Wired Shows Connection Between Transportation and Civil Rights

Wired’s Autopia blog looked at the connection between transportation and civil rights this week in an eye-opening piece that raises questions about why our transportation system fails to serve so many Americans.

The relationship between how we get around the shape of the communities we live in and our personal liberties is not intuitively obvious; I’m used to thinking about civil rights in terms of the obstacles, both real and perceived, which keep citizens from full participation in public life, not literal impediments to navigating between Point A and Point B. That, however, is exactly the connection the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights would have us make.

“Smart and equitable transportation systems connect us to jobs, schools, housing, health care services — and even to grocery stores and nutritious food,” said LCCHR President Wade Henderson at a hearing held by the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee. “But millions of low-income and working-class people, people of color and people with disabilities live in communities where quality transportation options are unaffordable, unreliable, or nonexistent.”

Wired’s Jason Kambitsis delves into the Leadership Conference’s arguments, and finds a compelling statistical underpinning for their claims:

According to the report, the average cost of owning a car is just shy of $9,500. That may not sound like much until you realize the federal poverty level is $22,350 for a family of four. One-third of low-income African-American households do not have access to an automobile. That figure is 25 percent among low-income Latino families and 12.1 percent for whites. Racial minorities are four times more likely than whites to use public transit to get to work.

Yet the federal government allocates 80 percent of its transportation funding to highways.

The 80/20 split between highways and transit (to say nothing of intercity passenger trains, which get a tiny fraction of a penny for every transportation dollar spent) leads directly to land use policy that favors sprawl. One of the results of this expansionism has been a far flung archipelago of businesses that dot urban and suburban areas: Kambitsis cites a Brookings Institute study that found 45 percent of jobs in the U.S.‘s 98 most populous metro regions lie outside of a 10-mile radius from the city center.

Our largely-inadequate transit systems, combined with almost nonexistent federal funding targeted at pedestrians—1.5 percent of transportation funds in total, even though 10.5 percent of all trips in the U.S. are taken on foot—has left seas of low-income urban and rural residents stranded from potential employment. That hurts low-income residents of transportation-starved communities who are forced, because they have to own cars or use taxis, to spend 42 percent of their total income on transportation, on average (compared to 22 percent of total income on transportation for middle-income Americans). But it also harms the business owners, who don’t have access to as deep and as varied a labor pool.

Americans are used to seeing highways as a mode of escape. You take a drive to clear your head. You pile your family in the car to get away on the weekend. Everyone reads “The Road” in high school, and thinks back to halcyon days when highways were man-made rivers with a current you could give yourself over to. It turns out in paying billions to facilitate escape, we may have left something valuable behind.

“This is the civil rights dilemma: Our laws purport to level the playing field, but our transportation choices have effectively barred millions of people from accessing it,” the LCCHR’s report argues. “Traditional nondiscrimination protections cannot protect people for whom opportunities are literally out of reach.”

A seamless, integrated transportation system that offers people real choices – including affordable, frequent and reliable trains, for trips across town or between states – would knock down a major barrier to full equality of opportunity for all Americans. NARP’s ultimate goal is for America to have just such a system, sooner rather than later.