Affirmative Evidence Packet

Transportation inequity pervades society

1. Access to social institutions is not equal

2. Greater transportation mobility for society at large leads to greater transportation poverty for the socially excluded

Kenyon et al. (2003: 210) offered the following, widely-cited definition of transport-related social exclusion, highlighting its accessibility and mobility dimensions:

‘[It is] The process by which people are prevented from participating in the economic, political and social life of the community because of reduced accessibility to opportunities, services and social networks, due in whole or part to insufficient mobility in a society and environment built around the assumption of high mobility’

This definition is particularly cogent in the transport context because it identifies the relational nature of the problem, i.e. that it is the high and increasing levels of mobility within the population as a whole that is a key causal factor in the reduced, accessibility and, ultimately, exclusion of less mobile sectors of the population.
Transportation inequity pervades society

3. Favoring automobile increase social inequity and increases dependence on the automobile even further

• Non-drivers as a group receive less than their fair share of transport funding which is unfair (horizontally inequitable). For example, in a typical urban area, 10-20% of trips are made by non- motorized modes yet only 2-5% of total government transportation budgets are devoted to non- motorized facilities, and an even small portion including private expenditures on parking facilities mandated in local zoning laws.

• Wider roads and higher motor vehicle traffic volumes and speeds impose delay, risk, discomfort and pollution on other road users, particularly pedestrians and cyclists.

• Since physically, economically and socially disadvantaged people tend to rely heavily on walking, cycling and public transit (or described differently, people who drive less than average tend to be disadvantaged compared with high-annual-mileage motorists), these impacts tend to be regressive (vertically inequitable).

• These policies tend to cause automobile-dependency: transport systems and land use patterns which favor automobile access. This provides inferior access for non-drivers, and transport costs on lower-income households (Agrawal 2011).

Current environmental justice analysis often overlooks these impacts. These impacts may be considered if non-drivers are a geographically-concentrated, legally-recognized minority group, but not if the people who are harmed are geographically dispersed (such as people with disabilities) or not politically influential (such as teenagers).

4. The wealthy can opt out of public transportation creating a disincentive to generate socially just transportation policy

The particular insight time geography offers to the analysis of transport-related exclusion is that often it is people’s own preferences, needs and attitudes which determine the transport choices that are available to them. In this case, the transport disadvantages or time poverty that they experience may be the product of self-enforced, rather than externally imposed, physical isolation and exclusion (Currie and Delbosc, 2010). Barry (2002) refers to this form of self-imposed exclusion in his chapter entitled ‘Social Exclusion, Isolation and Income’, finding that:

Social Inequity reinforces Racism

1. Transportation racism is a social justice and civil rights issue

Bullard, 2004. (Robert D. Bullard—Ware Professor Sociology, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University). Highway Robbery, Transportation Racism, & New Routes to Equity (eds. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres), 2004.

The struggle against transportation racism has always been about civil rights, social justice, equity, and fair treatment. For more than a century, African Americans and other people of color have struggled to end transportation racism. Harbingers of the modern civil rights movement, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s challenged transportation racism. Later, the Freedom Riders of the 1960s defied “Jim Crow” on interstate transportation. Despite the heroic efforts of many and the monumental human rights gains over the past five decades, transportation remains a civil rights and quality of life issued. Unfortunately, it appears that transportation—civil rights issues have dropped off the radar screens of many mainstream civil rights and social justice organizations at a time when racist political forces disguised as “conservatives” attempt to roll back and dismantle many hard-won civil rights gains. It is time to refocus attention on the role transportation plays in shaping human interaction, economic mobility, and sustainability. From New York City to Los Angeles, and a host of cities in between, people of color are banding together to challenge unfair, unjust, and illegal transportation policies and practices that relegate them to the back of the bus. P. 1-2

2. Transportation is a human right

Bullard, 2004. (Robert D. Bullard—Ware Professor Sociology, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University). Highway Robbery, Transportation Racism, & New Routes to Equity (eds. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres), 2004.
From Rosa Parks and the brave souls who risked their lives in the Montgomery Bus Boycott to John Lewis and the Freedom Riders, individual and organizational frontal assaults on racist transportation policies and practices represent attempts to literally dismantle the infrastructure of oppression. Natural heirs of the civil rights legacy, the Los Angeles Bus Riders in the 1990s and hundreds of grassroots groups in the early years of the new millennium have taken to our nation’s buses, trains, streets, and highways and joined the battle against transportation racism. Transportation racism hurts people of color communities by depriving their residents of valuable resources, investments, and mobility. This book represents a small but significant part of the transportation equity movement—a movement that is redefining transportation as and environmental, economic, civil, and human right. P.2

Social Inequity reinforces Racism

3. Transportation racism determines access to social good

Bullard, 2004. (Robert D. Bullard—Ware Professor Sociology, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University). Highway Robbery, Transportation Racism, & New Routes to Equity (eds. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres), 2004.
Transportation policies did not emerge in a race- and class-neutral society. Transportation-planning outcomes often reflected the biases of their originators with the losers comprised largely of the poor, powerless, and people of color. Transportation is about more than just land use. Beyond mapping out the paths of freeways and highways, transportation policies determine the allocation of funds and benefits, the enforcement of environmental regulations, and the siting of facilities. Transportation planning affects residential and commercial patterns, and infrastructure development. White racism shapes transportation and transportation-related decisions, which have consequently created a national transportation infrastructure that denies many black Americans and other people of color the benefits, freedoms, opportunities, and rewards offered to white Americans. In the end, racist transportation policies can determine where people of color, live, work, and play. P. 19-20

4. Current transportation planning maintains white privilege and societal segregation

Bullard, 2004. (Robert D. Bullard—Ware Professor Sociology, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University). Highway Robbery, Transportation Racism, & New Routes to Equity (eds. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres), 2004.
Transportation planning has duplicated the discrimination used by other racist government institutions and private entities to maintain white privilege. The transportation options that are available to most Americans today were shaped largely by federal policies as well as individuals and institutional discrimination. Transportation options are further restricted by both the geographic changes that have taken place in the nation’s metropolitan regions and historical job discrimination dictating limited incomes. Transportation decision-making is political. Building roads in the job-rich suburbs while at the same time blocking transit from entering these same suburbs are political decisions buttressed by race and class dynamics. In cities and metropolitan regions all across the country, inadequate or nonexistent suburban transit serves as invisible “Keep Out” signs directed against people of color and the poor. P. 20

5. Hispanics suffer social inequity from highway expansion

Chi and Parisi, 2011. (Guanqging Chi and Domenico Parisi—Department of Sociology and Social Science Research Center, Mississippi State University). “Highway Expansion Effects on Urban Racial Redistribution in the Post-Civil Rights Period,” Public Works Management Policy, 2011. 16:40. http://pwm.sagepub.com/content/16/1/40
Hispanic population changes were also affected by other factors. For example, census tracts that experienced overall population growth tended to experience Hispanic growth. Tracts with higher percentages of Hispanics in 1970 experienced Hispanic growth, suggesting that Hispanic migrants considered the social network when choosing their residency location. Tracts with good public transportation facilities and more old housing units in 1970 attracted Hispanics. Tracts with more well-educated people and higher poverty rates experienced Hispanic decline. That the poverty rate had negative effects on Hispanic growth may simply be due to that Hispanic growth in the studied areas was largely attributed to Hispanic migrants who came for job opportunities and thus preferred neighborhoods with lower poverty rate.

In sum, highway expansion affected Black redistribution through its amenity role by providing convenient access to highways, and highway expansion affected Hispanic redistribution through its disamenity role by providing lower housing prices. It seems that low housing prices and the presence of Hispanics were the main driving factors of Hispanic growth.

Racism Impacts

State racism treats human beings as disposable and expendable causing genocide

Giroux 6 (Henry, the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3)
With the social state in retreat and the rapacious dynamics of neoliberalism, unchecked by government regulations, the public and private policies of investing in the public good are dismissed as bad business, just as the notion of protecting people from the dire misfortunes of poverty, sickness, or the random blows of fate is viewed as an act of bad faith. Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion. This is especially true for those racial groups and immigrant populations who have always been at risk economically and politically. Increasingly, such groups have become part of an evergrowing army of the impoverished and disenfranchised—removed from the prospect of a decent job, productive education, adequate health care, acceptable child care services, and satisfactory shelter. As the state is transformed into the primary agent of terror and corporate concerns displace democratic values, dominant “power is measured by the speed with which responsibilities can be escaped” (Qtd. in Fearn 2006, 30).With its pathological disdain for social values and public life and its celebration of an unbridled individualism and acquisitiveness, the Bush administration does more than undermine the nature of social obligation and civic responsibility; it also sends a message to those populations who are poor and black—society neither wants, cares about, or needs you (Bauman 1999, 68-69). Katrina revealed with startling and disturbing clarity who these individuals are: African- Americans who occupy the poorest sections of New Orleans, those ghettoized frontier-zones created by racism coupled with economic inequality. Cut out of any long term goals and a decent vision of the future, these are the populations, as Zygmunt Bauman points out, who have been rendered redundant and disposable in the age of neoliberal global capitalism. Katrina reveals that we are living in dark times.The shadow of authoritarianism remains after the storm clouds and hurricane winds have passed, offering a glimpse of its wreckage and terror. The politics of a disaster that affected Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi is about more than government incompetence, militarization, socio-economic polarization, environmental disaster, and political scandal. Hurricane Katrina broke through the visual blackout of poverty and the pernicious ideology of color-blindness to reveal the government’s role in fostering the dire conditions of largely poor African-Americans, who were bearing the hardships incurred by the full wrath of the indifference and violence at work in the racist, neoliberal state. Global neoliberalism and its victims now occupy a space shaped by authoritarian politics, the terrors inflicted by a police state, and a logic of disposability that removes them from government social provisions and the discourse and privileges of citizenship. One of the most obvious lessons of Katrina—that race and racism still matter in America—is fully operational through a biopolitics in which “sovereignty resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who may die” (Mbembe 11-12).Those poor minorities of color and class, unable to contribute to the prevailing consumerist ethic, are vanishing into the sinkhole of poverty in desolate and abandoned enclaves of decaying cities, neighborhoods, and rural spaces, or in America’s ever-expanding prison empire. Under the Bush regime, a biopolitics driven by the waste machine of what Zygmunt Bauman defines as “liquid modernity” registers a new and brutal racism as part of the emergence of a contemporary and savage authoritarianism.

Racism Impacts – War

1. Racism leads to ethnic cleansing.

Elden  2 (Stuart, PhD of poli sci, Boundary 2 “The War of Races and the Constitution of the State: Foucault’s «Il faut défendre la société» and the Politics of Calculation” pg.126)

Modern racism replaces the theme of the historical war with the biological theme, postevolutionist, of the struggle for life. “It is no longer a battle in the sense of a war, but a struggle in a biological sense: differentiation of species, selection of the strongest, survival of the best adapted races. Indeed, the theme of the binary society . . . becomes replaced by that of a society which is, on the contrary, biologically monist’’ (FDS, 70). Similarly, there is a transition in the role of the state. The state no longer serves the interests of one race against another, but as ‘‘the protector of integrity, of the superiority and purity of the race’’ (FDS, 70–71). The dominant race does not say ‘‘we must defend ourselves against society’’ but ‘‘we must defend society against all the biological perils of this other race, this sub-race, this contra-race which we are in the process of, in spite of ourselves, constituting’’ (FDS, 53). It is not therefore simply a struggle of one 17. Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertrani, “Situation du cours,” social group against another but of a state racism, a racism that society exercises throughout itself, an internal racism, a permanent purification, one of the fundamental dimensions of social normalization (FDS, 71).

2. The biopolitical racism of the status quo will not cease its authoritarian genocide until there is a complete elimination of the racial other 

Giroux 6 (Henry, the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3)

Within the last few decades, matters of state sovereignty in the new world order have been retheorized so as to provide a range of theoretical insights about the relationship between power and politics, the political nature of social and cultural life, and the merging of life and politics as a new form of biopolitics. While the notion of biopolitics differs significantly among its most prominent theorists, including Michel Foucault (1990, 1997), Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2002, 2003), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2004), what these theorists share is an attempt to think through the convergence of life and politics, locating matters of “life and death within our ways of thinking about and imagining politics” (Dean 2004, 17).Within this discourse, politics is no longer understood exclusively through a disciplinary technology centered on the individual body—a body to be measured, surveilled, managed, and included in forecasts, surveys, and statistical projections. Biopolitics points to new relations of power that are more capacious, concerned not only with the body as an object of disciplinary techniques that render it “both useful and docile” but also with a body that needs to be “regularized,” subject to those immaterial means of production that produce ways of life that enlarge the targets of control and regulation (Foucault 1997, 249). This shift in the workings of both sovereignty and power and the emergence of biopolitics are made clear by Foucault, for whom biopower replaces the power to dispense fear and death “with that of a power to foster life—or disallow it to the point of death. . . . [Biopower] is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism” (Ojakangas 2005, 6). As Foucault insists, the logic of biopower is dialectical, productive, and positive 178 College Literature 33.3 [Summer 2006] (1990, 136).Yet he also argues that biopolitics does not remove itself from “introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die” (1997, 255). Foucault believes that the death-function in the economy of biopolitics is justified primarily through a form of racism in which biopower “is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power” (258).  

Poverty Advantage

1. Transportation poverty leads to social exclusion and causes economic poverty

Karen Lucas, 2012, Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, ‘Transport and social exclusion: Where are we now?” Transport Policy 20 (2012) 105–113
However, it is important to establish, that transport disadvantage and transport-related social exclusion are not necessarily synonymous with each other, i.e. it is possible to be socially excluded but still have good access to transport or to be transport disadvantaged but highly socially included (Currie and Delbosc, 2010). Rather transport disadvantage and social disadvantage interact directly and indirectly to cause transport poverty. This in turn leads to inaccessibility to essential goods and services, as well as ‘lock-out’ from planning and decision-making processes, which can result in social exclusion outcomes and further social and transport inequalities will then ensue. Fig. 1 is an attempt to illustrate some of these key interactions.

Transport surveys demonstrate that it is most usually the poorest and most socially disadvantaged within society who also experience transport disadvantage. Almost every National Travel Survey (NTS) identifies significant inequalities in the travel patterns and access to transport of lower income populations in comparison to their higher income counterparts. For example, the 2006 UK NTS identifies that, whilst on average car ownership levels rest at around 85%, less than 50% of the lowest income quintile households own a car. Although 40% of individuals in the lowest income households report travelling by car at least once a week, they make only around one-tenth the car trips of members of one car households and they make far fewer trips in a week overall, using any mode of transport (Department for Transport, 2007). The annual journey distances of non-car owners is also roughly half that of car owners (ibid) with the consequence that many people on low incomes also experience social exclusion as a direct or partial result of these transport inequalities (Social Exclusion Unit, 2003).

2. Transportation Poverty limits employment opportunities

The Community Cycling Center, 2009. “Understanding Barriers to Bicycling Transportation Literature Review”

http://www.communitycyclingcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/understanding-barriers-transportation-review-101909.pdf
The information collected in this review did not reveal specific, proven strategies in marketing bicycle transportation to low-income, women and minority communities. However, several barriers stand out as relevant issues facing the ability of these communities to obtain affordable, convenient transportation. Low-income people make fewer trips per day compared to people with higher incomes, and don’t travel as far every day. This is likely due to a combination of factors. Higher unemployment means fewer work commutes. Trip distances in central cities are shorter, resulting in fewer miles traveled on comparable trips, though this factor may change as low-income communities are priced out of central city neighborhoods. Low-income people also travel at different times of day, and constitute a larger portion of trips taken during off-peak hours (a factor which frequently makes transit use challenging or unavailable). Low-income households that don’t own cars are still likely to make a large portion of their trips by automobile. This indicates that low-income people carpool often, or are reliant on the use of vehicles borrowed from friends. A lack of transportation options also restricts employment opportunities, as some jobs may be prohibitively far away or otherwise inconvenient to travel to on transit or on foot.

Environmental Justice Advantage

1. Transportation infrastructure causes disparate impacts on minorities and vulnerable populations

Jacobs, et al, 2010. David E. Jacobs, National Center for Housing, Washington, DC; Rajiv Bhatia, San Francisco Department of Public Health, San Francisco, CA; and James VanDerslice, University of Utah, “The contributions of physical infrastructure to environmental health disparities: housing, transportation, and water,” Strengthening Environmental Justice Research and Decision Making: A Symposium on the Science of Disproportionate Environmental Health Impacts http://epa.gov/compliance/ej/multimedia/albums/epa/ej-symposium/infrastructure.pdf
For transportation infrastructure, this paper presents available evidence for five pathways through which transportation system infrastructure may cause disproportionate environmental or health impacts on vulnerable populations. Most directly, infrastructure can displace residents and permanently damage community structure and integrity. Second, both the construction and operation of infrastructure can impair (or benefit) walkability and livability. Third, use of motor vehicles on roadways and rail facilities generates air pollution, noise, and pedestrian hazards, disproportionately affecting residents living adjacent to these facilities. Fourth, preferential investments in auto-centered transport have generated a transit-dependent subclass that has substantial barriers to access. Finally, transportation systems facilitate ethnic- and class-based segregation, contributing to the reproduction of environmental injustice.

Inactive Transportation is a Public Health Problem

1. Transportation policies favor unhealthy forms of travel

Hutch, et al., 2011 (Daniel J. Hutch is with the Office of Policy, Economics and Innovation, US Environmental Protection Agency, Karen E. Bouye is with the Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA. Elizabeth Skillen is with the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, National Center for Preparedness, Detection and Control of Infectious Diseases,Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Charles Lee is with the Office of Environmental Justice, US Environmental Protection

Agency. LaToria Whitehead is with the Lead Poisoning Prevention Branch, National Center for Environmental Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Jamila R. Rashid is with the Office of the Secretary, Office of Minority Health, US Department of Health) “Collaborative Strategies to Improve Public Health Potential Strategies to Eliminate Built Environment Disparities for Disadvantaged and Vulnerable Communities,” American Journal of Public Health, April 2011, 101:4
Transportation and business investments. During the past several years, much research has related transportation and the built environment to public health outcomes. The main feature of these findings is the association between current transportation networks, their surrounding built environment, and the increasing incidence of obesity.9 Previous land use and transportation literature suggests that smart growth—characterized by higher-density, mixed commercial and residential land uses— can reduce dependency on automobiles and resulting pollution by decreasing travel time to common destinations.

Pedestrian safety and access to transportation are important to disadvantaged and disabled populations. As the Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities observes,

‘‘Transportation systems designed for cars instead of pedestrians are unfriendly to pedestrians and doubly unfriendly to those with special transportation needs.’’10

Environmental conditions that stem from automobile-oriented development can increase the incidence of respiratory impairment, amputations, and disabilities related to diabetes. Smart growth approaches—including increased transportation choices and a mix of residential and commercial land uses—and reinvestment in older communities can reduce disadvantaged and disabled people’s social isolation and lack of access to commerce.

2. Inactive transit systems increases obesity, early mortality, and costs hundreds of billions to the economy

American Public Health Association, 2009 AT THE INTERSECTION OF PUBLIC HEALTH AND TRANSPORTATION: Promoting Healthy Transportation Policy, p3
Obesity in the United States is climbing at alarming rates. In fact, obesity is the nation’s fastest rising public health problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16% of children are obese (12 million are overweight) and the majority of adults (66%) are overweight or obese.12 Overweight children are more likely to become obese adults. Obesity rates are highest among blacks, Hispanics, and low-income households.12 Obesity and inactivity lead to many other chronic diseases as well as high blood pressure, heart disease, osteoarthritis, cancer, stroke, and diabetes.12

Unfortunately, the opportunity to be physically active is being essentially engineered out of daily life. Communities are spread out with limited connectivity to other communities or services; there is often no walking/biking or public transit that allows people to get to home, school, work, or play safely.1 Auto-oriented communities are directly linked to low rates of physical activity.7

The cost of obesity and inactivity to society is enormous and growing. In 2004, the total cost (including health care and loss of wages) of being obese or overweight was estimated at $117 billion,14 and physical inactivity’s health care tab runs up to $76 billion per year.15

Obesity Leads to Mortality

1. Obesity about to overtake smoking as leading cause of death in US

New York Times, 3-10-04, “Death Rate from Obesity Gains Fast on Smoking,” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/us/death-rate-from-obesity-gains-fast-on-smoking.html
Obesity is near to overtaking smoking as the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, government researchers said on Tuesday, and other research shows that its adverse health effects could soon wipe out many recent improvements in health.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that tobacco use was still the leading cause of death in 2000, killing 435,000 people, or 18.1 percent of everyone who died.

But poor diet and physical inactivity caused 400,000 deaths, or 16.6 percent of the total, the report said.

An estimated 129.6 million Americans, or 64 percent of the population, are overweight or obese. Obesity is defined as having a body mass index -- a ratio of weight to height -- of more than 30. That usually means being 30 pounds overweight for a woman and 35 to 40 pounds overweight for a man of average height. More than 30 percent of adults in the United States -- or 59 million people -- are obese, according to the disease control centers. Serious health implications, like heart disease and diabetes risk, are associated with a body mass index of 30 and above.

If Americans continue to get fatter at current rates, by 2020 about one in five health care dollars spent on people ages 50 to 69 could be a result of obesity, 50 percent more than is spent now, another study, by the RAND Corporation, found.

2. Childhood obesity leads to extremely lower quality of life in adulthood

Lindholm, 2011, (Raymond Lindholm, Georgia State University College of Law, Center for Health, Law, & Society) “Combating childhood obesity: A survey of laws affecting the built environments of low-income and minority children”, Review of Environment and Health 2011
These health challenges translate into an extremely low quality of life for overweight and obese children. One study found that “health related quality of life for obese children and adolescents was comparable to that of children diagnosed with cancer.” (11) And for obese children also suffering from obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), the quality of life was found to be comparable to that of “children undergoing chemotherapy.” Obesity for these children often results in its own self-perpetuating cycle.

For example, children suffering from OSA do not get the rest they need. Therefore, they have lower levels of energy, trouble concentrating, and perform poorly in school. This may in turn lead to depression and other emotional disorders, which in turn may contribute to more sedentary behaviors.

Moreover, studies have shown that overweight and obese individuals are highly stigmatized in society. They are often viewed as being lazy, ugly, sloppy, or stupid. These stereotypes tend to affect girls more than boys. Obese adolescent females who become obese adults are more likely to have less education, lower earning power, higher likelihood of poverty, and a lower likelihood of marriage (11).

Obese individuals are less likely to be admitted to college and may also experience discrimination in acquiring housing (11). Similarly, obese adults may experience discrimination in obtaining employment or promotions (12).
Obesity Leads to Mortality

3. Poor children and children of color suffer from limited access to good transportation infrastructure substantially increasing health risks

Lindholm, 2011, (Raymond Lindholm, Georgia State University College of Law, Center for Health, Law, & Society) “Combating childhood obesity: A survey of laws affecting the built environments of low-income and minority children”, Review of Environment and Health 2011
According to Singh et al., “Children living in neighborhoods with no access to sidewalks or walking paths, parks or playgrounds, and recreation or community centers had 32%, 26%, and 20% higher adjusted odds of obesity than children in neighborhoods with access to such amenities, respectively.” The group of children apparently most affected by these built-environment factors is girls aged 10-11. For these girls, living in neighborhoods with the fewest health-promoting amenities (sidewalks, parks, trails, recreation centers, etc.) presents a 276% greater likelihood of obesity and 121% greater likelihood of overweight than girls of the same age living in neighborhoods with the most amenities. To put these numbers in context, girls age 10-11 are more than twice as likely to be overweight and obese when compared to any other childhood age group living in similarly deficient neighborhoods (19). For children in general, the neighborhoods they live in have the following built-environment factors :

• 
  • 26.7 % of children have no access to sidewalks or walking paths;
  
• 
  • 19.2 % have no access to parks or playgrounds;
  
• 
  • 35.0 % have no access to recreation or community centers;
  
• 
  • 14.0 % have no access to libraries or bookmobiles;
  
• 
  • 14.0 % were reported to live in unsafe neighborhoods;
  
• 
  • 17.0 % lived in neighborhoods with litter or garbage on the streets and sidewalks;
  
• 
  • 14.6 % lived in neighborhoods with poor or dilapidated housing; and
  
• 
  • 11.6 % lived in neighborhoods characterized by vandalism, such as broken windows or graffiti (19)
  

Studies have also found that minorities are more likely to live in neighborhoods with the greatest number of negative built-environment factors and safety issues. For instance, the Singh study also found that 26% of black and 23% of Hispanic children were reported to live in unsafe neighborhoods, compared with 8% of white children (19). As a result of these detrimental built-environment factors, poor and minority children are at greater risk of overweight and obesity. Specifically, according to the 2007 NSCS report, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic children have 72%, 74%, and 66% higher odds of obesity and 56%, 51%, and 61% higher odds of overweight respectively than their non-Hispanic white counterparts when analyzed solely according to their built environments. Analysis of these same factors from an economic standpoint shows that children below the poverty line had 134 % higher odds of being obese and 120% higher odds of being overweight when compared with children with family incomes greater than 400% above the poverty line (19). Taken together, these statistics show that minority and/or low-income children have a dramatically higher potential of being overweight and obese. Due to the new and emerging evidence that the built environment plays a major role in this likelihood, an effective approach to breaking this cycle will be to modify the laws and public policies creating the detrimental built environment factors in the first place.
Obesity Leads to Mortality

4. Expensive and limited transportation access increases death rates for the transportation poor

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