UC Davis

Non-elected advisory and planning bodies of transit agencies help planners determine the agency's service, operations, and future developments. The FTA requires reporting of the racial and ethnic makeup of those bodies to receive federal funding. In this thesis, I examine whether those bodies are representative of the people they serve. To do this, I retrieve FTA data and compare it to the service area demographics of those agencies, using a variety of approaches, including diversity indexes and regression analysis. I further explore the representativeness of these bodies through analysis of public responses to policy and qualitative interviews.I set forth metrics by which to judge representation, including expected representation derived from service population, and diversity indexes at the body and agency level compared to the diversity index of the service population. This analysis finds that most bodies in the United States are not representative, and instead over-represent the white population. This finding suggests that people of color in the United States are not being adequately represented in the decision making and planning processes of the transit agencies that serve them. Finally, I analyze public comments from transit agencies and other interested entities on the draft of the regulations examined here, along with the FTA’s own comments on this policy via their comments on agency’s Title VI reports. I propose and pilot a qualitative interview method to examine whether or not members of bodies believe they are being discriminated against. These qualitative analyses are crucial to understanding the on-the-ground experience of the people working within these spaces, with the goal that their experiences are not lost among the minutiae of data and statistics.