Author Description

Transportation issues touch nearly every aspect of our lives, including where we live and work, and the health, education, social, and public service benefits we have access to. For millions of urban Americans, transportation barriers create profound obstacles to job opportunities and quality of life.From Harlem to Los Angeles, and cities in-between, Just Transportation reveals the distribution of transportation benefits to the wealthy and educated is disproportionate to people of color and those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. While the automobile culture has been spurred on by massive government investments in roads and highways, federal commitment to public transportation appears to have reached an all-time low, allowing urban mass transit systems to fall into disrepair.Essays by a wide range of environmental and transportation activists, lawyers, and scholars trace the historical roots of transportation struggles in our civil rights history, from Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders to modern-day unjust transportation practices. The dynamics of disparate incomes and transportation equity are examined, as well as the impact of transportation policy on inner city environments. This timely and important book will be of interest to anyone concerned with race, class, and environmental justice issues.Chapter highlights include: the attempts of a community in Washington D.C. to stop a freeway from being built through the middle of their neighborhood; the empowering results of an environmental justice activist group's work with a Latino community in Austin, Texas; a civil rights suit in Los Angeles challenges the use of federal funds to build an expensive rail system;the unique transportation issues of the nation's oldest and most famous African American community, Harlem.