Transportation Apartheid

Transportation policy in the United States has a long history of discrimination. Although the role of public transportation in the 20th-century Civil Rights Movement is well documented—people like Rosa Parks, Homer Plessy, and the Freedom Riders brought discrimination on mass transit to the nation’s attention—less well known is the role of the automobile in perpetuating and continuing social and racial injustices.

The rise of personal automobile, some scholars suggest, sustained old inequalities like segregation and lack of access, and promulgated a new type of inequality—an inequity over the power of space and time (Bullard, Johnson, & Torres, 2000; Domosh & Seager, 2001; Sachs, 1992). As Domosh and Seager (2001) point out, selection of transportation method reveals socio-economic differences: “Wealthier people move through space more easily than their poorer counterparts: simply put, wealthy people fly, poor people take the bus” (p. 114). As income increases, transportation options also increase, as does the control one has over that transportation; people waiting for the bus that is late or never comes at all are typically not members of the upper classes (Domosh & Seager, 2001). Domosh and Seager’s upper classes are set apart by their ability to impact policy and policy makers in ways unattainable to the lower classes. And it is these groups that historically have favored a policy shift away from public transportation toward private vehicular modes of movement (Sachs, 1992).

Transportation inequality between those who own automobiles and those who have no access to one (or only one that is unreliable or unsafe) has resounding employment, health care, and basic mobility implications—and this inequality typically follows socio-economic and racial lines (Bullard, 2003; Bullard et al., 2000; Bullard & Johnson, 1997; Davies, 1975; Litman, 2007; Lutz & Fernandez, 2010; Paaswell & Recker, 1978; Sachs, 1992; Sheldon & Brandwein, 1973). Particularly disadvantaged are the young, elderly, and disabled who, lacking the same commanding position over space and time as their upper-class counterparts, are in disadvantageous situations relative to basic necessities (Sheldon & Brandwein, 1973).

The poorest households in the country spend up to 40% of their net income on transportation, compared with the 19% the average American spends (Center for Neighborhood Technology, 2013), and up from 10% in 1960 (Lutz & Fernandez, 2010). Furthermore, the growth of household expenditures on transportation is increasing much faster for the poor, African Americans, and Latinos than for Caucasians and the middle class as whole (Deka, 2004). This is perhaps due to the regressive nature of the cost of car ownership and reflects an increasing dependence on private transportation in minority segments of American society (Deka, 2004). Still, African Americans use public transportation at nearly 6 times the rate of their Caucasian counterparts (Bullard, 2003; Sanchez, Stolz, & Ma, 2003). Bullard (2003) argues that isolation caused by lack of access to private transportation, whether social or economic, is exacerbated by inadequate public transportation systems in urban areas.

Even within mass transit riders, the mode choice utilized is frequently an indicator of one’s race and socio-economic status. Upper-middle class White transit riders are far more likely to use light rail lines whereas poor and ethnic minorities can be found on public buses. More than half of all bus riders in the 1990s earned less than US$15,000 per year, and most were female and members of an ethnically minority group (Garrett & Taylor, 1999). As of the early 2000s, the National Household Travel Survey found that only 6% of commuter rail users earned less than US$20,000 whereas just under half earned in excess of US$100,000 each year (U.S. Department of Transportation, 2004). Seven percent of bus riders during the same time period earned more than US$100,000 annually.

Federal subsidies among modes of transit also reveal disparities with socio-economic and racial implications. Beginning in the 1990s, among transit modes, suburban commuter rail lines received the most subsidy per passenger, with buses the lowest (Garrett & Taylor, 1999). Furthermore, transit fares on suburban buses tend to be subsidized at higher rates than inner-city buses, resulting in lower fares for suburbanites. Although lower fares are required to attract car drivers onto transit and help suburban transit authorities remain politically feasible, this is indicative of bias in favor of suburban transit systems, in favor of the middle- and upper-middle classes who generally oppose transit subsidies for inner-city systems in favor of increased highway spending (Sanchez et al., 2003).

Ironically, in central cities across the United States, households least likely to own a car often have the greatest access to major highways upon which to drive those cars (Bullard et al., 2000; Davies, 1975), and this has led to questions of environmental justice specifically with regard to transportation policy and race (Bullard, 2003; Bullard et al., 2000; Deka, 2004; Litman, 2007). After all, what benefit is a major expressway next door if one does not have a car with which to utilize it (Bullard, 2003; Bullard et al., 2000)? Particularly, what benefit is a major expressway through a residential neighborhood with the negative health effects associated with pollution, noise, and vibration caused by heavy traffic (Bullard, 2003; Bullard et al., 2000)?

Provision of infrastructure for all types of transportation has positive and negative externalities (Steinemann, Apgar, & Brown, 2005). In the case of transportation policy and environmental effects, positive externalities are reserved mostly for the transportation user and negative externalities reserved mostly for those residing adjacent to transportation infrastructure. The degradation of one’s physical environment for the sake of someone else’s mobility is a subject of debate: At what point are populations being treated differently, and at what point is justice for adjacent populations being negatively affected? Often, poor, minority communities are the sites of hazardous waste disposal, polluting industries, and, in all major U.S. cities, urban freeways (Bullard, 2003; Logan & Molotch, 1987). Although overt racism may be difficult to establish, “a conscious racial motivation is not required to produce a disproportionate result” (Lazarus, 1994, p. 5).

Such policies, a plethora of scholars and activists argue, result in disadvantageous positions for public transportation agencies, and even within transportation agencies, when considering modal subsidies, the wealthy and semi-wealthy accrue more benefits than the poor. Commuters from the suburbs are far more likely to benefit from transportation policy—including highway and commuter rail infrastructure—whereas inner-city residents are far more likely to experience service cutbacks, increases in fares, funding retrenchment (Sanchez et al., 2003), and environmental degradation (Bullard, 2003).

It is important for policy makers, advocates, and academics to consider the various reasons why these inequities exist. Deka (2004), in his treatise on the usefulness of qualitative research in social justice concerns, asserts that urban and transportation planners, in their reliance on quantitative methodologies, rarely consider the implications of their policies and projects on disadvantaged policies. This is at least partially a result of the positivistic, rationalist character of transportation planning, and engineers’ reliance on variables like Levels of Service, vehicles per day, and crash rates (Deka, 2004; Willson, 2001). Such variables tend to exclude the mobility needs and transportation realities of those who do not use private vehicles, and frequently result in “improvements” to streets and highways that make walking, cycling, and disembarking from a bus a hostile activity.