Everybody in America knows what transportation inequity is, even if they've never heard the words.
In Detroit, Michigan, a grandmother named Cindy Reese is struggling with transportation inequity now that her grandson has graduated high school and can't go to community college because he has no way to travel there. "I've told my grandson his entire life that as an American citizen, he has all the rights and privileges of any other American," Cindy said. "He told me the other day that that's not true, because his city, his state, his government have failed him, because he can't get around to do what he needs to do to improve his life."
In St. Louis, Missouri, a student named Michael Wilson deals with transportation equity when he walks six miles home from his restaurant job on school nights, getting home at 2 a.m., because the city bus he needs stops running at 10:30pm.
Near Washington, DC, transportation inequity forces Raimon Jackson to spend two hours before and after events at the Gethsemane United Methodist Church rounding up young people by car in what the group calls an "underground railroad"--a result of the lack of adequate public transportation in the county.
Transportation inequity leads to the government spending 80 percent of our national transportation budget on highways and only 20 percent on transit. That means massive subsidies for sprawl that is destroying our health, devastating our environment, and robbing us of countless hours of our life when we're trapped behind the wheel. It's also robbing us of a powerful engine of job growth when we need it most, since transit spending creates twice as many jobs as highway spending.
And when you look at exactly where those federal highway dollars are going, less than 6 percent of them are allocated directly to metropolitan regions, even though our 100 largest metro areas house 2/3 of the U.S. population and generate ¾ of the gross national product.
The problems are huge, but we're building a movement to match them. The Transportation Equity Network (TEN) is a grassroots network of more than 350 member organizations in 41 states. We know that transportation issues shape the most important parts of our lives: where we and those we love are able to live, where we work, where we study, how we access opportunity--or whether we can--and how we build communities. We're working to build a more just, prosperous, and connected America by transforming transportation policy and funding to reflect our values--and end the decades of wasteful, destructive, sprawl-centric practices we all suffer from.
In the coming weeks, I want to have a conversation in this space about how we can turn this thing around. I want you to join the conversation and share your ideas. More than that, I want you to join the movement and take action with us.
There's one crisis that we all need to take action on now: saving public transportation. Last year, Americans took more than 10.7 billion trips on public transportation--the most in half a century. At the same time, the economic crisis is devastating transit systems: over 84% of U.S. transit agencies are cutting service, raising fares, or both.
Current law prevents those transit agencies from using federal dollars to avoid service cuts and fare hikes--they're restricted to using it for maintenance and expansion only. But there's a bill in the Senate that would change that. TEN is pushing hard for it, and we need your help. The Resurrect Mass Transit page on TEN's site has resources that make it easy to take action.
Let's keep America moving!
http://www.geographyjobs.com/article_view.php?article_id=207&PHPSESSID=7e90a1f2fc8a1857fabb3efd51e13897
Like transit, car sharing allows those who cannot afford a vehicle access to the things they need. As car sharing becomes more prevalent in U.S. cities, this article serves as an important reminder to those who are choosing where these car sharing cars are located.
Thank you, Ms. Barrett, for letting us know of your transportation initiative. It is LONG overdue. We are so far behind the rest of the world in this domain.
In the U.S. talk, more talk, and little else. In Denmark, action, a country with almost no domestic oil production capacity now exports energy to it's neighbors.
I keep reading that we're the "greatest country in the world". I'm not sure if that is true or not, but I can say that we are, as a nation extremely slow learners. Maybe our learning curve is skewed by profits?
There is no such thing. It is impossible for the government to step in fill every perceived need or "inequity".
Besides, if you are looking at funding the person in a car uses less govt funding than the person riding public transit. With 47% of transit agencies reporting a decline in ridership the subsidy amount per rider is even bigger.
The government can't provide every need... sometimes we actually have to do things for ourselves
I do complain, however, when it takes 2 walks, 1 bus, and 4 trains over 2 hours to get me to a medical location to which I can drive in 20-40 minutes.
In my state (Wisconsin) there's hardly any public transportation anymore linking the smaller and midsize communities. Greyhound? Nope. Amtrak runs across the state at a diagonal, but forget it if you're anywhere else. And if you're in the north, the only public transport is plane from a few communities . . . and the cost of that is prohibitive for many.
A move to a rational (I'm not going to say "more rational" because that implies rationality for the status quo) transportation policy is imperative.
Well they spend a few billion on the airports around here with upgrades and grants for lenghtening the run ways.
Heck our airport even got a grant to make the run way shorter after a grant that allowed them to buy land to make it longers.
They still own the land .
You bemoan "robbing us of countless hours of our life when we're trapped behind the wheel". I certainly don't feel trapped behind the wheel, but I do bemoan the 10% ethanol in the gas that dropped my mileage by 15%.
There is no light rail, fast rail or other government sponsored mass transit that isn't subsidized by tax dollars because of extremely low ridership. They just built a new one in Seattle last year that has nearly empty trains running in and out of the city that cost $179,000,000 per mile to build. And the taxpayers are required to subsidize the cost to operate it. Most of it's passengers came from the already in-place and much much less expensive bus system.
The figure of "10.7 billion trips" is misleading. It is more like 10.7 billion trips for the mass transit vehicles and no matter how many passengers ride them.
The complaint is that 80% of tax dollars go to fixing the highways. But that tax is the excise tax motorists and truck drivers pay to get back and forth to work. When the government forces everyone to be herded into the rapid transit, who will be paying those taxes?
Mass transit does not work very well anywhere in this country. The vast majority of Americans are still independent minded and will not use mass transit except as a last resort.
Don't be too smug. The highways are subsidized too. There is NO transportation system that is not subsidized.
Maybe highways would not need to be subsidized with more than the excise tax brings in if they weren't wasting 20% of it a mass transit that is only used by a very very few, who pay no excise taxes for their ride.
Besides, like Social security and Medicare payments (payroll taxes), it is all lumped into the general fund and our representaives in Washington DC dole it out to their wealthy friends and supporters. Can you say 6000 earmarks? (Stimulus 2009)
But I can see the dollars spent on more highways while bus routs are cut. This is a good idea and I would love to see it coupled with a push to send more long distance shipping via train. But I understand our train network is just as antiquated as our highway system.