Racial Equity Addendum to Critical Issues in Transportation (2021)

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Introduction T he Black Lives Matter movement and other events in 2020 and 2021 have made it clear that the United States continues to struggle with racism. Racism manifests in different ways, from the biased attitudes and discriminatory behaviors of individuals to the policies, practices, and norms of institutions and society that have created and maintained racial inequalities. Many of the troubling racial inequalities that persist today are a consequence of systemic racism— an undercurrent of discriminatory policies and practices that have contributed to racial disparities in access to goods, services, and opportunities. The country’s transportation enterprise is a major area of government responsibility that is central to the economy and everyday lives of Americans. As such, it warrants scrutiny both as a potential source of systemic racism and as a means of reducing the inequalities stemming from it. In 2018, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) issued a report, Critical Issues in Transportation 2019, which identified emerging developments and long-standing issues in transportation that are becoming more vexing and prominent. Critical Issues in Transportation 2019 focused on the role of research by posing questions that researchers could help answer to gain a better understanding of the identified issues and, where appropriate, to inform the development of new, socially beneficial policies, practices, and technologies. While it did not provide answers to the many questions, the report sought to frame future areas of inquiry for TRB and the transportation research community generally, knowing that progress in addressing many of the issues would require early, persistent, and concerted research and development efforts. While some equity-related issues were identified in Critical Issues in Transportation 2019, the topic was not discussed in depth. In response to the candid and critical national dialogue on racial equity in 2020 and 2021, this addendum to Critical Issues in Transportation 2019 tackles racial equity exclusively and with additional consciousness about its transportation dimensions trb | transportation research board2 RACIAL EQUITY ADDENDUM TO CRITICAL ISSUES IN TRANSPORTATION

racial equity addendum to critical issues in transportation 3 and implications. Still, a brief document of this type cannot possibly offer the complete and nuanced treatment that is warranted. The causes of racial inequalities are many and deep, and there is vast historical and social science literature on them. This addendum is intended to be a step in the process of identifying and building a research agenda for transportation that will help to more fully identify and address inequities and injustices caused and contributed to by transportation. To be manageable, this addendum focuses on equity issues that have a racial dimension and can be traced to transportation. It acknowledges the difficulty of distinguishing outcomes that stem from racial discrimination versus other forms of discrimination (e.g., language, gender, disability, and sexual preference) along with the complexities of isolating transportation from the broader economic, societal, and institutional landscape. In light of the past year’s social unrest and reckoning about the country’s history of racism, the addendum gives particular attention to inequities facing Black and Native American people, whose experience with racial discrimination in the United States has been especially egregious and long- lasting. However, systemic racism is experienced by all people of color—those who are Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and/or belong to other marginalized racial and ethnic groups. Therefore, the discussion frequently points to the research needed to understand and address inequities in transportation as they pertain to people of all racial and ethnic identities. Background Racism has been overt in transportation. While even the most blatant examples cannot be fully accounted in this addendum, some stand out. For example, the segregation of races on intercity trains led to the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” Supreme Court doctrine that stood for more than half a century. The Jim Crow requirements justified by this doctrine required Blacks to sit at the back of the bus. While legal decisions, Jim Crow laws, and other unambiguously discriminatory policies have been reversed by the courts and in constitutional amendments, their impacts on society have not been fully remedied and persist. Transportation has also contributed to racial inequities in other ways. Freeways and rail transit infrastructure constructed through cities, for instance, have often displaced and isolated people living in low-income neighborhoods and resulted in vehicle emissions and noise pollution. These impacts have been felt disproportionately by Blacks and other people of color, causing harm that extended far beyond losses in property and businesses to disrupt the entire social fabric of their communities and the accumulation of intergenerational wealth. Redevelopment and gentrification of other urban neighborhoods, RACIAL EQUITY ADDENDUM TO CRITICAL ISSUES IN TRANSPORTATION

often spurred by transportation investments, have likewise disrupted and displaced many people of color. As the transportation industry contemplates its future infrastructure investments, there is a growing recognition that past mistakes and the damage they have caused must not be repeated. Of course, racism has deep and broad origins that extend far beyond the transportation domain. While many causes of racial inequity will not lend themselves to transportation solutions alone, transportation can still help to redress some elements of the problem. For instance, both current and past policies and conditions have led to spatial distribution of races in which communities of color are likely to be poorer, have fewer economic opportunities, and have limited access to health care, education, shopping, and recreation. This is particularly true among Native Americans, who were forced to move from their tribal lands to isolated reservations. Although not a panacea, transportation can help ameliorate these disparities, including the spatial mismatch between housing and employment in some areas that have been influenced by discriminatory housing and zoning policies.1 The transportation industry can accomplish some of these efforts on its own, but there are others where it must act in concert with other institutions and all levels of government. In keeping with Critical Issues in Transportation 2019, the focus of this addendum is identifying, but not trying to answer, important questions about transportation’s impacts on equity. The discussions below point to areas that are candidates for further research, sometimes raising new research topics and sometimes reframing long-standing ones deserving renewed inquiry. Access to Transportation Research has shown that people of color living in racially segregated communities and on reservations often face disproportionately high transportation access constraints, including cost burdens.2,3,4,5,6 As a result, they do not have good access to employment, health care, education, healthy food, and other life needs and opportunities. Transportation’s importance for providing access to opportunities is a well- studied area of research, especially for access to work but also for access to quality education.7,8,9 While this research indicates that shortcomings in transportation are seldom the sole cause of poor access to opportunity, it also suggests that improvements in transportation can play a meaningful role in helping to address the problems, for instance, by improving practices and policies for transporting city public school students.10 More research to understand and document how transportation affects access to opportunities, particularly by people of color, is essential for designing and implementing policies aimed at improving access. Automobile Access While spatial patterns of rural and metropolitan areas can vary greatly along with public transit availability and the importance of automobile access, research indicates that most people, across all household income levels, travel primarily by automobile.11 Even among households with annual incomes of less than $25,000, nearly 80 percent own at least one vehicle.12 Nevertheless, the extent to which people of color living in highly segregated neighborhoods and on reservations trb | transportation research board4

racial equity addendum to critical issues in transportation 5 depend on automobiles for access to employment, education, health care, and groceries remains fertile ground for research, particularly with regard to the importance of car ownership.13,14 More granular research, for example, can be valuable for understanding the importance of having access to an automobile to seek and retain employment. It could also further understanding of the importance of automobile access to achieving higher earnings under different conditions, such as central city, suburban, and rural locations and when accompanied by other forms of transportation such as transit and shared modes of transportation. That research, in turn, can inform changes in public policies. Because acquiring and retaining an automobile is essential for access in locations outside of transit-dense urban areas, it is important to understand how various policies can affect automobile ownership and use. Research indicates that lower-income people and people of color face higher vehicle purchase prices, financing costs, and insurance rates.15,16,17,18 Research that examines how alternative policies and regulations can help low-income people avoid these costs would be desirable, such as ways to reduce vehicle registration fees for those eligible for social services and to increase the scrutiny of racial disparities in financing costs.19 Likewise, it is important to know how policies can be structured to help people hold on to their personal vehicles through periods of unemployment and to prevent regressive registration and licensing fees. Research will be important, for instance, to better understand how social services requirements that place limits on a person’s assets can be restructured in ways that will not make recipients choose between retaining eligibility for benefits and owning a vehicle.20,21 Studies show that the loss of a driver’s license, and thus automobile access, greatly limits access to employment, education, health care, and other services.22,23 Therefore, it is important to understand how policies that keep people from driving for non- transportation reasons, such as failure to pay child support, can exacerbate poverty. This also has an equity dimension because the incidence of revoked and suspended licenses is higher among people of color living in lower-income neighborhoods. And, as cities design and implement a mix of policies aimed at discouraging automobile ownership and use, it will be important for those policy choices to be informed by research that considers the impacts on residents already facing significant transportation access constraints. Areas of inquiry could address the following questions: Who is most impacted by policies that discourage automobile ownership? Are all demographic groups equally burdened or advantaged by changes in mode shares and quantity of trips?

trb | transportation research board6 Access to Public Transit Public transit service is a necessity for many workers to reach their jobs, including those who provide essential services for relatively low pay, who are disproportionately Blacks and other people of color.24 For example, workers who were classified as essential at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic comprised more than one-third of all U.S. public transit riders and were disproportionately people of color.25,26 Given the evident role of public transit in providing lower-income households with access, research that examines ways to increase the use and offerings of transit service can be important for informing public policy. An example is research that assesses the impact of providing transit passes to recipients of social services benefits and other public assistance. This research could include evaluations of the impact on lower-income workers of employer- and income-based transit subsidies. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, research that examines how post-COVID-19 pandemic transit service changes could affect communities with high transit needs will be especially important. More generally, decision makers need the results of research to understand how policies can be designed to ensure more equity in the availability of all modes of transportation, including shared modes, sidewalks, bicycle paths, and other active transportation facilities. In particular, they need to understand which modes are most important to, and missing from, low-income neighborhoods. Technology-based services such as ridehailing, on- demand transit, carsharing, bikesharing, and other micromobility services are expanding unevenly within and outside metropolitan areas.27,28 There is a lot of evidence that bikeshare and carshare services are sparse in lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color.29,30,31,32,33 Moreover, the ability of people to use these services often depends on bank and smartphone access, which is less prevalent in these neighborhoods and communities.34 Research can help inform policies and practices aimed at ensuring that these new services contribute positively to equitable access and do not exacerbate existing inequities. Institutional Issues and Decision Making Critics of transportation planning and investment priorities, particularly in urban areas, have pointed to patterns of decision making indicative of racial bias. Examples, as noted above, include the siting of urban freeways in low-income—and often racially segregated—neighborhoods, which creates dislocation, isolation, and exposure to negative externalities such as noise, poor air quality, and safety hazards.35 Such choices are seldom made by state and local transportation agencies

racial equity addendum to critical issues in transportation 7 alone,36 but their planning and implementation have largely been the responsibility of these institutions.37,38 Curbing racism in the decision- making processes and power structures across all levels of government is essential to equitable transportation planning and investment choices, and understanding racial bias in transportation institutions is a critical step. Ensuring equitable decisions can be complicated by the many entities involved in planning and designing transportation investments, particularly for those projects that cross jurisdictional boundaries. The challenges for sovereign tribal governments can be even more complex, as described later. The advent of policies and processes that elevate equity in the transportation decision calculus will therefore require research focused on governance, especially in the multi- jurisdictional settings that are common for large transportation plans and projects. Public transit agencies are expected to provide many societal services and benefits, from equitable and environmentally sustainable service offerings to affordable and reliable personal mobility.39 Judging the utility and performance of this mode and the public investments made in it, including gauging transit’s effectiveness in providing equitable access to needed transportation, can be difficult under these circumstances. The identification of equity-related metrics to supplement traditional measures such as ridership levels is a candidate topic for research to more fully inform public investments in these services. One would want to have an array of such metrics, for instance, to assess how investments in new transit services affect equity. This is particularly likely given the history of transit investments designed to attract higher-income “choice” riders, often at the expense of investments in services for people who are more dependent on transit. There is evidence that the enforcement of motor vehicle traffic laws, often through traffic stops, is not evenly applied across all races.40,41,42 The enforcement of traffic laws is largely the responsibility of police agencies and sometimes viewed as being outside the transportation institutional domain. However, enforcement practices can impact the ability of people to make effective and safe use of the transportation system and therefore can be directly relevant to transportation equity. Research that documents the extent of racial bias in traffic enforcement, including the use of cameras for automated enforcement, can be important to inform local and state policy makers about ways to ensure equitable transportation access and outcomes. Equity in Planning and Public Participation Processes Although it had been known for decades that transportation plans and policies had disparate effects on communities of color and low-income populations, the civil rights implications were largely neglected until the 1990s.43 More laws, policies, standard practices, and regulations are in place today to prevent and remedy such inequities. Examples range from commitments to appoint public transit boards that are more demographically representative to designing road pricing schemes that are not disproportionately burdensome to communities of color.44 Because long-range regional transportation and land use planning can be so critical to these efforts, it is

trb | transportation research board8 a potentially useful area for research on equity- relevant data, metrics, and analytic tools.45 During the 1990s, transportation planning processes became the subject of environmental justice interests. The federal government defines environmental justice as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.46 A long-standing concern to proponents of environmental justice is that such involvement and outreach often does not begin until after many key plans and decisions have already been made.47 Indeed, a body of research suggests that public involvement processes used to date for communities of color (especially those that are low-income) have not been especially effective for ensuring environmental justice.48,49 Additional research, therefore, can help in understanding both the causes of this cited problem and the means to ensure that environmental justice is a decision factor rather than simply a procedural requirement. That research, for instance, might examine procedures and methods that have been effective for engaging with affected communities early and equitably. A synthesis of proven examples of low- income residents and underrepresented people being able to have a positive effect on decisions that impacted them could be valuable. Research can shed light on real-world strategies for effective engagement with all affected communities, but particularly with communities consisting of people of color. One might want to examine, for example, the importance of racial diversity among transportation planners, designers, and decision makers and to ensure that the methods of engagement are culturally and linguistically appropriate.50 Land Use, Affordable Housing, and Displacement Transportation networks, especially links between employment centers and residential areas, are inextricably tied to land use. The built environment, whether in areas that are sparse and rural or dense and urban, is also an important factor in equity analyses. Low-income residents and communities of color face particular mobility constraints in outlying suburban and rural areas. Myriad transit and pilot projects are under way to improve accessibility for late-night activity and in areas where transit service is infrequent; programs to improve auto access also exist. The effectiveness, including cost-effectiveness, of these programs in filling mobility gaps remains an important area for further research. Housing Transportation plays an important role in the availability and affordability of housing, but often results in long commutes between low- and moderate-income residential areas and job locations. The spatial mismatch between jobs

racial equity addendum to critical issues in transportation 9 and housing in many regions is regularly most pronounced for people of color.51,52,53,54 Regions are challenged to find ways to address the jobs– housing balance across their geographic spans beyond trying to provide affordable housing in jobs-rich neighborhoods, which can be difficult to accomplish politically and economically.55 Research can play a role in identifying solutions. Public transit can be a solution, having demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic how it can be a lifeline to employment, especially for lower- income people and people of color. However, if transit services are reduced as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is conceivable that more individuals will become housing insecure or homeless.56,57 It is an empirical question whether accessibility to transit and other modes has an effect on the likelihood of people losing their homes, especially during times of hardship. As new public transportation options are added, many jurisdictions are trying to ensure that affordable housing is provided in areas around these new transit lines and stations by employing a range of strategies including inclusionary zoning, parking management, financial incentives, and housing subsidies. Successful implementation will require an understanding of the effectiveness of these strategies and the importance of complementary policies by states, cities, and transit agencies.58 It will also require knowledge of the short- and long-term effects of rail transit infrastructure and development around rail stations on gentrification and housing affordability.59 Research can inform these policy needs as well as examine other potential means to expand the supply of affordable housing near transit. Opportunities may exist to convert underused shopping malls or offices to residences; these sites often have transit access but may have been rendered less needed by e-commerce and increased teleworking. Displacement and Redlining Gentrification, resulting in part from transportation investments, can displace low-income residents to areas with poorer transportation infrastructure and service.60 Furthermore, decades of redlining and exclusionary zoning helped shape the spatial distribution of racial groups across regional landscapes, tending to concentrate people of color into areas of poor accessibility.61,62 While Black–white residential segregation has decreased in recent decades, it remains substantial.63 Ameliorating remaining disparities in accessibility will continue to require land use, zoning, and fair housing policies combined in a complementary fashion that research can help inform. Research can also help policy makers understand the effectiveness, including cost-effectiveness, of different strategies to reduce the division and social isolation of low-income neighborhoods and

trb | transportation research board10 communities of color caused by transportation infrastructure. While possible strategies include measures such as capping freeways or downgrading them to boulevards, the potential for community displacement from redevelopment and gentrification will need to be better understood for equity to be ensured.64,65 Native American Transportation Equity Issues Native American lands and communities often face restricted mobility, isolation, and underdeveloped infrastructure including roads, bridges, aviation, Internet connectivity, and electricity. These access and mobility shortcomings contribute to the health, education, social welfare, and economic development deficits of many tribal lands and communities. However, transportation issues, like many other issues, are different for Native Americans than other communities of color, in part because of the sovereign status of tribes and their lands.66 Native Americans living on tribal lands and reservations face structural and political impediments to the development, efficient operation, and governance of their transportation infrastructure. While the reasons for these impediments and the resultant lack of accessibility need to be better understood to develop effective remedies, they remain an understudied area of research, both within and outside the transportation domain. The distinct needs of Native American people and tribes need to better understood by transportation decision makers. Equitable provision of transportation is a vexing problem for Native Americans much as it is for other communities of color and underrepresented racial groups; however, differing circumstances present different policy and program delivery requirements and opportunities. A starting point for research to inform policy choices will be to identify the kinds of data that are uniquely needed to address equity issues related to tribal lands and communities to bring about and manage high- performing modern transportation systems. Leading The Way The transportation industry suffers from several of the same biases and discriminatory behaviors that have prompted demands for more equitable treatment across many facets of American society. The transportation industry is also continually changing, providing fresh opportunities to build more equity into the system as well as new challenges in ensuring that the equity chasm does not widen. For example, challenges exist in the equitable provision of shared transportation services and the use of innovative new (or “big”) data sources to inform planning and decision making with a focus on equitable outcomes. This addendum identifies a number of issues to be remedied, but there are undoubtedly many more. All will require a better understanding to develop and implement effective solutions supported by cross-disciplinary research and improvements to a wide array of data, metrics, and analytical methods.