February 4, 2019; WKRN (Nashville, TN)
On February 4th, the nation celebrated Transit Equity Day, in honor of the late Rosa Parks, who would’ve turned 106 years old. The holiday is intended to draw attention to transit as a civil rights issue and an important element of a climate-safe future.
Across the nation, community groups and nonprofit organizations marked the holiday through a wide array of awareness-building activities, ranging from events by the Bus Riders Unite program in Portland, Oregon, which seeks the reinstatement of the Rider Advocate program to make the system safer for people of color who depend on it, to advocates in New Jersey pushing for the electrification of New Jersey’s transportation system. In Nashville, a group called Music City Riders United (MCRU) participated in public actions to demand transportation equity throughout the city, focusing on the discrepancy and placement of bus shelters throughout the city. MCRU is a campaign of Workers’ Dignity, a nonprofit dedicated to economic justice through organizing and developing solutions to wage theft and systemic abuse of workers throughout the greater Nashville area. For nonprofits addressing equity, the MCRU campaign shows how concerted public engagement and awareness can lead to transit equity progress.
“Transit equity” is an issue and term that may be new to some. The Center for Social Inclusion explains the importance of transit equity:
Accessible, affordable transportation is critical to the lives we live. Residents of communities of color and poor white communities, whether rural or urban, must travel to obtain better jobs, secure educational opportunities and get quality health care. Too often competing interests result in transportation policies that unintentionally leave low-income Americans stranded. To achieve equity in transportation policy, we need to craft and catalyze strategies that help rural and urban communities of color get the investments needed to spur mobility in every sense of the word.
As an issue, transit equity is rooted deep in American history, with racism playing a major role in several chapters of the development of our country—from the construction of the transcontinental railroad, to the development of suburban neighborhoods across racial divides, to transportation serving as a galvanizing issue during the civil rights movement. In fact, in his book A Testament of Hope, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. connected accessible public transportation and employment opportunities, calling urban transit systems “a genuine civil rights issue.”
Today, transit equity is a central issue for many marginalized communities. As NPQ has written about before, effective public transit planning is important for ensuring affordable, accessible, and convenient transportation options that contribute to the well-being of many disenfranchised communities. Yet, there is a growing schism between communities with access to transportation and those without, which is reflected in accessibility and job proximity. While there are multiple reports that illustrate this growing gap, a 2015 report from Brookings entitled “The growing distance between people and jobs in metropolitan America” shows how this impacts low-income communities and neighborhoods of color. Sixty-one percent of high-poverty census tracts and 55 percent of neighborhoods with a majority of people of color experienced declines in job proximity between 2000 and 2012, meaning that these areas consequently had higher travel times to jobs. When combined with the realities of public transportation, which many low-income communities depend on, the picture illustrates why transit equity is so important: Urban areas offer higher-paying jobs but are inaccessible to many communities, with only 30 percent of urban jobs nationally being accessible via a 90-minute ride on public transportation, leaving many low-income communities without access to higher paying jobs because of limited transportation options.
With this background, transit equity is a central issue for many economic justice organ