Transportation Policies Leave Blacks on the Side of the Road

Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2005 by Bullard, Robert D

In 1999, for example, the Wiggins family of Buffalo, N.Y., won a multimillion dollar settlement after the death of 17-year-old Cynthia Wiggins. Wiggins, an African American who had not been able to find a job in Buffalo, worked at a fastfood restaurant in the suburban Waiden Galleria Mall. On her way to work one day, she was crushed by a dump truck while crossing a seven-lane highway. The bus that she rode to work, used mostly by African Americans, was not allowed to stop on mall property, so the nearest stop was about 300 yards away, across the highway.

Blacks in Buffalo charged the Waiden Galleria Mall with using the highway as a racial barrier to exclude some city residents. The mall owners, Pyramid Companies of Syracuse, N.Y., agreed to pay $2 million of the $2.55 million settlement, over time, to Wiggins's 4-year-old son. The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority agreed to pay $300,000, and the driver of the truck agreed to pay $250,000.

White Flight

Detroit is the most racially segregated big city in the United States and the only major metropolitan area without a regional transit system. It is no accident, then, that Detroit leads the nation in suburban "office sprawl."

"One out of three Detroit households [doesn't own a car] and they rely heavily on public transportation. Unfortunately, our current transportation system does not take you anywhere," says Detroit NAACP executive director Heaster Wheeler. "Over 50 percent of the new jobs that have come to our region in the last 25 years are located in areas not served by transit systems."

In Metro Atlanta, race has literally stopped regional transit in its tracks. The majority of entry-level jobs are not within a quarter-mile of public transportation. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) is regional in name only, serving just two counties, Fulton and DeKalb. The suburban counties of Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton opted out of MARTA and created their own "separate" bus systems. Many White have distanced themselves from MARTA and jokingly refer to the transit system as "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta."

Fueled Up

The current federal funding scheme for transportation is also no friend to urban transit. More than a third of the $133 billion dollars available to highway spending in 2001 came from federal and state gas taxes. Thirty states, however, restrict use of the gasoline tax revenue to funding highway programs only, thereby limiting these states' ability to finance and invest in mass transit options.

Many of the states that restrict use of the gasoline tax are ones with majority Black cities, such as Birmingham, Ala.; Pine Bluff, Ark.; Atlanta; Gary, Ind.; Jackson, Miss.; St. Louis; Cleveland and Memphis. There is little doubt that these cities are getting shortchanged when transportation spending is tilted toward rural and suburban road pavement.

This skewed gasoline tax distribution system creates "donor regions." For example, rural Harrison County, Ohio, with a population of a mere 15,000, receives the same level of state funding from the county share as Cuyahoga County, which has 1.4 million urban residents and includes the city of Cleveland.