Highway Robbery: Transportation, Racism & New Routes to Equity

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.