Comparative Indicators for Policy Reform
University of Michigan and University of Maryland

A project of the Collaborative Science and Technology Network for Sustainability of the Environmental Protection Agency
and the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute

Title
Cars Not Geography: Job Accessibility and Reconceptualizing Spatial Mismatch in Detroit

Author Joe Grengs

Abstract

Transportation scholars are challenging traditional formulations of the spatial mismatch hypothesis because it disregards the considerable difference between travel modes. This case study of the Detroit metropolitan region uses 2000 census data and a gravity-based model of transportation accessibility to test differences in jobs access among places and people, and provides support for recent calls for reconceptualizing spatial mismatch. It shows that even though Detroit experiences the greatest distance between blacks and jobs of any region in the country, most central-city neighborhoods offer an advantage in accessibility to jobs compared to most other places in the metropolitan region - as long as a resident has a car. Policies aimed at helping carless people gain access to automobiles may be an effective means of improving the employment outcomes of inner-city residents.

By Joe Grengs

No other governmental program comes close to influencing the divided geographic patterns of our metropolitan regions like that of federal transportation. Yet most citizens would be hard-pressed to name who decides how and where transportation dollars are spent. Metropolitan planning organizations, or MPOs, are the bodies through which billions of federal dollars are distributed to state and local governments each year in support of transportation projects. Nearly every transportation project you see-new roads, fixed roads, interchanges, bus lines-has federal transportation dollars behind it. MPOs decide which projects get funded and which do not. These projects, in turn, influence where homes, jobs and stores are located. Yet the people who make up these MPOs, and the manner in which they arrive at their decisive choices, are mysterious to all but the most dedicated citizen activists.

The problem with MPOs is that most of them are biased against central cities in their voting structure. By allotting votes on a "one government-one vote" basis instead of a "one person-one vote" basis, MPOs grant outlying suburban jurisdictions considerably more political power in the decision-making process compared with center cities. Scholars and activists contend that this bias exacerbates sprawling urban development and further disadvantages poor households and people of color in the urban core. Whether this bias leads to worsening social equity remains an open question, but on a procedural basis a highly skewed representational scheme within an MPO may be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, thus making such a structure unconstitutional.

Should the actions of transportation officials be subject to democratic accountability? Not in the state of Michigan, according to a judge's ruling in August 2004. A civil rights lawsuit alleged that transportation officials in the Detroit metropolitan region choose projects and spend public dollars in a way that favors the largely white and wealthy suburbs and unfairly ignores the needs of the central city and its inner suburbs. At issue was the voting structure of the MPO. The judge found that voting strength of an MPO need not be in proportion to population because an MPO has limited responsibility as a special-purpose government. Unfortunately, as a result of the ruling, Detroit's famously segregated metropolis will continue to develop under the influence of a skewed procedure that builds in a bias toward building roads for suburban commuters over strengthening transit service for inner-city bus riders. But the case does offer important lessons that planners elsewhere can learn from to mount challenges against undemocratic practices in transportation funding.

The abandoned social goals of public transit in the neoliberal city of the USA

Joe Grengs

Abstract:

A preface and a bus rider’s story: “two-tiered” transit system in the making?

Imagine a bus stop in a typical working-class neighbourhood of inner-city Los Angeles, a city with an extraordinary array of peoples and cultures. The bus pulls up with standing room only, filled with a variety of people: Mexican, Salvadoran, Korean, Filipino and African American; men and women going to jobs, some of them janitors, some street vendors. People on the bus include women clutching children and grocery bags, kids going to school, elderly folks off to the Senior Centre. The ride is like always: hot, noisy and desperately crowded. The riders come from decidedly different backgrounds, yet share the same experience daily—jostled against one another, staring blankly out cracked windows, minding their own business, intent on getting where they need to go. And getting it over with as quickly as possible.

In another part of town, people of a different income class are riding in a new train. They come from the suburbs, clacking away at laptops and sipping cappuccino on their way to downtown jobs. These are people taking advantage of what Mike Davis (1995, p. 270) calls “the biggest public works project in fin de siecle America”, an ambitious series of commuter rail lines that were budgeted at $183 billion over 30 years (Sterngold, 1999). These train riders choose to leave their cars at home to avoid the maddening freeway jams of Los Angeles. Some ride the train on principle. Trains are, after all, better for the environment.

Back on the inner-city bus … someone’s handing out leaflets and talking about forming a union—of bus riders? First in English then in Spanish, the organizer tells riders how the train that’s always in the newspapers is costing more than planners expected, and that politicians now propose to take money away from buses to keep building the train lines. Then the organizer talks about racial discrimination. Racial discrimination? What do buses have to do with racial discrimination?