Coastal transit authority: Title VI equity audit
Transit Agency · Pop. 1.2MContext
A transit authority serving a coastal metropolitan area of approximately 1.2 million residents faced a federal Title VI compliance review. The agency needed to demonstrate that its service allocation was not systematically disadvantaging protected populations, and to identify and address any gaps before the review.
The Challenge
The agency had ridership data but no spatial method for identifying where high-demand, high-need corridors existed in Title VI protected areas relative to the overall network. Manual analysis of each route's demographic context would have taken the planning team several months.
The Approach
Mobvynt built an ACS-weighted demand surface layering block-group demographic profiles onto the H3 hex grid. Equity gap scoring identified hex cells where demand intensity exceeded the regional median AND the nearest service frequency was below the regional median AND the census-weighted protected population share exceeded the agency's Title VI threshold. The analysis was completed in six weeks alongside routine planning operations.
Results
- Four high-priority corridors identified in Title VI protected areas with service below regional median
- Federal compliance documentation generated directly from platform output maps and tables
- Two frequency improvements prioritized in the next TIP cycle based on equity gap scores
- Ongoing quarterly equity monitoring dashboard established using the same GTFS/ACS pipeline
The equity overlay made it possible to show, with actual spatial data, exactly where our network was underperforming for protected populations. That's a conversation that used to be difficult to have in a documentable way.