Equity in Practice: Strengthening Transit Through Community Partnerships

Transit agencies should continually interact with their riders and community members to ensure services meet their needs. Community engagement can take many forms, from agency staff hearing public comments on a finished project to working with constituents to design a plan or policy. Transit agencies often outsource this work to third-party consultants, who can be unfamiliar with the communities they are tasked to engage with. Since the mid-2010s, LA Metro has been refining a promising engagement method: partnering with community-based organizations (CBOs) on agency projects. This multi-purpose approach braids the perspective of community members into ongoing, essential aspects of LA Metro’s operations, like service planning and policy development. TransitCenter, Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), and six LA-based community organizations worked with LA Metro to implement part of the agency’s strategy for working with CBOs. In our new report, Equity in Practice: Strengthening Transit through Community Partnerships, we reflect on what other agency practitioners can learn about community partnerships from LA Metro.