Justice40 Initiative
Department of Transportation's Justice40 Informational Video
Department of Transportation's Justice40 Informational Video (Spanish)
What is the Justice40 Initiative?
The Biden-Harris Administration created the Justice40 Initiative to confront and address decades of underinvestment in disadvantaged communities. The initiative will bring resources to communities most impacted by climate change, pollution, and environmental hazards.
Here at the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), Justice40 (J40) is an opportunity to address gaps in transportation infrastructure and public services by working toward the goal that at least 40% of the benefits from many of our grants, programs, and initiatives flow to disadvantaged communities.
Justice40 is not a one-time investment, nor is it a single pot of money. Rather it is a government wide initiative that makes a series of changes to ensure benefits reach communities most in need. Through Justice40, USDOT will work to increase affordable transportation options, that connect Americans to good-paying jobs, fight climate change, and improve access to resources and quality of life in communities in every state and territory in the country.
The initiative allows USDOT to identify and prioritize projects that benefit rural, suburban, tribal, and urban communities facing barriers to affordable, equitable, reliable, and safe transportation. Through Justice40, USDOT will also assess the negative impacts of transportation projects and systems on disadvantaged communities and will consider if local community leaders have been consulted in a meaningful way during the project’s development.
Just Released
Department of Transportation’s Justice40 Story Map, describes DOT’s approach to Justice 40 including three case studies. The Story Map uses the ETC Explorer to demonstrate the connection between the components of disadvantage for the case studies and project benefits that may help reverse or mitigate how a community experiences disadvantage.
USDOT’s Equitable Transportation Community (ETC) Explorer, is an interactive web application that uses 2020 Census Tracts and data, to explore the cumulative burden communities experience, as a result of underinvestment in transportation, in the following five components: Transportation Insecurity, Climate and Disaster Risk Burden, Environmental Burden, Health Vulnerability, and Social Vulnerability. It is designed to complement Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) by providing users deeper insight into the Transportation disadvantage component of CEJST, and the ETC Explorer’s Transportation Insecurity component, which will help ensure the benefits of DOT’s investments are addressing the transportation related causes of disadvantage. USDOT’s ETC Explorer is not a binary tool indicating whether a census tract is considered disadvantaged; rather it is a dynamic tool that allows every community in the country to understand how it is experiencing burden that transportation investments can mitigate or reverse.
Want more information on J40?
Department of Transportation's Justice40 Fact Sheet
Questions or comments on USDOT's Justice40 work please email:
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