash for AC transit and those people, the sort of the current data is hopefully gonna be released soon, but the pre pandemic ridership data showed that those.

Folks paying cash. Were disproportionately black and Latino. And what this has set up is that if you’re paying in cash, you can buy a daily pass on the bus for $6 a day, but you can’t buy a weekly pass. And so if you bought a daily pass every day on the bus, if you’re very frequent bus rider, you would be paying $17 more a week than what the person with a clipper card.

To get to that weekly pass. So that seems like a disparity. It’s a disparity that. It’s like hurting the people who need it the most. There are a lot of unbanked riders. If you look at East Oakland, Oakland, there’s also, you know, gaps where there aren’t banks even. And so we’re sort of layering a bunch of policy failures on top of each other to create this situation where the people who can, you know, at least afford to pay our theoretically going to be paying more.

So AC Transit did a Title VI analysis for this change. I would argue they didn’t do it accurately. This is the type of situation where. If we had faith in the federal government, like we would file a complaint, but you know, even if these regulations don’t get rescinded, there’s not a lot of faith that there would be like a investigation or any enforcement of Title VI in this administration.

So we’re left in a situation where there are very few. Tools under federal law to do anything about this. I will add that the sort of title vi, you Can’t Discriminate in federally funded programs exist in California law for state funded programs. So we do have the same protection under state law in California.

Um, so part of what we are investigating now is thinking about how can we help transit agencies understand what their requirements are under California law to ensure that there aren’t disparate impacts to their decisions?

We built our built environment such that most places outside of major cities, you have this requirement to drive around in this two ton metal box. And so that requirement of having that to participate in society is now kind of coming down to the lower levels as more agencies and others. Require you to have a phone or some sort of technology in order to participate.

And so it seems like there’s like a resilience or redundancy necessary to have these systems work better. You know, you, you can’t just, like, as we found out in the power outage in, in San Francisco. Mm-hmm. Right? All the Waymo’s like just went down. Yeah. Yeah. Because they didn’t have a secondary system to make them move outta the way or.

Pass them through lights that weren’t working. And so I, I find that frustrating too, is like, we’re requir people to have phones. We require people to have cars. We require this technology, but we don’t have like a, a redundancy to allow us to operate, you know, smoothly for everybody.

So KQED did a story on this clipper card situation and they went and talked to riders in a major transit hub in East Oakland. And one of the riders they found was staying in shelter. She had a clipper card on her phone, but her phone battery was dead and she had money, but it was a check and she needed to go to a bank to cash the check, to put the money then on the phone, on the Clipper card, and she had to take a bus ’cause there wasn’t a bank branch near.

Eastmont transit center, so she had to pay in cash, overpay in cash to be able to go to the bank, hopefully charge her phone, cash the check, add the money to the account so she could get money on her Clipper card. It’s like we’re creating all of these hurdles for the people who have the most hurdles in their life.

It is very expensive to be poor in this country, and this is sort of adding onto that while at the same time, like I understand the arguments for not wanting. A lot of cash to be added onboard buses because it slows them down. Right. So there’s a lot of reasons why. It’s like we want to incentivize people not to, not to be using cash on onboard buses.

Um, but we have to create ways that people can still access the lower fares or other ways we’re trying to incentivize that. Otherwise it’s yeah, just an inequitable policy. It

So I had to get a zip card just to deposit the money. And so it’s like. It’s kind of a similar thing, like there’s these systems that overlap each other that are required to be a participant in society that just don’t seem to work sometimes, and it’s frustrating.

Government needs to be designed to work for everybody, right? Even the people whose experience of the world is less frequent, right? So if you think of sort of like the statistical distribution who are at the ends of the distribution, whose experience is less frequent, like a lot of sort of like efficiency, private sector thinking is like, well, let’s just serve the middle of the distribution.

Like we don’t need to do the extra work to serve the folks on the edges, but government, it’s imperative that they serve, right? The folks whose experiences. Less common for whatever reason, and that requires more work. And it requires, sometimes things might look less efficient because you’re doing and designing your programs to work for everyone and not just for the median person and.

This came up for me when I was implementing a program for low-income youth, a low-income youth fair in Boston. And it was like, oh, right. We created a program for some organizations, but then we had to set up a whole different system just for the small group of organizations for whom that system didn’t work.

And I, and I was like, right, that is a lot of work, but that’s exactly what I’m here for. That is exactly what my job is, is to figure out how to make this work for everyone. And not just the easiest use case, right? Yeah. It’s like what are the edge cases and how do we make it work for the edge cases? It became kind of my like mantra.

Businesses only have to cater to their market, not necessarily to everybody. And so government isn’t a business, it can never be a business. It’s actually a public service. And so there’s, it’s a natural monopoly as it were. And so I feel like that’s just another kind of discussion we need to have about the way that we run government and who government’s actually for.

And so part of what’s gonna be taken away if these regulations get rescinded is the requirement that agencies do those checks. At the front end, the like preventative checks. So we’ve talked about sort of the complaints, but the other part of Title six, the requirements in the Federal Transit Administration circular, is that agencies do these checks before they make the decision, right?

So that it isn’t like a, we’ve created this harm and then maybe. Years later, it’s fixed. It is. Let’s make sure that we’re checking to make sure that our decisions don’t have a disparate impact before we implement them. And so for fair changes, for service changes as well as service quality. So like there’s a requirement that they monitor for overcrowding and for reliability to make sure that the bus lines that are serving black and brown neighborhoods and communities of color.

Aren’t less reliable, aren’t older buses that pollute more, aren’t more crowded. So those are like key critical requirements. The other like major fundamental requirement is to gather the data in order to do that analysis. And so without that data, we can’t do the checks. We can’t determine how far we are from equity.

Regulation that we’re hopefully not about to lose. But that data is then used for all sorts of analysis of thinking about for transit planning, service planning, as well as these equity analyses. And my fear is that without the federal requirement, especially as agencies face budget crises, they will stop doing that data collection because.

It is expensive to collect that level of survey data, and I think there’s some, you know, innovations that are happening of trying to figure out how to, you know, collect it more online and less paper surveys. You don’t have to do like manual data entry and all the things that, you know, come with that, but.

It is a big investment, uh, but it is a super critical investment in being able to understand who your riders are, how they’re getting to transit, how they’re using transit, how they’re paying, and all of the rich analysis that can be done from it.

It feels like it’s more expensive ’cause you’re losing that information and all that stuff that is necessary.

Hard for anybody else to collect, right? Yeah. There’s,

Is there somebody something we need to do? So it seems like there’s set in stone on their actions, but

That could be used in a legal challenge, but also just to really demonstrate that this is really important and for people to understand how important this is nationally. Transportation as well as in other sectors. ’cause they’re doing these rollbacks across all of the sectors. And this disparate impact analysis is important in housing, in employment, in education, in lending, in all sorts of ways that where there’s like a history of discrimination in our country.

There isn’t. So California has that requirement, but it they’re, and they have some regulations that explain how agencies need to not discriminate in what it means. But we don’t have the requirements for the preventative analysis for transit agencies. We don’t have the requirements for the data collection.

So there’s more that we can do in California to replicate the protections that we have federally and to make sure that the transit agencies aren’t taking disparate impacts and that we have the data to check. So there is an enforcement mechanism currently in California law, so people could file a complaint with Caltrans who oversees the State Transportation Development Act funding that goes to transit agencies.

But that is also like, hasn’t really been tested. I did a public records request with them. They just send it back to me today saying. So they have no records of any procedures of what they would do if someone filed a complaint under this section of California law. So it’s really a sort of untested, because we’ve been relying on federal civil rights law for so long that we have to figure out and build the capacity within California agencies to.

Have the guidance, have the enforcement mechanisms and invest again in the state capacity to do the enforcement, to do the investigations that previously relied on the federal government to do. And other states are currently working with national partners on this. Other states are currently working through, there’s a few other states that have the same title.

In their state code, but there’s some other codes that are states that are working on it right now of trying to pass them. Massachusetts is one Boston Connection, so I’m still working with folks there. Maryland as well is the ones I can think of off the top of my head, but there’s more that, yeah, that we can do at the state level.

Um, and then I do have another website, which is the transit data primer, which we haven’t really talked about, but I also built during my fellowship. Just talks about different types of transit data sets, the importance of qualitative and quantitative data, how they need to be used together. This survey data we’re just talking about is an example of, you know, a mix of qualitative and quantitative data and how important it’s for how transit agencies can use data.

So that is. Transit data primer.org.