Appraisal of Available Analytical Tools to Assess Environmental Justice Impacts of Toll Road Projects

(PI: Jolanda Prozzi; Co-PIs: Jorge Prozzi, S. Travis Waller, Chandra Bhat, Guohui Zhang, Talia McCray, Lisa Loftus-Otway)

Given the fiscal constraints of traditional roadway funding sources, the financing of new roads and the modernization of existing roads through investments that will be recovered through toll charges have been promoted at both the national and state level. The objectives of this project are to extend the work that has been done under TxDOT Research Project 0-5208 by (a) critically reviewing the robustness of available data collection and processing measures, (b) critically reviewing the robustness of available tools and analysis techniques through an evaluation of state-of-the-practice applications of these tools and analysis techniques in quantifying and qualitatively describing the EJ impacts associated with toll road projects and toll road systems/networks, (c) recommending suitable tools and analysis techniques to effectively evaluate the impacts of toll roads and toll road systems/networks on EJ communities, and (d) designing and prototyping a simple Geographic Information System (GIS)-based tool to quantitatively evaluate the accessibility and mobility impacts of toll road projects and toll road systems/networks on EJ communities.