Transportation Policies Leave Blacks on the Side of the Road

Bullard, Robert D

Transportation is one of the most significant aspects of our lives, yet few people realize the historical civil rights struggle associated with it. In fact, the modern Civil Rights Movement has its roots in transportation. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Louisiana's segregated "White" and "Colored" seating on railroad cars. The case, Plessy v. Ferguson, ushered in the infamous doctrine of "separate but equal." Plessy not only codified apartheid in transportation facilities, but also served as the legal basis for racial segregation in education. The ruling was overturned in 1954 by the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decison, in which the Supreme Court declared that the "doctrine of 'separate but equal'has no place."

Nevertheless, African Americans continued to struggle to end transportation discrimination on buses, trains and light rails. A year before the Brown decision, for example, Blacks in Baton Rouge, La., staged the nation's first successful bus boycott. Two years later, on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a Montgomery city bus to a White man. In so doing, Parks ignited what many consider the impetus for the modem Civil Rights Movement.

By the early 1960s, young "Freedom Riders" risked death by riding Greyhound buses into the Deep South, which was their way of fighting transportation segregation in interstate travel.

Today, the nation is less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. However, Rosa Parks would have a difficult time sitting in the front or back of a Montgomery bus. The city dismantled its public bus system, which served mostly Blacks and poor people, in 1997.

Ironically, the cuts in the Montgomery bus system were made at the same time that federal tax dollars boosted the construction of the region's extensive suburban highways.

Car Trouble

Lest anyone dismiss transportation as a tangential issue, consider that American households spend more on transportation than any other household expense - food, education, health care - except housing. On average, Americans spend 19 cents out of every dollar earned on transportation expenses. But the nation's poorest families spend nearly 40 percent of their take-home pay on transportation, according to the 2003 report "Moving to Equity: Addressing Inequitable Effects of Transportation Policies on Minorities," by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and the Center for Community Change. Households that earned less than $20,000 saw their transportation expenses increase by 36.5 percent or more between 1992 and 2000. On the other hand, households with incomes of $70,000 and higher only spent 16.8 percent more on transportation than they did in 1992.

The private automobile is still the dominant travel mode for every segment of the American population. Nationally, only 7 percent of White households do not own a car, compared with 13 percent of Asian American households, 17 percent of Latino households and 24 percent of African American households. Nevertheless, only 20 percent of all surface transportation funding nationwide is earmarked for public transportation, while 80 percent is earmarked for highways.

This funding allocation has left Blacks on the side of the road. African Americans are almost six times as likely as Whites to use public transit to get around. In fact, African Americans and Latinos comprise a significant portion of all mass transil users (62 percent of bus riders, 32 percent of subway riders and 29 percent of commuter rail riders).

Help Wanted

The lack of car ownership and inadequate public transit service in many urban areas exacerbate social, economic and racial isolation, especially for low-income African Americans, who already have limited transportation options.

A 2000 study by scholar Michael Stoll of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that no other group in the United States was more physically isolated from jobs than African Americans. Stoll's research revealed that more than 50 percent of Blacks would have to relocate to achieve an even distribution of Blacks relative to jobs; the comparable figures for Whites are 20 to 24 percentage points lower.

"Given the difficulties of reverse commuting to suburbs in many metropolitan areas, especially by public transit, coupled with the fact that high proportions of Blacks do not own cars, such spatial mismatch disconnects Blacks from many jobs for which they may be suited, thereby increasing their employment difficulties," wrote Stoll in his study, titled "Modest Progress: The Narrowing Spatial Mismatch Between Blacks and Jobs in the 1990s."

Today, more and more corporations are leaving central cities and locating to suburbs. A 2000 Brookings Institution study, "Office Sprawl: The Evolving Geography of Business," reported the suburban share of metropolitan office space at 69.5 percent in Detroit, 65.8 percent in Atlanta, 57.7 percent in Washington, D.C., 57.4 percent in Miami and 55.2 percent in Philadelphia. But getting to many suburban job centers without a car is next to impossible.

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.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia's funding formula steers cash to rural highways at the expense of grid-locked Atlanta motorists. From July 1999 to September 2003, Georgia spent $620 on transportation costs per resident in the 13-county Atlanta region, compared with $ 1,000 per resident in the rest of the state. During the late 1990s, only about 17 percent of the gasoline tax revenues were returned to the Atlanta metropolitan counties - a region that generates 40 percent of the state's collection.

This problem is not unique to metro Atlanta. The Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based environmental organization that researches threats to health and the environment, found that commuters in 176 metropolitan areas paid $20 billion more in federal gasoline tax than they received back in federal Highway Trust Fund money for both transit and highways from 1998 to 2003. Taxpayers in 54 metropolitan areas lost an estimated $100 million dollars during the six-year period. The top gasoline tax losers were Los Angeles, Dallas-Form Worth, Phoenix, Atlanta, Detroit and New Orleans.

On One Accord

Clearly, transportation continues to be a civil rights issue. Nationwide African Americans and other people of color have demanded an end to transportation policies that aid and abet the flight of people, jobs and investments to suburbs. In 1995, the Labor/Community Strategy Center, Bus Riders Union, Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund charged the Los Angeles MTA with violating Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The groups found that MTA operated separate and unequal bus and rail systems. MTA, they discovered, spent 70 percent of its budget on rail systems for majority White communities, while reducing the fleet of buses that catered to the mostly minority populations.

Though the coalition won a historic out-of-court settlement against the MTA in 1996, it has been an uphill battle to get the the MTA to live up to the 10-year federal consent decree. The Bus Riders Union had to go to court as recently as January 2004 to get the MTA to abide by the decree.

On the national front, Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 to improve public transportation necessary for "improved air quality, energy conservation, international competitiveness, and mobility for elderly persons, persons with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged persons in urban and rural areas of the country." From 1998 through 2003, the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) spending amounted to $217 billion, making it the largest public works bill enacted in the nation's history at the time. The legislation also helped create jobs. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, every $1 billion invested in public transportation infrastructure supports approximately 47,500 jobs.

TEA-21 expired in September 2003. Congress has since passed six temporary extensions. The latest extension carries spending through the end of May 2005, with the Federal Highway Administration getting $24.5 billion and public transportation $5.2 billion.

While transportation dollars have fueled suburban highway construction and job sprawl, race and class dynamics continue to isolate millions of African Americans in central cities and away from expanding suburban job centers.

Transportation investments, enhancements and financial resources, if used properly, can bring new life and revitalization to urban areas where it is much needed and can aid in lifting families out of poverty. They can become a key ingredient in building economically viable and sustainable communities. State transportation departments and transit providers have a major responsibility to ensure that their programs, policies and practices do not discriminate against or adversely and disproportionately impact people of color and the poor. Because of the far-reaching social and economic implications of transportation, it needs to be placed at the top of the civil rights agenda.

Writing in the foreword to my book Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism & New Routes to Equity, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) summed up the challenge that lies ahead: "Our struggle is not over. The physical signs are gone, but the legacy of 'Jim Crow' transportation is still with us."

Robert D. Bullard is the director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University and author of Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism & New Routes to Equity (South End Press).

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jan/Feb 2005
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