Affirmative Evidence Packet

Contents

1AC

The 1AC can claim help to solve one or two harms by spending on public and active transit systems. The first of these is social equity. Currently, low-income communities and communities of color do not receive their fair share of transportation support. Since transportation is the key way that we access most of the important things in life, health care, education, shopping, those who suffer from transportation inequity suffer from a form of social exclusion—that is being excluded from the rest of society. This frequently occurs to identifiable groups and there for disproportionately affects different races, elderly, and disabled persons more negatively than society at-large.

The second harm is public health. This line of argument is accessed two ways. On the one hand, a lack of access to active transit infrastructure discourages healthy transportation via walking and biking. As a result obesity, cardiovascular, diseases and stress-related diseases are higher in communities without safe active transit infrastructure. On the other hand, lack of access to public transit decreases access to such social facilities as health care and food stores that support healthy diets. Again, this tends to impact poorer communities and communities of color more frequently than mainstream communities.

The plan increases spending on public transit and active transit to restore social equity to transportation. Public transit could include a number of mass transit systems including: trains and subways, light-rail and trolleys, or buses. Active transit is non-motorized transportation. It includes safe walking and biking routes, though arguably scooters and skateboards are another form of active transit. Cities across the country are involved in various components of these initiatives. Portland, OR is a model city for a combination of light rail/trolleys/buses and active transit. Other cities have developed similar programs including Dallas, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Baltimore, MD. Cities with strong public transit include Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Francisco. Much of the solvency evidence references these examples and there is a solid debate to be had over whether or not successful programs such as Portland can be replicated in other cities.

The solvency arguments demonstrate the importance of restoring social equity to transportation, funding active transit systems, and public transit in order to remedy the problem.

The Plan

Greetings, my partner and I feel it is time to address some our local and national transportation problems. We offer for your consideration, the following plan:

OBSERVATION ONE—Inherency: the barrier to change

Current transportation funds are directed away from areas of greatest need.

1. 
   Low-income and communities of color lack access to centers of power excluding them from necessary transportation funding and negatively impacting public health.
   

For several decades, we have invested the overwhelming majority of federal transportation funds in new highway construction. People from urban areas and people of color are significantly underrepresented in the institutions that decide how to invest transportation funds for metropolitan areas, which results in a strong preference for transportation benefiting suburbs and outlying areas. As a result, we now have a landscape of metropolitan sprawl and a predominately car-based transportation system across the country.

Congress seeks to eliminate funding for non-motor transportation and public transportation.

McMahon, February 22, 2012, (Edward T. McMahon—Urban Land Institute), “Bicycles Belong” Urban Land
This question is at the heart of the current debate over how transportation funds will be spent over the next few years. The U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted on February 2 to eliminate funding for nonmotorized transportation (e.g., bike paths and sidewalks) from the federal transportation bill working its way through Congress. The "wildly imbalanced transportation bill" also imperils federal support for public transportation systems.

In taking this approach, Congress took a giant step back-to the 1970s and 1980s, when federal transportation legislation strongly favored investment in highway infrastructure. Not until 1991 was the funding legislation expanded to other options, with passage of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA). ISTEA broke from the past by including funding for mass transit and bicycle and pedestrian facilities. Since that time, about 20 percent of the highway trust has gone to support public transportation and about 2 percent of federal transportation funding has gone to various "transportation enhancement" projects-primarily bike trails, sidewalks, and related facilities. However, the new House bill severs support for such projects, with its supporters contending that these are frills and amenities with little impact on transportation.

However, transportation is about more than just roads. For example, in large European cities such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Stuttgart, up to 30 percent of all commuters reach their jobs by bicycle. Does this mean that Germans, Danes, and the Dutch don't like cars? Of course not; they love them, just like we do. The difference is, they simply don't have to use them all the time, because they have more transportation choices than we do. In addition to excellent public transportation systems, most European countries have extensive networks of bikeways, bike lanes, and other nonmotorized facilities.
1AC

TWO—HARM: SOCIAL INJUSTICE.

1. Transportation is fundamental.

Transportation access is the key to full participation in all elements of society including education, health services, job markets, family, recreation, etc. Our focus on the car excludes some groups from full participation in society.

Martens et al, 2012, [Karel Martens, Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlans; Aaron Golub, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and School of Sustainability, Arizona State U; Glenn Robinson, School of Engineering and Institute for Urban Research, Morgan State University, “A justice-theoretic approach to the distribution of transportation benefits: Implications for transportation planning practice in the United States,” Transportation Research A 46 (2012), 684-695
While we feel that potential mobility can be seen as the dominant proxy of the social meaning of the transport good, we argue that this social meaning is increasingly contested in current society, at least within academia (e.g., Vigar, 2002) and increasingly among government officials (Preston and Rajé, 2007). Moreover, the conceptualization of the transport good as potential mobility is at odds with the functional dimension of transport, which is of key importance for people to fulfill one’s needs and desires. The availability or un-availability of transport shapes people’s life opportunities (Lucas, 2006) – it determines whether a person can take advantage of education and health services, can access job markets (Ihlanfeldt and Sjoquist, 1998; Ong and Blumenberg, 1998) and thus advance economically, can keep in contact with friends or family, or whether she/he can enjoy leisure and recreational facilities (Frank et al., 2006). This functional dimension of transport should be more important in guiding transportation planning practices than the mere notions of freedom and independence. Even more, we agree with Sheller and Urry (2000)) that the focus on potential mobility has brought freedom and independence for a large part of the population, but at the expense of the freedom of a car-less minority. Hence, in what follows, we will focus on access as the appropriate social meaning of the transport good.

2. Transportation poverty is worse for low income areas and communities of color.

Those without cars are also less likely to have access to public transit.

Karen Lucas, 2012, Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, ‘Transport and social exclusion: Where are we now?” Transport Policy 20 (2012) 105–113
Surprisingly, given the levels of car penetration in the US (approximately 92% of all households have access to a private vehicle), car ownership amongst the lowest income quintile is only slightly higher than it is in the UK (around 60%). Women are more likely to drive across all age categories in the USA than in the UK and there is less of a gender difference between licence holders and non-licence holders than in the UK. Black Americans are far less likely to own and drive a car than their white counterparts, with 20% of all Black households not having access to a car. American Indians, Hispanics, Pacific Islander, Asian and people of mixed race are also less likely to own cars than white Americans (Clifton and Lucas, 2004). There is considerable evidence to suggest that low income non-car owning households in the US also have less access to public transit (Garcia and Rubin, 2004) and, hence, experience considerable difficulties in accessing jobs (Cervero, 2004) and other key facilities (Morris, 2004).
1AC

3. This results in transportation Apartheid.

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. P. 3.
Transportation systems do not spring up out of thin air. They are planned—and, in many cases, planned poorly when it comes to people of color. Conscious decisions determine the location of freeways, bus stops, fueling stations, and train stations. Decisions to build highways, expressways, and beltways have far-reaching effects on land use, energy policies, and the environment. Decisions by county commissioners to bar the extension of public transit to job-rich economic activity centers in suburban counties and instead spend their transportation dollars on repairing and expanding the nation’s roads have serious mobility restrictions for central city residents. Together, all these transportation decisions shape United States metropolitan areas, growth patterns, physical mobility, and economic opportunities. These same transportation policies have also aided, and in some cases subsidized, racial, economic, and environmental inequities as evidenced by the segregated housing and spatial layout of our central cities and suburbs. It is not by chance that millions of Americans have been socially isolated and relegated to economically depressed and deteriorating cities and that transportation apartheid has been created.

1AC
Structural racism guarantees that the negative impacts are inevitable. Only dismantling the walls of racism allows us to overcome them. You most vote affirmative to solve the case and avoid the impact of the negative’s disadvantages.
Barndt, educator, trainer and organizer in the field of racial justice, 2007 (Joseph,

Understanding & Dismantling Racism: the twenty-first century challenge to white America,

p.219-220)
To study racism is to study walls. In every chapter of this book, we have looked at barriers and

fences, restraints and limitations, ghettos and prisons, bars and curtains. We have examined a

prison of racism that confines us all_people of color and white people alike. Victimizers as well

as victims are in shackles. The walls of the prison forcibly separate communities of color and

white communities from each other, as well as divide communities of color from each other. In

our separate prisons we are all shut off from each other. The constraints imposed on people of

color by subservience, powerlessness, and poverty are inhuman and unjust; but the effects of

uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed that are the marks of our white prison inevitably destroy

white people as well. To dismantle racism is to tear down walls. The walls of racism can be

dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the

possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual, institutional, and

cultural racism can be destroyed. It is an organizing task that can be accomplished. You and I are

urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down, once and for all the

walls of racism. The walls of racism must be dismantled. Facing up to these realities offers new

possibilities, but refusing to face them threatens yet greater dangers. The results of centuries of

national and worldwide colonial conquest and racial domination, of military buildups and violent

aggression, of over-consumption and environmental destruction may be reaching a point of no

return. The moment of self-destruction seems to be drawing ever more near, nationally and

globally. A small and predominantly white minority of the global population derives its power

and privilege from the sufferings of the vast majority of peoples of color. For the sake of the

world and ourselves, we dare not allow it to continue. Dismantling racism also means building

something new it means building an antiracist society. The bricks that were used to build the

walls of the prison must now be used for a better purpose. Just as we must tear down the wall

brick by brick, so also we must build new structures of power and justice_ Although we still

need many more reminders that we cannot build a multiracial and multicultural society without

tearing down the walls of racism, this negative reminder must be turned around and stated in

reverse: we cannot tear down the walls without building new antiracist structures of power in our

institutions and communities. Transforming and building anti-racist institutions is the path to a

racism-free society.

1AC

THREE—HARM: PUBLIC HEALTH.

1. Inactive transportation has increased obesity in US

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