The Transportation and Land Use Coalition (TALC) is a coalition of over 90 groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, working to improve the social and environmental benefits of public investments in roads, transit and other facilities. With its special focus on social justice, TALC undertook a study of 14 target neighborhoods in the Bay region to assess how well served these areas were by transportation options. The key facilities evaluated were community clinics and hospitals, along with other neighborhood services. By understanding transit times from the neighborhoods to these facilities, TALC would be able to make recommendations for service improvements, particularly for public transit.

GreenInfo Network was asked to develop the data model and an analysis to address this question and then to complete the display mapping for the project’s reports.  Using the ArcView Network Analyst extension, GreenInfo tested each relevant bus line to determine the population of each neighborhood that could access the hospitals and clinics within a specified time (about 30 minutes, including all legs of a journey). 

 The results of this analysis are summarized in the project report, Roadblocks to Health.

The mapping, survey, and research findings presented in this report clearly demonstrate that the Bay Area’s most disadvantaged communities face significant transportation barriers to healthy activities. In low-income communities of color, where car-ownership rates are low, inadequate public transit limits access to hospitals, community clinics, supermarkets, and regional parks. People of color are disproportionately injured and killed on unsafe streets – a health crisis in itself that contributes to fears of walking and bicycling. 

The report, available from the TALC web site, also included a series of action recommendations that TALC has advocated since its publication. The project received broad media coverage and has opened up a new program area for TALC, called Transportation Equity And Community Health (TEACH) – a comprehensive effort to increase participation in transportation decisions by poor and people-of-color communities and to ensure that transportation investments promote access, equity and better health for low-income communities -- an example of a TEACH map is lower right.

Online project maps are here