We Built It This Way: A Primer on Transportation Inequity
Learn how policy and funding decisions created today's inequities and steps you can take toward a more equitable transportation system.
Introduction
The places we live and the ways we get around are built through a series of intentional policy and funding decisions. Those decisions aren’t random; they are influenced by humans who are subject to individual and societal pressures and biases. In the United States, Black, Indigenous, Brown, and low-income communities have experienced decades of underinvestment.
This story map reviews examples of how inequitable systems affect communities of color and perpetuate inequities across the country; highlights the historical context that built inequities into our communities and transportation systems; and presents ideas to begin undoing these systems and addressing the harm they have done. You can navigate by scrolling up and down, or by clicking sections in the gray navigation bar above.
If you haven't already, watch this short video for a summary of the information that will be included below.
Our Streets Today
Low-income communities and communities of color are full of culture, connectedness, and determination. In many neighborhoods, generations of the same family may live together, and neighbors who may have known each other for decades relax on their porches and wave hello to neighbors walking and biking as they make their way to the park, school, or work. Safe and convenient ways to access community destinations are essential to the fabric of a community.
At the same time, safe access to everyday destinations in low-income communities and communities of color can be daunting and limit residents’ access to employment, education, medical care, and groceries. Data show that Black, Brown, and Indigenous people consistently have less access to safe, connected transportation networks and public spaces than white people, and disproportionately experience:
- Low rates of car access in a car-dependent system
- Less access to safe street infrastructure and public space
- Racial profiling and over-policing
- Poor health outcomes
These current circumstances are not the result of individual or community failure to maintain or improve neighborhoods, but rather are due to decades of intentional funding and policy decisions. Resources are still siphoned into white, affluent communities through both official policies and informal government practices.
Low rates of car access in a car-dependent system
Most people in America need a reliable car to get to the places they need to go. However, cars require significant amounts of money to purchase, fuel, and maintain. Low-income people, by definition, have fewer financial resources available for these purchases, but even within this group, people of color are much less likely to have access to a car. That means that low-income people of color are depending on active transportation and public transit for more of their daily trips.
Car access in Omaha, Nebraska by race
For example, in Omaha, Nebraska, 20 percent of Black households did not have a vehicle in 2017, compared to six percent of white households. Explore the data from other cities with National Equity Atlas .
Unequal access to safe street infrastructure and public space
Compared to infrastructure for cars, infrastructure for transit and active transportation is not funded well enough to serve people’s daily transportation needs. Even where this active transportation infrastructure exists (think crosswalks, sidewalks, and bike lanes) it is disproportionately located in white, affluent communities. As a result, where active transportation and transit could be a solution to limited car access, communities often don't have the infrastructure to ensure people can safely access those options.
Low income communities have fewer sidewalks compared to high-income communities.
Low-income communities have fewer marked crosswalks compared to high-income communities.
Low-income communities have less street lighting compared to high-income communities.
That lack of safe infrastructure means that in those census tracts, people are more likely to be killed while walking.
Additionally, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people are disproportionately represented in fatal crashes involving people walking.
American Indians or Alaska Natives have the highest pedestrian death rate. According to this study by Keisha Pollack, the motor vehicle death rate for American Indians/Alaska Natives varies significantly across the country. In five states (South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Arizona), the death rate is more than twice the national average for all American Indians/Alaska Natives and more than four times the rate for the general United States population.
For more information on tribal road safety, review this factsheet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
How the system perpetuates less access to safe street infrastructure and public space
Sidewalk and bike infrastructure construction are often tied to new development. That means established communities frequently aren't considered for these resources.
In many places across the country, minor repairs and improvements are dictated by complaint-driven systems. That means that resources go to people who have the time, knowledge, and connections to ensure their voices are heard by government agencies. People in low-income communities and communities of color that are already under-resourced may not have the capacity to advocate for improving their communities. Showing up to a meeting at city hall in the middle of the day is hard if you have kids to take care of, work a service-industry job, and depend on public transportation.
Unequal distribution of resources in Baltimore, Maryland
One example of this mismatch is in Baltimore, Maryland, where there are major racial disparities in the allocation of capital dollars. According to a study from the Urban Institute: “Neighborhoods that are less than 50 percent African American receive nearly four times the investment of neighborhoods that are over 85 percent African American. Low-poverty neighborhoods receive one and a half times the investment of high-poverty neighborhoods.”
Racial profiling and over-policing
On top of unsafe infrastructure, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities are over-policed on the streets and in public spaces. Because of entrenched bias and racism, they are more likely to be unnecessarily stopped, questioned, and presumed to be dangerous. They are additionally set up for over-policing by the lack of safe infrastructure for biking and walking. If it isn't safe to bike in the street, people bike on the sidewalks; if there is no crosswalk or safe place to cross, people jaywalk. Through infrastructure and funding decisions, we are creating the conditions that force people to make the very choices that we punish them for.
Racial profiling and over-policing in the headlines
Black people are also told explicitly that they don’t belong in public spaces. A viral video in 2020, showed footage of a white woman calling the police to falsely accuse a Black man of threatening her after he asked her to leash her dog in an area of New York City’s Central Park designated for birding. You may also remember 2018 headlines of a white woman calling the police on Black people barbecuing on Lake Merritt in Oakland, California. While these specific examples made headlines, they are not outliers.
This article explores the common phenomenon where white people police Black people for participating in outdoor activities like birding or just being in a park.
Racial profiling and over-policing that is not making headlines
Native Americans are more likely than any other racial group to be killed by police. However, while the rate of deaths relative to their representation in the population is high, the number of deaths is relatively low.
According to this CNN article , from 1999 to 2015, the rate of Native American deaths as a result of "legal intervention" was 12% higher than for African-Americans and three times the rate for white people. The majority of those deaths were due to police shootings, but a few were attributed to the causes such as manhandling.
A study on racial profiling and over-policing
In this study from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Black cyclists made up almost half of the incident or arrest reports associated with being stopped for a bicycling citation, despite making up only 18 percent of the total Minneapolis population. The report warns that inequitable law enforcement actions may impede efforts to diversify the demographics of bike riders and bike advocates.
Poor health outcomes
Black families who were historically (and remain) unable to purchase desirable housing often ended up purchasing cheaper property near highways and industrial lands, near poor air quality and speeding traffic. If families wanted to access newer, well-funded community amenities, the burden was on them to leave their neighborhood and community connections.
Even if they wanted to move, people of color were denied housing loans, barred from buying specific homes by racially restrictive convents that restricted sales to any non-white buyer, and are still directed toward fewer options .
Now, there is a disproportionate risk of respiratory illness and other chronic health issues among communities of color and low-income communities.
On the graph to the right, Asian Americans have the lowest asthma rates of any racial group. However, this sub-group is an aggregate of many different ethnic populations and therefore hides the disparities that exist between them.
Poor health outcomes
A 2019 report from The Union of Concerned Scientists states that Asian American and Black residents in Massachusetts were exposed to significantly higher concentrations of small particulate matter from vehicle pollution (which has been linked to heart and lung diseases) than white residents. Specifically, compared to white residents, the average particulate matter exposure was 36 percent higher for Asian American residents, 34 percent higher for Black residents, and 26 percent higher for Latino residents.
Community Engagement is Essential
Even when resources are allocated to Black and Brown communities, if there is not authentic engagement to understand residents' needs, these projects can cause more disruption and further damage already-strained relationships between residents and government entities. Many agencies don’t require public input on their projects. Even if they do, the process may be treated simply as a checkbox, and there is not always accountability for following through with the community’s ideas.
Volunteers planting trees in Detroit in 2016. Carlos Osorio/AP
An example of this occurred in Detroit, Michigan when the city tried to increase the city's tree canopy but neglected to involve neighborhood residents. The nonprofit partner heading up tree planting had trouble finding residents willing to accept a free tree in their front yard. It turned out that residents' resistance to the trees was due to their distrust of the city because of their past experience with other city initiatives and the way that the tree planters presented themselves. Multiple Black women mentioned a time after the 1967 race rebellion when the city suddenly cut down elm trees in their neighborhood. They understood that as an attempt to ease surveillance after the uprising; the city even had helicopters spray toxic DDT above the trees. Alternatively, the city stated that tree removal happened because the elms were dying off from Dutch elm disease.
The stories may conflict, but their lived experience motivated people to reject government-sponsored activity in their neighborhood. Additionally, the tree planters that were relaying this information were largely white and not from Detroit. Neighborhood residents understood the benefit of trees, but the lack of neighborhood involvement in the planning and implementation is what derailed the plan.
A Brief History of Racial Inequities that Established Today's Mobility Injustices
The U.S. was built on the forcible removal of Indigenous people from their land and fueled by the labor of chattel slavery. This is the foundation of the examples and stories we are sharing here: U.S. leadership did not acknowledge the full humanity of Black and Indigenous people.
That story does not end in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution officially ending slavery in America. In fact, that is where we will begin this brief history review.
Reconstruction (1867 to 1877)
In the period after the Civil War, Reconstruction , the country tried to address the legacy of slavery. During this time, federal laws protected civil rights for formerly enslaved and free Black people; there was even a brief period where there was significant Black voter turnout and Black people held public office at every level of government. This was followed by a violent, racist backlash, which underscored how deeply entrenched the harmful legacy of racial subjugation was.
Southern voters elected more than 600 Black state legislators and 16 Black members of Congress. Image courtesy of The Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Black Codes/Jim Crow Era (1870s to 1950s)
Starting in the 1870s, Black voter suppression and violence against Black people were common and continued well into the 1900s. In former confederate states, which were increasingly controlled by white, southern democratic legislatures, passed restrictive voter registration and electoral laws as well as legislation to segregate white and Black people, commonly referred to as Jim Crow laws . These laws legally required racial segregation in public spaces and facilities, such as parks, public transportation, and public schools.
Although the Supreme Court supported the idea that people could be “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in reality, the resources and facilities available for Black people were inferior and underfunded compared to those offered to white people – if they even existed for Black people at all. It’s also important to note that segregation was not limited to the South. While segregation was part of southern laws, the northern states practiced de facto segregation in housing and bank lending practices, as well as through job discrimination.
Changing the landscape (1950s-1960s)
The American landscape changed dramatically in the decades following the Great Depression and World War II. Policies aimed at rebuilding the economy and growing the middle class made housing loans available to white families, who left cities en masse in search of new housing and community amenities. This was the beginning of the suburbs that continue to characterize many American communities.
Black families, even Black veterans, were largely barred from these opportunities, denied housing loans through redlining and housing covenants. The video below explains the ways that communities were segregated by design through government policies and community practices.
Segregated By Design
These discriminatory housing policies existed concurrently with the explosive growth of the federal highway system, which made it easier for people to commute from the suburbs to city jobs in private vehicles.
Traffic jam on the Congress Expressway, Chicago, June 24, 1959, 6:55 p.m. ( National Museum of American History )
Local governments seized this opportunity to use highway construction as a tool to remove “blighted” neighborhoods – where mostly Black families lived – as part of urban renewal and redevelopment. James Baldwin famously referred to Urban Renewal as "Negro Removal." The term "blighted" provided a convenient container for the implicit bias and racial prejudice that cast primarily Black communities as scary, dangerous.
Formerly thriving Black communities were divided and destroyed (both physically and metaphorically), left with crumbling infrastructure, minimal opportunities for financial advancement, and a disproportionate burden of environmental pollutants from vehicle emissions. These neighborhoods were now less walkable and connected because of the major highways slicing through, dividing communities from their everyday destinations and each other.
Listen to this interview with former U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, discussing this history.
Today
Now, we are living with the legacy of racist transportation policy and funding decisions. Our communities are largely built so that we have to get around by car. Public transportation options, if they are present, are often unreliable, don't connect people to their everyday destinations, and fail to support the people who need it most.
For example, a report from the Association of Public Transportation Agencies recently outlined that public transportation agencies should better support late-night workers. Shift workers outside of the 9-5 day are often also part of the population that is burdened by transportation costs and limited transportation options. According to the report, the median late-shift workers' pay is 14 percent lower than daytime workers. Additionally, Black and Latinx members of the workforce are more likely to arrive at work in the evening, late-night, and early-morning hours.
The Bottom Line
The conditions that exist today were built through policy and funding decisions made for communities of color− we can use the same tools to work with communities and address the ongoing effects of inequitable decisions.
Even if you are not actively taking action to perpetuate this oppressive system, you may be benefiting from advantages afforded by generational wealth, access, and privilege, while allowing the system to continue barring Black and brown people from healthy and safe access to community gathering spaces, employment, and education.
The Bottom Line: If we are not actively working to undo the harms of past injustices, we are perpetuating them.
What We Can Do
1) Partner with community members.
Community members should be at the heart of efforts to improve safe, convenient access and mobility. Nonprofit and public sector advocates should take a supportive role by providing funding, content-area expertise, and other resources to realize community members’ vision.
2) Prioritize community members’ desires and elevate their leadership.
The initial engagement and data collection should be just the beginning of community members’ involvement. Continue the conversation about what should be a priority for limited resources and how projects should unfold. By cultivating authentic relationships and involving neighbors and organizations in a meaningful way, you sow the seeds of community-led stewardship.
3) Advocate to prioritize funding that aligns with community members' vision.
Advocate for equitable distribution of funding within budgets and push to address the systemic barriers put in place by historic and ongoing inequities. Governments and nonprofits across the country are doing this in a variety of ways.
For more details and resources to support these three actions, go to saferoutespartnership.org/mobilityjustice
