Taubman College Urban planning faculty member Joe Grengs featured in Slate magazine on transportation equity
Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Joe Grengs, was quoted in a Slate Magazine article entitled “America’s Unfair Rules of the Road: How our transportation system discriminates against the most vulnerable,” on February 27.
Grengs, whose research focuses on transportation planning and metropolitan land-use patterns, contributed to the article by discussing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Alexander v. Sandoval’s impact on transportation and urban planning.
“Alexander v. Sandoval had quite sweeping ramifications,” Grengs said. “It really threw a wet blanket on the potential for pushing government agencies on civil rights issues…and it really elevated the bar that you had to clear for proving intentional discrimination.”
Grengs research also focuses on showing how the concept of accessibility offers a more effective evaluation tool for advancing social justice than current planning practices, developing methods for making intermetropolitan comparisons of accessibility to offer a basis for advancing policy reform, and explaining how accessibility is experienced differently by race, ethnicity, sex, age, and income.
