When Congress created the New Starts fund for new rail transit projects in 1991, it required that the grants be awarded to projects that were “cost effective.” This same requirement was applied to the small starts fund, for transit projects costing less than $250 million, which Congress created in 2003. The Obama administration, however, is proposing to eliminate the cost-effectiveness test in favor of “livability,” “multi-modalism,” and “environmental justice.”
The Antiplanner’s comments on the proposed rules argue that these criteria are not authorized by law and, moreover, are vague and open to such broad interpretation that they are effectively meaningless. My comments focused mainly on livability and multi-modalism as I hadn’t ever heard of transit projects being justified based on environmental justice.
A recent series of articles in the Washington Times, however, reviews the administration’s infatuation with environmental justice in detail. As the first article in the series notes, seventeen federal agencies recently signed a “memorandum of understanding” agreeing to integrate environmental justice into all of their “programs, policies, and activities.”
