Link – High Speed Rail – Implementation

Link – High Speed Rail – Implementation

Even at the level of implementation, High Speed Rail is shot through with racist ideologies

Link – High Speed Rail – Sprawl

High Speed Rail causes massive urban sprawl

Kambitsis ’10 [Jason, Wired.com, March 16, 2010, http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/03/high-speed-rail-and-sprawl/]
It’s fast, it’s efficient and it is the future of transportation, but will high-speed rail cause sprawl? Yes, it could, warn some urban planners. Despite the promise of creating more densely populated urban centers, high-speed rail could do quite the opposite by making it easier for people to live far from urban centers. Let’s use California as an example, since high-speed rail has made the most progress there. The Golden State, long known as a trendsetter for transportation and environmental policy, has received more than $2.3 billion in stimulus funds toward a proposed line linking San Francisco and Los Angeles by way of the Central Valley. The money is earmarked for construction, land acquisition and engineering and it follows the $9.95 billion allocated by a state ballot initiative. If and when the line is completed by 2030, riders will zip between the two cities in 2 hours and 38 minutes and pay less than half what it would cost to fly. But that convenience could increase emigration from California’s urban centers to the exurbs and beyond. In other words, it could lead to more sprawl. An example of this can be seen in cities like Palmdale, which is 58 miles north of Los Angeles. By cutting the commute time between those two cities from 1 hour and 25 minutes, to 27 minutes, outward growth of the Los Angeles area will undoubtedly continue. It’s easy to see why — home prices in Palmdale are more than half of those in L.A., and high-speed rail could make getting downtown as quick and easy as living downtown. Pushing people further into the exurbs runs counter to a major goal of high-speed rail, namely cutting our carbon output while creating denser, more sustainable communities. Before this conversation goes any farther it should be said adopting high-speed rail is fundamental to the country’s economic vitality because it provides cost-effective transportation options that link major commerce centers. It is in many ways more beneficial than the continued use of automobiles as the primary means of moving people around. The time is now and the technology is here. That said, there are some potential flaws regarding where stations are built and how the rail infrastructure is integrated with communities that could lead to sprawl. The goal for high-speed rail in the United States, as in Europe — which, like Japan, is held as a model for HSR — is linking large cities. But the big difference between the European and American approach is Europeans have made a large investment in rail and the accompanying infrastructure that links it with stations and communities. The United States, on the other hand, has invested heavily in a highway system. The result is our land use patterns are quite different. In addition to making rail a priority, Europe has long supported public transit and multi-modal transportation infrastructure that supports bicycling, walking and other ways of getting around. It has all but taken the car out of the equation and solved the so-called “last mile” problem — addressing how people get from the transit stop to their final destination. Public transit options, along with dense, compact communities built around transit hubs (an approach called transit oriented development, or TOD) has created inherent convenience and in many cases eliminated dependence on cars. In the United States it is a completely different story. We rarely embrace TOD. This could be a problem with high-speed rail. Without a rapid transformation of our building patterns and a push to make existing communities denser, high-speed rail could be a conduit of sprawl, not a deterrent. If stations include vast parking lots, or they’re built in remote areas away from urban cores instead of being made a part of the community, it will all but guarantee people drive to the stations and create a system that is only accessible by car. Drivers already comfortable with a commute of an hour or more could move further away from urban centers, drive to a station and ride to work and still enjoy a shorter overall commute time. “HIgh-speed rail will simply add another layer of access to the far-flung suburbs/exurbs and Central Valley, resulting in more mass-produced subdivisions,” warns Robert Cervero, director of the University of California Transportation Center and author of Development Around Transit. We can avoid this. Proactive land use policies focused on increasing urban density coupled with incentives for transit-oriented development and suburban infill must be embraced by communities along high-speed rail lines — especially those with planned stops. This will help create a market for transportation and the subsequent development tied to it. Regional and local transportation planning initiatives that create infrastructure connecting pedestrians, bicycles and mass transit and place it on a level playing field with automobiles will reduce dependence on cars for commuting. Parking should be provided in garages, not lots, and it must be integrated into the development. And, finally, stations must be landmark, not utilitarian, structures that compliment their communities and welcome riders. Grand Central Station in New York is an excellent example. Focusing on these ideals will reduce the risk of sprawl and make high-speed rail — and the communities it connects — a guidepost to the future of transportation.

Sprawl is inherently racialized – it creates de facto segregation and prevents social justice organizing

Powell ’99 [John, founding member of PRRAC's Board, is executive director of the Institute on Race and Poverty and was recently named the Marvin J. Sonosky professor of law and public policy at the University of Minnesota Law School, “Achieving Racial Justice: What's Sprawl Got to Do With It?”, Online]
While the Supreme Court supported desegregation within cities by ending de jure segregation, it simultaneously supported segregation of the region along jurisdictional lines through the constitutionalization of "local control." Federal courts constitutionalized the concept of "local control" despite pre-existing federal law that said cities were not entities unto themselves, thereby setting the stage for the re-establishment of a racial hierarchy that reconfigured, but maintained, white supremacy and black subordination. "Local control" has been used to justify the segregated and fragmented jurisdictional structure of sprawl; it is the primary enforcement mechanism for racially exclusionary practices; and it appears to be a perfectly legal method of ensuring racial subordination under current federal law. Two areas of particular significance in the "local control" movement are land use practices or exclusionary zoning and protection of local control over education. School desegregation litigation provides an example of how white suburbanization under the concept of "local control" has undermined the civil rights movement. Despite almost 50 years of litigation since Brown, most black, and an increasing number of Latino, children attend racially and economically segregated schools in areas that have supposedly been desegregated under federal law. The Supreme Court fostered this arrangement by striking down explicit segregation at the intrajurisdictional level while upholding it at the inter-jurisdictional level. One of the most important cases that supported this arrangement was the Milliken case. The Supreme Court, basing its decision on the importance of local control, would not allow the lower court to order a desegregation remedy for Detroit's discriminatory school district that included Detroit's suburbs. The Court held that the suburban districts could not be incorporated into the desegregation remedy because they had not been found to intentionally segregate their districts. This was their conclusion, despite the fact that Detroit's school district was overwhelmingly comprised of students of color and the suburban districts were overwhelmingly white. The Court ignored the claim that a segregated housing market on a jurisdictional level was causing inter-district school segregation. Instead, the Court suggested that these segregative housing patterns were unexplainable and beyond the purview of the court. Milliken sent a message to whites that neighborhood-level segregation within the city would not be acceptable, but the suburbs would be a safe haven from desegregation. And the message to blacks was that there were limits to how far the Court would go to achieve racial justice, and those limits very closely matched the city limits. This white suburban wall began to crack for middle-income blacks after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a result, middle-income blacks have begun to move to the suburbs in record numbers. However, they are often resegregated in the suburbs and remain isolated from the more powerful white suburbs that still capture most of the opportunities and resources. During this same period, low-income people of color have been consigned to resource-depleted cities; isolated from the opportunities that brought blacks to the North 50 years ago. This isolation has caused an explosion of racialized concentrated poverty at the urban core. Growth in black and brown concentrated poverty at the urban core is almost always associated with white, upper middle-class, fragmented sprawl at the edge of the region. Racial subordination has taken on a different form: through the mechanisms of metropolitan fragmentation and sprawl, blacks have again been subordinated socially, politically and economically. By racializing space through the spatial isolation of blacks and other minorities, we have achieved many of the negative racial conditions formally held in place with Jim Crow laws, thus frustrating the civil rights goals of the 50s and 60s. Weighing In On the Issue Fragmentation and sprawl may be the most important impediments to racial justice as we approach the millennium. The fact that it has become a national concern for environmentalists as well as land use planners provides a wonderful opportunity to weigh in on this national discussion. New lines are being drawn on this issue by federal and state government, both figuratively and literally, and suburban voters demonstrated a growing hostility toward sprawl in the last election.

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: