Utnif 2012 The Only K
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- The highway system is historically bound up with racialized suburbanization that creates de facto segregation
LinksLink – HighwaysInvestment in Highways widens the socioeconomic gap between majority and minorities – benefits only accrue to the privilegedBullard ‘3[Robert, Ware Professor of Sociology and Director, Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University, Fall/Winter 2003] Transportation spending programs do not benefit all populations equally.27 Follow the transportation dollars and one can tell who is important and who is not. The lion's share of transportation dollars is spent on roads, while urban transit systems are often left in disrepair.28 Nationally, 80% of all surface transportation funds is earmarked for highways and 20% is earmarked for public transportation. 9 Public transit has received roughly $50 billion since the creation of the Urban Mass Transit Administration over thirty years ago,30 while roadway projects have received over $205 billion since 1956.31 On average, states spend just $0.55 per person of their federal transportation funds on pedestrian projects, less than 1% of their total federal transportation dollars.32 Average spending on highways came to $72 per person.33 Generally, states spend less than 20% of federal transportation funding on transit.34 The current federal funding scheme is bias against metropolitan areas. The federal government allocated the bulk of transportation dollars directly to state departments of transportation. 36 Many of the road-building fiefdoms are no friend to urban transit. Just under 6% of all federal highway dollars are sub-allocated directly to the metropolitan regions.37 Moreover, thirty states restrict use of the gasoline tax revenue to fund highway programs only.38 Although local governments within metropolitan areas own and maintain the vast majority of the transportation infrastructure, they receive only about 10% of every dollar they generate.39 From 1998-2003, TEA-2141 transportation spending amounted to $217 billion.41 This was the "largest public works bill enacted in the nation's history. '42 Transportation spending has always been about opportunity and equity. In the real world, costs and benefits associated with transportation developments are not randomly distributed. 43 Transportation justice is concerned with factors that may create and/or exacerbate inequities and measures to prevent or correct disparities in benefits and costs."a Disparate transportation outcomes can be subsumed under three broad categories of inequity: procedural, geographic, and social.45 Procedural Inequity: Attention is directed to the process by which transportation decisions may or may not be carried out in a uniform, fair, and consistent manner with involvement of diverse public stakeholders.46 Do the rules apply equally to everyone? Geographic Inequity: Transportation decisions may have distributive impacts (positive and negative) that are geographic and spatial, such as rural versus urban versus central city.47 Some communities are physically located on the "wrong side of the tracks" and often receive substandard transportation services. 48 Social Inequity: Transportation benefits and burdens are not randomly distributed across population groups.49 Generally, transportation amenities (benefits) accrue to the wealthier and more educated segment of society, while transportation disamenities (burdens) fall disproportionately on people of color and individuals at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.50 Intergenerational equity issues are also subsumed under this category. 51 The impacts and consequences of some transportation decisions may reach into several generations. 2 Heavy government investment in road infrastructure may be contributing to an increase in household transportation costs. 53 Lest anyone dismiss transportation as a tangential issue, consider that Americans spend more on transportation than any other household expense except housing.54 On average, Americans spend $0.19 out of every dollar earned on transportation expenses. 55 Transportation costs ranged from 17.1% in the Northeast to 20.8% in the South 6 -where some 54% of African Americans reside. Americans spend more on transportation than they do on food, education, and health care. 58 The nation's poorest families spend more than 40% of their take home pay on transportation. 9 This is not a small point since African American households tend to earn less money than white households.60 Nationally, African Americans earn only $649 per $1000 earned by whites. 61 This means that the typical black household in the United States earned 35% less than the typical white household. The highway system is historically bound up with racialized suburbanization that creates de facto segregationKuswa ‘2 [ Kevin, PhD in communication studies, Suburbification, Segregation, and the Consolidation of the Highway Machine, J.L. Soc’y] The rhetoric of blame--creating a status of victim by arguing that certain people deserve their immobility-is complemented by a highway machine that allows an extreme differentiation between living conditions within a limited region. It becomes natural to blame people for inadequate living conditions in order to justify inaction. Fotsch concentrates on Los Angeles and urban California, but the same process marks the history of Houston, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit and many other east coast cities. Charting the way interstate throughways divided Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, and Atlanta is but one string of examples. During the 1950s the "auto freeway transportation system.. .helped to create the ghettos, and now those same highways have joined a technological narrative that helps to legitimate the ghettos. The state continues to invade the formation of the suburb and the urban fringe by allocating resources in selective ways. State policies attempt to capture transportation and residential planning, simultaneously entrenching certain racist practices. Urban highways after 1956, in particular, were constructed according to fairly uniform standards -set up by the Bureau of Public Roads in the Yellow Book. The urban highway is, simply, a wide path of limited access roadway, usually raised with at least two lanes available in each direction. The effects of these highways are severe and physical, especially their "connection to the suburban goal of escaping urban populations."49 More pernicious than the urge to escape, the connection to suburbia made it easy to label urban populations as "poor" and "radical" and constitutive of a culture of new immigrants.5" The logic of the suburbs implied that the run-down areas of a city were regions occupied by minorities. In instances where the actual suburb was not predominantly inhabited by whites, those places still tended to be racially homogenous and the suburb was always a means of separating economic classes. The city polarized into a few high rent districts and a number of highly populated low rent districts. The highway generated an explicitly racist boundary ,by isolating large numbers of people from one another. Certainly buses and consumer spots at highway exits -offered locations for human contact, but not the same type of human interchange that previously occurred on trains. Despite the rhetoric of freedom and mobility, the flipside of highway expansion is the destruction and segregation of marginalized communitiesKuswa ‘2 [ Kevin, PhD in communication studies, Suburbification, Segregation, and the Consolidation of the Highway Machine, J.L. Soc’y] Detailing the suburb as a primary mechanism for the segregation of people, Lewis Mumford targets the metropolis and its co-option by the military and the state. Citing overvalued land, increasing congestion, a lack of space for recreation, a perpetual cycle of growth and decay, and an elitist distribution of social services, Mumford contends: "The metropolitan regime opposes these domestic and civic functions: it subordinates life to organized destruction, and it must therefore regiment, limit, and constrict every exhibition of real life and culture. 37 Mumford's articulation of a regimented urban reality was compounded by the massive expansion of road building following World War II and the 1956 solidification of the highway machine. The rise of the suburb-a place partially produced by (and fueling) the highway's ability to connect the pristine periphery to the central business district-temporarily resolved Mumford's concerns of density and congestion, only to displace those problems with more severe environmental and human costs. Regardless of the organization of the suburb, the construction of highways in urban areas was a traumatic and oppressive event for the people uprooted by the highway's swath. The suburb also exacerbated the human displacement wrought by the highway because the resources necessary to soften the blow of urban construction were being consumed by suburban areas. The suburbs were typically beyond the reach of the poorest residents of the city, a barrier to entry that widened the gap between the rich and the poor, particularly when the poor neighborhoods were often the same neighborhoods torn up by the highway. The paradox was that the highways and the vehicles that traversed them were being promoted under the banners of maximum choice, individual access, and personal mobility. 38 These ideals were used to build more highways, increasing the demand for automobiles, and removing choice from the inhabitants of the city. Personal and individual choice could not exist on a large scale when part of the process necessitated a destructive dissection of urban areas. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.63 Mb. Share with your friends:
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