Transportation Apartheid Atlanta Style Robert D. Bullard, Ph.D. Environmental Justice Resource Center Clark Atlanta University Glenn S. Johnson, Ph.D. Environmental Justice Resource Center Clark Atlanta University Angel O. Torres, M.C.P. Environmental Justice Resource Center Clark Atlanta University

Access to Opportunities: The Reality of Welfare Reform in Metropolitan Atlanta Michael J. Rich Department of Political Science Emory University

Air Quality, Transportation Alternatives and Public Health: Can You Take a Deep Breath? John M. Balbus, M.D., M.P.H. Assistant Professor, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health School of Public Health and Health Services The George Washington University George William Sherk, J.D., M.A. Research Associate, Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering School of Engineering and Applied Science The George Washington University

An Environmental Justice Strategy for Urban Transportation in Atlanta: Lessons and Observations from Los Angeles Eric Mann Director, Labor/Community Strategy Center Planning Committee Member, Los Angeles Bus Riders Union

Empowering Minority and Lower Income Populations within the Regional Transportation Planning Process: Achieving Accurate Representation Lawrence D. Frank, Ph.D. City Planning Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology Darrell Howard City Planning Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Personal Transportation Costs for the Welfare-to-Work Trip Dr. David S. Sawicki Professor, City Planning and Public Policy Programs Georgia Institute of Technology Mitch Moody Ph.D. Candidate, City Planning Program Georgia Institute of Technology

Sprawl and Public Health Howard Frumkin, M.D., Dr.P.H. Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University

Strengthening the "E" in TEA-21: The Case of Atlanta, GA Don Chen Director, Smart Growth Program Surface Transportation Policy Project

Transit Equity and Black Atlantans Goro O. Mitchell Assistant Director, Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy Clark Atlanta University

Use of Information and Accountability Laws to Spur Transportation Reform Michael Replogle Federal Transportation Director Environmental Defense Fund

Transportation Apartheid Atlanta Style

Robert D. Bullard, Ph.D.
Environmental Justice Resource Center
Clark Atlanta University

Glenn S. Johnson, Ph.D.
Environmental Justice Resource Center
Clark Atlanta University

Angel O. Torres, M.C.P.
Environmental Justice Resource Center
Clark Atlanta University

Abstract

The decision to build highways, expressways, and beltways has far-reaching effects on land use, energy policy, and the environment. Transportation profoundly affects residential and industrial growth, and physical and social mobility. Our paper will examine the social, economic, and environmental costs and consequences of transportation planning in the Atlanta metropolitan region. It will compare transportation planning in Atlanta with a number of other major metropolitan areas. The analysis will also explore the equity implications of highway investments vs. regional transit, transit-oriented development, representation and transportation decision making, price of ozone pollution, commuter rail, cost of congestion, land use, residential housing patterns, racial redlining and disinvestment, business and economic development, air quality and public health, access to jobs, and mobility, and pedestrian safety. The paper will analyze and critique the Atlanta Regional Commission Regional $36 billion Transportation Plan and its $1.9 billion Transportation Improvement Program in relations to transportation investments, social equity, and environmental justice implications. Finally, the analysis will examine the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority's (GRTA) role in addressing past and present transportation equity. It will also examine GRTA's role in facilitating linked and coordinated (urban-suburban) regional transit.

 

Access to Opportunities: The Reality of Welfare Reform in Metropolitan Atlanta

Michael J. Rich
Department of Political Science
Emory University

Abstract

Although states have been granted considerable discretion and responsibility for designing welfare reform initiatives through the landmark Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, many public, private, and nonprofit officials are struggling with the translation of the new workfare philosophy into specific programs that effectively move recipients from welfare to work. This is especially true at the local level where county and city officials must now craft programs in this new policy environment as many states have passed on increased authority and responsibility for social programs to local governments. For many local officials, a huge barrier is determining literally where to begin, as few communities have the capacity to take a comprehensive, systems approach perspective on the welfare-to-work challenge. Of special note is the fact that many simply assume the "to" in welfare-to-work will be taken care of; that is, welfare recipients will be able to access job opportunities and other needed services, or if they are without a vehicle, providing transit tokens will provide them with needed access to jobs and services.

This paper examines the welfare-to-work challenge in metropolitan Atlanta, one of the nation's fastest growing metropolitan areas and one with an extremely robust local economy. If welfare recipients are to successfully make the transition from welfare to work, it ought to be easier in a dynamic local economy such as metropolitan Atlanta, which is one of the nation's leading job generating regions.

The paper will consist of three primary sections. In section one, current data from a variety of state and local administrative sources will be used to analyze the spatial distribution of welfare recipients, job opportunities, and selected support services (child care, employment and training centers) in metropolitan Atlanta with an emphasis on issues related to TANF household access and accessibility.

The second section builds on this presentation of the welfare-to-work challenge and examines the local institutional structure to determine how----if at all key regional and local stakeholders (public agencies at the state and local level, private employers, nonprofit organizations, community groups) have formed new collaborative relationships (or strengthened existing ones) to provide a more holistic and strategic approach to welfare reform. Of particular interest will be Georgia's Work Connection, a collaborative effort among the state's three primary welfare/workforce development agencies, and how that collaborative effort has been translated down to the regional and local levels.

The third section will focus on an analysis of specific transportation-oriented initiatives designed to assist TANF households in making the transition from welfare-to-work. Though attention will be given primarily to those initiatives underway in metropolitan Atlanta, innovative programs underway in other urban areas will also be briefly discussed.

The paper will conclude with recommendations on how TANF household access and accessibility to jobs and support services can be increased, given special attention to actions public, private, and nonprofit organizations can take to enhance access and accessibility.

 

Air Quality, Transportation Alternatives and Public Health: Can You Take a Deep Breath?

John M. Balbus, M.D., M.P.H.
Assistant Professor, Department of Occupational and Environmental Health
School of Public Health and Health Services
The George Washington University

George William Sherk, J.D., M.A.
Research Associate, Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering
School of Engineering and Applied Science
The George Washington University

Abstract

This study examines (1) the range of adverse health consequences (primarily respiratory and cardiovascular) that may be anticipated given present and future air quality levels associated with transportation alternatives in the ten county Atlanta metropolitan area and (2) the disproportionate impact of such adverse health consequences on certain communities within the metropolitan area. The State Implementation Plan (as developed by the State of Georgia in order to fulfill the requirements of the Clean Air Act) and related databases are utilized to describe present future air quality levels associated with Atlanta's transportation alternatives. The range of adverse health consequences that may be anticipated given these air quality levels is discussed. Utilizing existing population projections, the extent and burden of likely adverse health consequences are examined in terms of both cumulative impacts and disproportionate impacts on minority and low-income communities. The study concludes with a discussion of the costs associated with likely adverse health consequences.

 

An Environmental Justice Strategy for Urban Transportation in Atlanta:
Lessons and Observations from Los Angeles
Eric Mann
Director, Labor/Community Strategy Center
Planning Committee Member, Los Angeles Bus Riders Union

Atlanta and Los Angeles are two world cities, with previous elites challenged by an increasingly cosmopolitan, transitional, and dynamic population. In both cities the urban poor, the working class, and the lowest income communities of color are given shoddy service and denied equal access to federal and state transportation funds that privilege suburban commuters and auto owners. In both cities the "choice rider" is privileged, that is those who already have cars whereas the "transit dependent", is the urban working class, the elderly, the high school kids, the disabled, and are discriminated against with poor service, long-waits, poor connections, overcrowding and very long trips, a transit experience that is characterized by class bias, racial discrimination, and racist degradation.

The Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles has initiated the Bus Riders Union, the largest multi-racial grassroots transportation group in the U.S., with more than 3,000 members representing 400,000 daily bus riders. The BRU's 8 years of organizing, significant policy and legal victories, and analytical and theoretical expertise, can be used as a resource for the urgent work of mass transit reconstruction in Atlanta. Based on the BRU work, more than four visits by LCSC staff to Atlanta and detailed consultations with many leaders of Atlanta's environmental justice movement, the paper will emphasize the following remedies: reduced fares and an emphasis on affordable transit to increase transit use among the transit dependent, a clean fuel bus centered mass transit system, dramatic reductions in highway funding and use, enforceable standards for bus and rail overcrowding, a coordinated plan to create new bus service to hospitals, job centers, and educational centers including freeway based bus services, the stopping of racial segregation through opposing projects such as the proposed Macon/Atlanta commuter rail and forcing outlying counties to integrate their service with MARTA, extending existing MARTA rail lines into express bus lines that prevent rail construction boondoggles, reducing sprawl and air pollution by forcing suburban commuters into integrated public transportation and eventually into relocating into urban centers, democratizing the political process by creating new participatory structures with institutional power and prioritized funding for regional transit needs of inner city communities of color.

This paper will go into significant detail to show the structural similarities of Los Angeles and Atlanta and the directly relevant applications of the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union experience to the Atlanta movement.

 

Empowering Minority and Lower Income Populations within
the Regional Transportation Planning Process: Achieving Accurate Representation

Lawrence D. Frank, Ph.D.
City Planning Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Darrell Howard
City Planning Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract

K.H. Schaeffer and Elliott Sclar presented in their seminal work, Access For All, several disturbing trends that, in 1975, threatened to further divide already splitting urban areas. They noted an emerging low-density urban form coupled with lower levels of auto ownership by low-income and elderly households. The emerging land-use patterns that Schaeffer and Sclar described in 1975 is the predominant urban land-use pattern of today. They warned that this pattern would produce a highly auto dependent society fraught with social inequities. Robert Cevero confirmed this twenty-three years later in 1998, noting that the extreme dependence of the American society on the automobile has contributed to the vast social inequities which plague urban areas, effectively isolating low-income populations, the disabled, the young, and the old from resources and services.¹

This chapter will explore the transportation issues of mobility and immobility across ethnicity, income, age, and disability while retaining a focus on the empowerment of all populations within the regional transportation planning process. It is our position, that a process that can effectively yield equal representation can not be realized in the absence of representative documentation. Moreover, the ability to measurably mark and trace the benefits and burdens over time of all populations requires a significant shift in the allocation of resources applied to the collection of household level information that upderpins much of our transportation planning process.

Regional approaches to understanding the travel patterns and mobility needs of all segments of the populace are systematically under-reporting on the mobility needs of the traditionally under-served. In simple terms, household travel surveys conducted to capture a representative set of travel characteristics across demographic conditions are consistently failing to obtain a meaningful sample of lower income, minority, youth /elderly, and physically disadvantaged persons. Unfortunately, these same surveys are the foundation upon which regional travel demand models and resulting transportation investment packages are developed and tested for a host of environmental and political objectives. Under these circumstances one might ask:

"How is it possible to achieve a truly inclusive process -- one that captures the mobility needs of all populations including the traditionally under-served -- without vital and essential information required to understand the spatial (where) and modal (how) dimensions of their mobility needs?"

Documenting the mobility needs of traditionally under-served households requires aggressive strategies to capture expressed travel patterns and stated needs through a host of costly mechanisms. Reaching hard to reach households, ones that often do not have a phone, speak another language, or feel a lack of reciprocity based upon past history requires a shift in regional travel survey design and data collection processes. What is required is the establishment of an approach to sampling travel patterns at the regional level that results in the inclusion of a representative set of households across space and race. Such an approach is presented and applied to the deployment of the Atlanta 2000 household travel survey as part of the SMARTRAQ research program.² This data will support the documentation of the actual mobility needs of underrepresented and under-served populations in the Atlanta Region. It is the intent of this work to provide the foundation to measurably assess the equitable investment of transportation resources benchmarked against actual access to opportunities for the traditionally under-served. Hopefully, the resulting approach, which addresses a host of urban form and spatial concerns, will become a model for other regions of the nation.

1. Cervero, Robert. The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry. Island Press: Washington, DC. 1998.
2. SMARTRAQ stands for Strategies for Metropolitan Atlanta's Regional Transportation and Air Quality.

 

Personal Transportation Costs for the Welfare-to-Work Trip

Dr. David S. Sawicki
Professor, City Planning and Public Policy Programs
Georgia Institute of Technology

Mitch Moody
Ph.D. Candidate, City Planning Program
Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract

National welfare reform has focused attention on the critical support services necessary for the transition from welfare to work (WtW). In particular, transportation to work with concurrent access to childcare and other human services is key to a successful and sustainable transition to employment for the predominantly female welfare population. Typical of many large cities, Atlanta's dense, racially segregated welfare populations live surrounded by a ring of predominately white suburbs. As a region, Atlanta has experienced strong economic growth for several decades but the gains have gone more to the suburbs than the central city. A potential remedy for the geographic and economic isolation of these large inner city welfare populations is practical, cost-affordable transportation to the job-rich suburbs.

For sustained attachment to the workforce, childcare and other critical human services should ideally be integrated with the work trip. Unfortunately, traditional public transit service may of marginal utility to the young female welfare population because of the potentially high personal cost of trip-chained travel on fixed-route services. If excessive, the personal trip to work cost can be a substantial barrier to sustained employment.

This research will quantify the personal economic cost of the journey to work for welfare clients from several selected welfare-dense inner city Atlanta neighborhoods. A detailed GIS network analysis will be developed which will welfare recipients to employment centers via existing bus and rail transportation services. To accomplish this, record-level welfare client (TANF) data, firm data (ES-202), and human service facility information will be geocoded and mapped with GIS. A bus-rail route layer connecting the selected welfare-dense neighborhoods to the employment centers will overlap a street network that will permit the calculation of the total cost of the trip: 1) foot trip and to bus stop; 2) bus-to-childcare; 3) childcare-to-work including any necessary transfer/mode changes. The total personal trip cost will include waiting for the bus or rail, especially relevant to the time-consuming childcare trip segment. Finally, the cost of transportation as a part of total household income and other relevant comparative metrics will be estimated and the implications for public policy briefly addressed.

 

Sprawl and Public Health

Howard Frumkin, M.D., Dr.P.H.
Department of Environmental and Occupational Health
Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University

Abstract

Sprawl has been defined as "random unplanned growth characterized by inadequate accessibility to essential land uses such as housing, jobs, and public services like schools, hospitals, and mass transit." Sprawl in Atlanta, as in other cities around the United States, has featured extensive, low-density residential development on the city's periphery, heavy investment in roads with relative neglect of public transportation, pedestrian-unfriendly public spaces, and a concentration of capital investment and commercial development out of the central city.

The impact of sprawl on economic development, on the environment, and on civic life have been widely noted and debated. However, little has been written about the health consequences of sprawl. This paper argues that sprawl has a variety of direct and indirect impacts on public health. Important health outcomes include respiratory and cardiovascular disease, in relation to air pollution; injuries and fatalities in relation to motor vehicle crashes; and the absence of opportunities for walking. Less tangible aspects of sprawl include the anxiety and forfeited leisure time that result from long delays in traffic; the deprivation of contact with nature; and the erosion of civic values.

Like most metropolitan areas, Atlanta's population is a complex mix of racial and ethnic groups and social classes. The adverse health effects of sprawl are not distributed equally across these subgroups. For example, the direct health effects of sprawl, such as asthma and pedestrian fatalities, impact people of color more than whites. Less direct disparities exist as well. For example, "official" barriers to health care, principally related to health insurance, are compounded by "unofficial" barriers such as inaccessibility of health care facilities--a factor that has much to do with transportation and zoning decisions. Accordingly, this paper outlines some of the health disparities associated with sprawl in Atlanta.

 

 Strengthening the "E" in TEA-21: The Case of Atlanta, GA

Don Chen
Director, Smart Growth Program
Surface Transportation Policy Project

Abstract

Federal transportation funding typically drives local decision making, particularly with regard to discretionary spending programs. This paper explores the use of federal transportation funding to address social equity issues in Georgia and the Atlanta region during the past decade. It does so by analyzing the manner in which transportation agencies chose to spend their federal transportation funds under the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) and compares investment patterns with social equity outcomes. In particular, this paper examines the amount of funding devoted to public transit programs, public safety, job access initiatives, community economic development in urban areas, and the geographic distribution of funding. Civic involvement and other indicators of public demand for these programs are also discussed. The paper concludes with an examination of the region's potential to address transportation and social equity problems through its existing agencies as well as its new "super agency," the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority. It makes a number of recommendations for how local agencies can leverage federal transportation dollars to support racial and social equity while accomplishing transportation and livability goals.

Transit Equity and Black Atlantans

Goro O. Mitchell
Assistant Director, Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy
Clark Atlanta University

Abstract

Atlanta in the 1990s has been encumbered by unchecked sprawling road construction and development. As a result, Atlantans suffer from a plethora of negative externalities, including poor air quality, traffic gridlock, lost productivity and an overall diminished quality of life. To address these traffic related ills, policy makers have considered a number of ameliorative options, including the expansion of Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) rail lines into primarily white and affluent suburban communities. These massive capital improvement plans have been perceived by minority community activists as racist, for they ignore the needs of transit dependent populations which are primarily people of color, poor, young or elderly, living south of I-20 or in Atlanta proper. Simultaneously, these activities have raised concerns regarding inequalities in MARTA's operational activities (e.g., who is negatively impacted by recent bus route changes), development around stations, across subsidies and other issues. This paper will use the case study method to examine the Atlanta region and MARTA's capital improvement and operational activities. The author will examine the procedural inequities of the MARTA planning process, ARC regional planning, and the role of GRTA in addressing commuter gridlock in the region. The paper will also explore the geographic, social, and horizontal inequities of MARTA. Finally, the author will critique how the following laws, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Executive Order 12898, and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) address transit-related equity issues in the Atlanta Metropolitan area.

 

Use of Information and Accountability Laws to Spur Transportation Reform

Michael Replogle
Federal Transportation Director
Environmental Defense Fund

Abstract

Several federal laws require analysis and disclosure by regional, state, and local agencies of the effects of transportation investment and policies on the environment, equity and communities. These laws have had significant effects on the transportation governance and planning process and are reshaping the factors on the transportation governance and planning process and are reshaping the factors considered in decision-making in metropolitan Atlanta. These laws promise to empower more effective participation by representatives of low-income minority communities in the transportation planning and decision-making process. However, improved data collection, information and analysis systems, as well as more timely public oversight and access to these systems is needed.

This paper will review how these laws have operated and been enforced in metropolitan Atlanta, discussing the role of government and non-governmental organizations in their enforcement. It will review the adequacy of current and planned data and analysis systems to support informed decision-making and public involvement. The key laws considered are the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898 and U.S. DOT Order, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Clean Air Act Amendments, and ISTEA/TEA-21.