University of California Transportation Center

Environmental justice is an increasingly important element of policy making in transportation. It is not specific to any mode of transportation, particular community, or single policy issues. It is fundamentally about fairness toward the disadvantaged and often address the exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities from decision making. The federal government has identified environmental justice as an important goal in transportation, and local and regional governments must incorporate environmental justice into transportation programs. Because ideas about justice differ between communities, local and regional governments have flexibility in how they change their policies to reflect environmental justice. Communities and local governments struggle to balance competing interests and interpretations of environmental justice.