Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity (Paperback)

by Robert Bullard (Editor), Glenn Johnson (Editor), Angel Torres (Editor)

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Product Description

Transportation Racism: New Routes to Equity dispels a major myth that conceals enduring divisions in American life. While many people view the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the end of government-sponsored discrimination in the United States, Transportation Racism confirms the obvious and ignored truth: equality in transportation has been established in name only. Case by case, Transportation Racism shows how-a half-century after the Montgomery bus boycotts-chronic inequality in public transportation is firmly and nationally entrenched.

Coast to coast, equal access to healthy, reliable, and practical transportation eludes many people, the majority of them poor people and people of color. The effects of this injustice are broad and deep. Access to transportation, public and private, determines the physical and social mobility necessary for admission to larger social, economic, and civic worlds. For millions of people, exclusion from transportation networks means drastically compromised life choices. Their jeopardized health and limited economic opportunities are then compounded by the day-to-day indignities and feelings of frustration and isolation resulting from publicly funded segregation.

The authors illustrate the insidious contributions of transportation policy and urban planning to the establishment and enforcement of racial and economic inequality. Written in recognition of activists like Ella Baker and Rosa Parks, Transportation Racism lays the groundwork for future transit rights organizers.

Transportation Racism asserts that staying the current course will further polarize communities on the basis of class and color, and the powerful evidence marshaled by the authors in this anthology demands that cities and states revisit their public transportation agendas.

Robert Bullard's Dumping in Dixie and Confronting Environmental Racism were seminal works in the establishment of Environmental Justice as a movement and an academic field.

About the Author
Robert D. Bullard is the Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. His book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality has become a standard text in the environmental justice field. Two of his other books include Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (South End Press, 1993) and Highway Robbery (South End Press, 2004).

Product Details

• Paperback: 300 pages
• Publisher: South End Press (January 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896087042
• ISBN-13: 978-0896087040
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #485,992 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars worth reading but poorly edited, June 4, 2005

By	Michael Lewyn (Jacksonville, FL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The basic purpose of this book is to show how our transportation funding system makes the poor (and especially racial minorities) worse off. The book is an anthology of essays, mostly case studies from various cities (including Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York City).

A few of the more interesting assertions:

*Martin Luther King was writing about transportation issues before his death; in a posthumously published essay, he wrote that public transit is "a valid civil rights issue" because the availability of transit "determines the accessibility of jobs to the black community" (p. 17).

*Discriminatory policies not only affect the balance of spending between highways and transit, but also affect public transit policy. For example, Pittsburgh's planners have given Pittsburgh's white southern suburbs a clean, quiet light rail system, but have given its poorer, blacker East End a louder, more polluting busway system- even though East Enders are more likely to use public transit.

*Even poor drivers lose from our auto-oriented status quo. Families earning less than $14,000 per year after taxes spend 40% of their take home pay on transportation, as opposed to 13% for families earning over $72,000.

*In 1935, families spent 10% of their budgets on transportation. Today, they spend 20% - perhaps explaining why so many people feel financially stressed.

*The claim that highways "pay for themselves" overlooks negative externalities such as the effects of highways on city neighborhoods: poor, carless people get all the air pollution from nearby highways without any of the benefits.

However, some essays in the book are not as well done as others. Some essays contain the sort of left-wing rhetoric that is likely to alienate anyone to the left of Dennis Kucinich, and/or are indifferent to complex trade-offs. For example, the New York City essay discusses a community's desire to keep traffic off its surface streets (p. 81). But where traffic is encouraged to move to expressways (even tunneled expressways, the community's preferred remedy) suburban migration, and thus disinvestment from the city, is more convenient and neighborhood merchants might lose business. By contrast, the San Francisco essay (one of the better essays in the collection) discusses numerous issues that the authors acknowledged to be close calls.