Focus Magazine
March/April (35/2)
Left Behind by Transportation Apartheid Before and After Disasters Strike
by Robert D. Bullard
Transportation serves as a key component in addressing poverty, unemployment, and equal opportunity goals by ensuring access to education, health care, and other public services. Transportation equity is consistent with the goals of the larger civil rights movement and the emerging regional equity movement.
American society is largely divided between individuals with cars and those without cars. The private automobile is still the most dominant travel mode of every segment of the American population, including the poor and people of color. Clearly, private automobiles provide enormous employment access advantages to their owners. Having a car can also mean the difference between being trapped and escaping natural and man-made disasters.
According to the 2001 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), which was released in 2003, 87.6 percent of whites, 83.1 percent of Asians and Hispanics, and 78.9 percent of blacks rely on private cars to get around. Nationally, only seven percent of white households do not own a car, compared to 24 percent of African American households, 17 percent of Latino households, and 13 percent of Asian American households.
Dismantling Transportation Apartheid
For more than a century, African Americans have struggled to end apartheid on buses, trains, and highways. This form of racial discrimination was codified in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson, a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld Louisiana’s segregated “white” and “colored” seating on railroad cars, ushering in the infamous doctrine of “separate but equal.”
The modern civil rights movement has its roots in transportation. In 1955, more than a half a century after Plessy vs. Ferguson relegated blacks to the back of the bus, 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 the modern civil rights movement. Parks, who passed away in 2005, would have had a difficult time sitting on the front or back of a Montgomery bus in 2000, since the city dismantled its public bus system—which served mostly blacks and poor people. The transit cuts were made at the same time that federal tax dollars boosted the construction of the region’s extensive suburban highways.
Many of the nation’s regional transportation systems are “regional” in name only—with a good number of “separate and unequal” urban and suburban transit systems built along race and class lines. The ten-county Atlanta metropolitan area typifies a region struggling to get its roadway and transit balancing act together. The Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Authority (MARTA) serves just two counties, Fulton and DeKalb Counties, and the city of Atlanta.
Race has literally stopped regional transit in its tracks. The outlying suburban counties of Cobb, Gwinnett, and Clayton opted out of MARTA and created their own “separate” bus systems. For many white suburbanites, MARTA is jokingly referred to as “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta” and they want no part of it. (Indeed, a recent rider survey revealed that 78 percent of MARTA’s rail and bus riders are African American and other people of color.) MARTA is the nation’s eighth-largest transit system and the only one in the country that does not receive any state earmarked funds. In contrast, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA), the nation’s oldest and sixth-largest transit system, gets 20 percent of the state’s five cent sales tax, or about $680 million a year.
In Louisiana, New Orleans and Jefferson Parish also run separate bus systems. Passengers on the New Orleans Rapid Transit Authority (NORTA) and Jefferson Transit are forced to switch buses at the parish line. Even Hurricane Katrina floodwaters did not wash away the stubborn cultural divide that separates New Orleans from its suburbs
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