Spending numbers make the unfairness case clear. In 1998, for example, buses, which tend to be the mode of transportation for the poor, carried more than half the transit users in Atlanta. But buses received only 15 percent of the transit agency's capital funds. Similarly, buses carried 84 percent of Portland, Oregon's transit users but received only 16 percent of the funds.
Such disparities are not unusual. Nationwide, buses carry more than 60 percent of passengers but receive only about 33 percent of all capital funding. In contrast, light-rail and commuter-rail, which generally connect more affluent, largely white suburbs with downtown areas dominated by white-collar businesses, receive an unusually large share of capital funds. (Light-rail carries only 3 percent of riders yet receives 12 percent of capital funds; commuter-rail lines carry about 4 percent of all passengers and receive 19 percent of available capital funds.)
These inequities have led to challenges to transportation policies. The Atlanta Transportation Equity Project, for example, has opposed that region's transportation plans on two grounds. First, low-income, inner-city neighborhoods bear a disproportionate burden of negative impacts from transportation, such as noise and pollution from nearby highways. Second, the bulk of the region's transportation spending would go to highway proj-ects in largely white suburbs while ignoring projects that might improve the quality of life for inner-city neighborhoods, such as bikeways, sidewalks, sound barriers and more buses. The project is calling for more funds for such improvements.
Pursuing a somewhat different tack, advocates in Boston and Milwaukee have gone to court to try to bring light-rail to low-income, largely minority neighborhoods. In Milwaukee, advocates argue that the state should fund light-rail lines that would connect poor neighborhoods with suburban job centers. In Boston, the suit tries to force the transit agency to use light-rail instead of buses as a permanent replacement for an elevated heavy-rail line that was torn down more than a decade ago.
Many of these efforts take their cues from the notable fight put up in the mid-1990s in Los Angeles when the Bus Riders Union, the NAACP and the Environmental Defense Fund, among others, successfully challenged the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. They were angered by the MTA's decision to raise fares on its overcrowded buses and allocate capital funds for extensions to its lightly used rail systems.
The MTA's challengers argued that such policies violated the nation's civil rights laws because they subsidized a small handful of largely white, middle-class train riders at the expense of about a half million largely poor and minority bus riders. Advocates saw this as a particularly galling policy because for several years the MTA had stopped replacing aging buses so it would have more money for new rail lines.
The case never went to trial. In 1996 the MTA signed a consent decree promising to reduce overcrowding on its buses.
Carrying out this decree, however, has been contentious. Although the agency acquired 500 new natural-gas-powered buses, a federal district judge ordered it to buy another 200. The MTA is currently challenging this order in a federal appeals court.
In all these cities where civil rights/transportation fights are going on, advocates base their cases on provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibit discriminatory practices in programs that receive federal funds. This interpretation of civil rights law, they argue, is buttressed by a 1994 Executive Order in which President Clinton ordered federal agencies to consider environmental justice in their missions, programs and policies.
This theory, however, has yet to be established in case law. With the exception of the MTA case--which was settled before it went to trial-- no effort to challenge a transportation plan on civil rights grounds has succeeded. In 1990 a federal judge threw out a civil-rights-based challenge to fare increases in Philadelphia. In 1995, an appeals court overturned a preliminary injunction against New York's plan to raise subway and bus fares at a higher rate than commuter-rail fares.
Regardless of how the courts rule, the issues raised in the challenges are worth considering. We're long past the era when highway planners explicitly sited urban freeways to eliminate the largely minority, low-income "slums" near the downtown areas the road would serve. It's time, therefore, to examine the more subtle ways in which transportation spending decisions still hurt poor people--and to consider how such spending might actually help them.
