Addressing urban transportation equity in the United States.

• Author: Bullard, Robert D.

INTRODUCTION

In the United States, all communities do not receive the same benefits from transportation advancements and investments. (1) Despite the heroic efforts and the monumental social and economic gains made over the decades, transportation remains a civil rights issue. (2) Transportation touches every aspect of where we live, work, play, and go to school, as well as the physical and natural world. Transportation also plays a pivotal role in shaping human interaction, economic mobility, and sustainability. (3)

Transportation provides access to opportunity and serves as a key component in addressing poverty, unemployment, and equal opportunity goals while ensuring access to education, health care, and other public services. (4) Transportation equity is consistent with the goals of the larger civil rights movement and the environmental justice movement. (5) For millions, transportation is defined as a basic right. (6)

Transportation is basic to many other quality of life indicators such as health, education, employment, economic development, access to municipal services, residential mobility, and environmental quality. (7) The continued residential segregation of people of color away from suburban job centers (where public transit is inadequate or nonexistent) may signal a new urban crisis and a new form of "residential apartheid." (8) Transportation investments, enhancements, and financial resources have provided advantages for some communities, while at the same time, other communities have been disadvantaged by transportation decision making. (9)

1. OLD WARS, NEW BATTLES

   In 1896, the United States Supreme Court wrestled with this question of the different treatment accorded blacks and whites. (10) In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court examined the constitutionality of Louisiana laws that provided for the segregation of railroad car seating by race. (11) The court upheld the "white section" and "colored section" Jim Crow seating law, contending that segregation did not violate any rights guaranteed by the Constitution. (12)

   In 1953, nearly four decades after the Plessy decision relegated blacks to the back of the bus, African Americans in Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana, staged the nation's first successful bus boycott. (13) African Americans accounted for the overwhelming majority of Baton Rouge bus riders and two-thirds of the bus company's revenue. (14) Their economic boycott effectively disrupted the financial stability of the bus company, costing it over $1600 a day. (15) The successful Baton Rouge bus boycott occurred two years before the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional. (16)

   On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks ignited the modern civil rights movement. (17) Mrs. Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in defiance of local Jim Crow laws. (18) Her action sparked new leadership around transportation and civil rights. (19) Mrs. Parks summarized her feelings about resisting Jim Crow in an interview with sociologist Aldon Morris in 1981: "My resistance to being mistreated on the buses and anywhere else was just a regular thing with me and not just that day." (20)

   Transportation was a central theme in the "Freedom Riders'" campaign in the early 1960s. (21) John Lewis and the young Freedom Riders exercised their constitutional right of interstate travel at the risk of death. (22) Greyhound buses were attacked and some burned in 1961. (23) Nevertheless, the Freedom Riders continued their quest for social justice on the nation's roads, highways, and urban streets. (24)

   While some progress has been made since Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility in 1997, (25) much remains the same. Discrimination still places an extra "tax" on poor people and people of color who need safe, affordable, and accessible public transportation. Many of the barriers that were chronicled in Just Transportation have not disappeared overnight or evaporated with time. (26)

2. FOLLOW THE DOLLARS

   Transportation spending programs do not benefit all populations equally. (27) Follow the transportation dollars and one can tell who is important and who is not. The lion's share of transportation dollars is spent on roads, while urban transit systems are often left in disrepair. (28) Nationally, 80% of all surface transportation funds is earmarked for highways and 20% is earmarked for public transportation. (29) Public transit has received roughly $50 billion since the creation of the Urban Mass Transit Administration over thirty years ago, (30) while roadway projects have received over $205 billion since 1956. (31) On average, states spend just $0.55 per person of their federal transportation funds on pedestrian projects, less than 1% of their total federal transportation dollars. (32) Average spending on highways came to $72 per person. (33)

   Generally, states spend less than 20% of federal transportation funding on transit. (34) The current federal funding scheme is bias against metropolitan areas. (35) The federal government allocated the bulk of transportation dollars directly to state departments of transportation. (36) Many of the road-building fiefdoms are no friend to urban transit. Just under 6% of all federal highway dollars are sub-allocated directly to the metropolitan regions. (37) Moreover, thirty states restrict use of the gasoline tax revenue to fund highway programs only. (38) Although local governments within metropolitan areas own and maintain the vast majority of the transportation infrastructure, they receive only about 10% of every dollar they generate. (39)

   From 1998-2003, TEA-21 (40) transportation spending amounted to $217 billion. (41) This was the "largest public works bill enacted in the nation's history." (42) Transportation spending has always been about opportunity and equity. In the real world, costs and benefits associated with transportation developments are not randomly distributed. (43) Transportation justice is concerned with factors that may create and/or exacerbate inequities and measures to prevent or correct disparities in benefits and costs. (44) Disparate transportation outcomes can be subsumed under three broad categories of inequity: procedural, geographic, and social. (45)

   Procedural Inequity: Attention is directed to the process by which transportation decisions may or may not be carried out in a uniform, fair, and consistent manner with involvement of diverse public stakeholders. (46) Do the rules apply equally to everyone? Geographic Inequity: Transportation decisions may have distributive impacts (positive and negative) that are geographic and spatial, such as rural versus urban versus central city. (47) Some communities are physically located on the "wrong side of the tracks" and often receive substandard transportation services. (48)

   Social Inequity: Transportation benefits and burdens are not randomly distributed across population groups. (49) Generally, transportation amenities (benefits) accrue to the wealthier and more educated segment of society, while transportation disamenities (burdens) fall disproportionately on people of color and individuals at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. (50) Intergenerational equity issues are also subsumed under this category. (51) The impacts and consequences of some transportation decisions may reach into several generations. (52)

   Heavy government investment in road infrastructure may be contributing to an increase in household transportation costs. (53) Lest anyone dismiss transportation as a tangential issue, consider that Americans spend more on transportation than any other household expense except housing. (54) On average, Americans spend $0.19 out of every dollar earned on transportation expenses. (55) Transportation costs ranged from 17.1% in the Northeast to 20.8% in the South (56)--where some 54% of African Americans reside. (57) Americans spend more on transportation than they do on food, education, and health care. (58) The nation's poorest families spend more than 40% of their take home pay on transportation. (59) This is not a small point since African American households tend to earn less money than white households. (60) Nationally, African Americans earn only $649 per $1000 earned by whites. (61) This means that the typical black household in the United States earned 35% less than the typical white household.

3. ERASING TRANSPORTATION INEQUITIES

   In the real world, all transit is not created equal. In general, most transit systems have taken their low-income and people of color "captive riders" for granted and concentrated their fare and service policies on attracting middle-class and affluent riders out of their cars. (62) Moreover, transit subsidies have favored investment in suburban transit and expensive new commuter bus and rail lines that disproportionately serve wealthier "discretionary riders." (63) Almost 40% of rural counties in this country have little or no public transportation, (64) and "[i]n areas with populations from one million and below, more than half of all transit passengers have incomes of less than $15,000 per year." (65)

   In urban areas, African Americans and Latinos comprise over 54% of transit users (62% of bus riders, 35% of subway riders, and 29% of commuter rail riders). (66) Nationally, only about 5.3% of all Americans use public transit to get to work. (67) African Americans are almost six times as likely as whites to use transit to get around. (68) Urban transit is especially important to African Americans where over 88% live in metropolitan areas (69) and over 53% live inside central cities. (70) About 60% of African Americans live in ten metropolitan areas. (71) The metropolitan areas with the largest black population include New York (2.3 million), Chicago (1 million), Detroit (0.8 million), Philadelphia (0.7 million), Houston...