Can structural racism in mobility’s costs be compensated?

Cyclists gather on Washington, DC's Black Lives Matter Plaza. (Photo by me)

People of color disproportionately bear the multi-faceted costs of U.S. driving not covered by road users, estimated at more than $250 billion annually in an International Monetary Fund working paper. This racially disparate burden, comprised of externalities like crashes, congestion, and pollution, is a legacy of discriminatory planning and policy.

But amidst the country's civil rights reckoning, people are taking meaningful action:

• Roads have become spaces to fight racism
• Planning processes are better incorporating communities of color
• People are formulating how transportation and urban planning tools historically used to divide might be reformed into sources of racial reparations.

These actions, and the need to build on them, show how emphasizing the relationship between structural racism in mobility and the ongoing movement for equality could help make society fairer and stronger.   

U.S. access, a legacy of racism, imposes inequitable burden on people of color

Racial segregation remains stark in U.S. metro areas, with outcomes such as income and education typically favoring homogenously white neighborhoods. Redlining and highway-building, pillars of 20^th-century urban planning, helped these disparities take root.

Discriminatory transportation policy persists today. For example, loud, mainly white voices in regions including Atlanta, Detroit, and Nashville have recently used stereotypes surrounding public transportation’s multiethnic riders, such as the debunked belief that transit lines are vectors of crime, to help block improvements to those regions’ bus and rail systems.

Racism has also shaped the user experience of our transit systems themselves. Engineer and former Houston METRO board member Christof Spieler describes how many U.S. regions have two-tiered, structurally segregated bus and rail networks prioritizing service for suburban white-collar commuters – often designed around park-and-ride facilities – over connectivity in more diverse, more densely populated communities. And in Washington, DC, a white journalist popular among locals amplified calls on social media for a Black bus operator to be fired for eating breakfast during a Metrorail ride to her next shift.

But while navigating this directly-suppressed access, people of color also disproportionately bear the infrastructural, safety, and environmental costs of supporting mobility:

• Though road congestion is often used as political justification to expand highways, additional road capacity induces demand for more vehicle travel that quickly fills up new lanes. Specifically, Transportation for America found that U.S. car congestion increased 144 percent between 1993 and 2017 despite $500 billion of taxpayer spending on urban highways during the period. However, new road lanes can – like the urban highways that preceded them – displace communities of color. A proposed $7 billion widening of I-45 in Houston, for example, would require demolition of 340 businesses and more than 1,000 homes that the project’s environmental impact statement found disproportionately belong to people of color.
• Car crashes, a decades-long global pandemic that the U.S. has had particular difficulty controlling, are most threatening to people outside of motor vehicles like pedestrians and cyclists. People of color are at especially high risk when on foot or bike. Crash fatality rates among Black pedestrians are 25 percent higher than the national average, and among Native Americans and other indigenous people more than twice as high. Enforcement-based traffic safety strategies exacerbate this disparity, especially on roads designed to prioritize car throughput over safety; for example, Tulsa law enforcement personnel harassed and beat two Black teens for walking on a sidewalk-less street, while a Los Angeles police officer killed cyclist Dijon Kizzee following an alleged violation of vehicle code.  
• Vehicle emissions impose a variety of costs on society, including particulates that put immediate strain on people’s respiratory systems and greenhouse gases that inflict a longer-term toll on life. Communities of color bear the brunt of these environmental costs. Air pollution in highway-pierced neighborhoods, for example, causes chronic health conditions that – even before COVID-19 – harmed people’s quality of life. Such marginalized places are also particularly susceptible to climate change impacts such as rising sea levels, nutritional disparities, and flash flooding.

How can society repay its debt to communities of color?

The ongoing racial reckoning has fostered greater solidarity against discrimination. This activism has shown how mobility and urban planning – despite their role in segregation – can also be tools of equality:

• Inclusive spaces: People transcending demographics have taken to roadways – including highways built through neighborhoods of color – to fight racism. These people have endured violence, including vehicle attacks, in their stand for racial justice. DC’s Black Lives Matter Plaza and the similar street projects throughout the country it has inspired, though not substitutes for the deeper policy changes the demonstrators seek, show how communities can embrace and commemorate this heroic stand for equality by creating more inclusive public spaces. Further illustrating the need for racial violence-free space, the Safe Routes Partnership dropped enforcement from its Safe Routes to School Framework in an effort to put an end to traffic stop-initiated fatal encounters between law enforcement and people of color, like the Atlanta police killing of Rayshard Brooks during a DUI investigation. 
• Community engagement: Diligent collaboration with people of color can bolster access, especially for users of active and public transportation. For example, outreach by community development organization Restoration helped increase bikeshare use in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood by 225 percent, while Oakland, Ca. adjusted its COVID-19 Slow Streets program to more effectively connect people with essential services on arterial corridors in response to community feedback largely from East Oakland residents. And the American Public Transportation Association’s Darnell Grisby has outlined transit governance and policy reforms that would help agencies better represent their diverse riders.  
• Reparations: Urban planning-based strategies are a central part of increased discussion on racial reparations. For example, in a Detroit Free Press op-ed, Venture for America fellow Nithin Vejendla suggested that city remove several downtown highways and use the reclaimed land as a source for reparations. Destiny Thomas, founder and CEO of Thrivance Group, subsequently proposed a broader 14-point urban reparations plan – incorporating zoning reform, ride-hailing and freight fees, and neighborhood-oriented transit improvements – in an op-ed for Streetsblog.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to past and present injustice. However, actions that empower and improve access for people of color – like those described above – can help ensure future mobility connects an equitable society free of physical segregation and economic separation.