Addressing Urban Transportation Equity in the United States

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) I. 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. …