Planners Book Club

The Right to Transportation was the March 2008 selection of Planners Book Club.

Does transportation affect the lives of minority, low-income, elderly, and physically disabled citizens? The answer is yes—and those effects can be profound, according to The Right to Transportation. The authors argue that transportation policies can limit access to education, jobs, and services for some individuals while undermining the economy and social cohesion of entire communities.

Here are some questions, provided by the authors, to get your discussion started.

1. What are some of the most significant advances in civil rights related to urban transportation?

2. What changes in transportation or communications technology have the greatest potential to increase social and economic opportunity for low-income persons and persons of color?

3. As planners consider the importance of accessibility to jobs, what negative impacts can result from particular modes of travel (auto access, transit access, pedestrian access)?

4. As the U.S. population ages, what particular transportation and land-use issues will become priorities?

5. How can we provide for equitable levels of transportation accessibility? What about ransportation mobility?

6. Some research has shown that immigrants may have particular transport accessibility handicaps. How does this group fit into the transportation equity framework discussed in this book?

7. Will current demographic trends lead to more pressure for equitable transportation systems — or less pressure?

8. What level of government should enforce civil rights and environmental justice laws related to transportation: local, metropolitan, state, federal, or some combination?

9. What particular lessons can grassroots advocacy groups learn from the early efforts of the Freedom Riders and Rosa Parks?

10. How do various types of infrastructure, such as housing, education, and transportation, interact to increase or maintain segregation?

11. How does transportation affect social mobility?

12. President Clinton’s Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater, said, "Transportation is about more than concrete, asphalt, and steel." Do you agree? Why? What other factors should be considered?

13. Toll roads and toll lanes are becoming popular ways to decrease congestion. How important are the regressive economic effects of such a flat tax?

14. By definition, sustainable development includes equity considerations. Yet these issues are rarely discussed in the context of the environment and global warming. How should equity be included in that increasingly important conversation?

15. Studies of transportation projects are supposed to analyze the projects' cumulative impacts, including impacts on minority communities. Yet they rarely do so. What can be done to change that situation?

16. The U.S. is becoming increasingly diverse in population, culture, and religion. Do our transportation systems increase assimilation or separation? Further, can transportation decisions be made with or without such implied value judgments, or do all such decisions contain values, even if they are hidden?

17. Is using transportation to drive social equity a form of "social engineering"? Is this wrong?

18. Transportation infrastructure decisions are usually made by white men. Civil rights advocates sometimes call this a form of institutional racism. Is it? Should the system be changed, and if so how?

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