Sep

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Does our transportation funding violate the Civil Rights Act?

Filed Under Civil Rights, Uncategorized 

Let’s start with a provocation: Washington State’s 18th Amendment violates the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964, perpetuating discrimination in the state’s transportation system.

Passed in the post-War era, the 18th Amendment is focused tightly on how Washington state will allocate it’s gas taxes. It states:

“All fees collected by the State of Washington as license fees for motor vehicles and all excise taxes collected by the State of Washington on the sale, distribution or use of motor vehicle fuel and all other state revenue intended to be used for highway purposes.”

Rosa Parks: The Original Fighter for Civil Rights in our Transportation System

While environmentalists have decried the constraints of the 18th Amendment for many years, we’ve heard relatively little from the social justice community. How does the state’s transportation expenditures create the types of inequities that the Civil Rights Act was designed to avert? Looking back to the history of the Civil Rights Act provides us with some answers.

Passed during the Johnson administration, the Civil Rights Act is surely one of the high-points of the post-War Congress. In addition to outlawing racist voter-registration laws and creating parity in states’ education systems, the law also stated that there could not be un-equal treatment in “public accommodations,” essentially abolishing the infamous separate but equal approach to public facilities in the South.

Divided into 10 Titles, there are two sections of the Civil Rights Act that seem to have the most bearing on this discussion. As an armchair attorney, please allow me to lift their descriptions from Wikipedia:

  • Title III: Prohibited state and municipal governments from denying access to public facilities on grounds of race, religion, gender, or ethnicity, and
  • Title VI:  Prevents discrimination by government agencies that receive federal funding. If an agency is found in violation of Title VI, that agency can lose its federal funding.

While the 18th Amendment was not enacted to be discriminatory, it appears that in practice it violates both of the above titles by promoting a system that is prejudiced against a number of protected classes.

For example, a skilled litigator could argue that the 18th discriminates against people based upon race. We know, for example, that nationally only 7% of white Americans do not own cars, while for latinos and blacks, those numbers are 17% and 24% respectively; since Washington State does not fund alternatives to driving, it is discriminatory against both of these minority groups. Or, as Deron Lovass at the Natural Resources Defense Council notes:

Clearly, a public investment program that caters to the automobile also caters, largely, to white people, and that’s a huge problem.

Race is but one example of “highway discrimination;” we could easily argue investments in auto-centric infrastructure also discriminates against the poor, the elderly and those with both mental and physical disabilities. None of these protected classes are able to drive in the same numbers (or the same percentages) as white Americans. Public dollars should be used to erase inequities, not perpetuate or exacerbate them, bringing up the question that if 18th Amendment is unconstitutional, so too might be the Federal Highway Act and next year’s transportation re-authorization bill?

Remember that when Rosa Parks did not get up from her seat in Montgomery, AL in 1955, she was taking a stand against a transportation system—a “public accommodation”—that was fundamentally unjust. 55 years later, is Washington State’s 18th Amendment still enforcing an entrenched practice of discrimination by asking our state’s protected classes to get to the back of the transportation funding bus? And if so, how do we fix it?

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17 Responses to “Does our transportation funding violate the Civil Rights Act?”

  1. Joshua Daniel Franklin on September 9th, 2010 10:30 am

    This isn’t just an academic discussion either; BART recently lost federal funds because of a Title VI lawsuit filed by a group called Public Advocates. They successfully argued that the Oakland airport connector line should have stops in low-income areas instead of just passing through, somewhat like Seattle’s light rail line stops in Rainer Valley.

  2. Justin Siemaszko on September 9th, 2010 11:03 am

    So let me get this straight…

    someone’s trying to say that using revenues generated by personal motor vehicles exclusively on the systems used to accommodate personal motor vehicles is discriminatory?

    That seems like a stretch. It’s also a logical absurdity. Let’s accept the argument and see where the “logic” leads: If funding auto transit is racist because black people tend to skew toward public transport, than funding public transport is equally racist by exactly the same offset in the other direction. This is a fool’s plight that I suspect will go way too far.

  3. Ryan Champlin on September 9th, 2010 12:29 pm

    I understand the argument that money generated from personal vehicles should only be pumped back into the infrastructure for personal vehicles, and I can accept it to a point, but it ignores the social and environmental costs of such a system. The system should be taxed in part to fund other transportation infrastructure (transit, sidewalks, trails, bike lanes) that reduce those costs.

    And notice I said “in part.” The argument that auto funding is racist is a stretch, for the reason given by Mr. Siemaszko, only if the state were to use automobile revenues to fund all transportation projects ***except*** those that support automobiles. We are not saying that they should do that, just that some of the money should go toward transportation projects that will gain much less revenue because the users have less personal income to contribute.

    To be fair, I don’t think this is a racial issue… it is an income discrimination issue. The fact that people of color are more likely to be people of lower incomes is just a very unfortunate caveat that shows that we still have a lot of room to improve as a country.

  4. Alex B. on September 9th, 2010 12:29 pm

    The supreme court has ruled that zoning codes that prohibit high-density housing are not discriminatory even though a higher percentage of minorities live in high-density zoning (I don’t have the case in front of me but I can look it up if you’re interested) – my non-lawyerly mind would assume that this could be applied by a judge to transportation funding as well. But it’s worth a try!

  5. free antivirus download on September 9th, 2010 1:10 pm

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  6. baycityroller1 on September 9th, 2010 2:19 pm

    Transportation funding tnat is biased towards roads and the cars they serve isn’t just about race and class. It’s also about politics. Like half of all Americans, I live in a high density urban center that does not force me to own or operate a car, which allows me to demonstrate my concern for the environment and social justice by walking, biking and taking mass transit.

    The subtantial amount of income and other taxes that I and my fellow urban dwellers pay, however, is being used, in no small part, thanks to federal, state and local funding mechanisms, to pay for the roads and cars used by motorists and suburbanites.

    This unfair, undeserved subsidy, which is over $100 billion a year, is then dwarfed by the massive, $500 billion a year oil war being waged by the US military in the middle east.

    It is support like this that has enabled suburban sprawl, white flight and suburban conservative ideology to spread, like a cancer, across the landscape, in spite of it being unsustainable, in the long term, by effectively taking from the poor, the liberal, the young, the old and the disabled, and giving to the rich.

    It is travesty of justice and, given the hundreds of thousands of middle easterners killed in the oil wars, a crime against humanity.

    The idea that transportation funding could be unconstitutional is just the tip of the iceberg!

  7. dparker on September 9th, 2010 6:14 pm

    The “skilled litigator” to whom you refer would likely run away from this argument as quickly as possible. It could hardly fail to occur to a judge that if car ownership statistics are a proxy for determining who benefits from the highway system, they might also be a proxy for who shoulders the burden of the same. At best, this argument might support the position that general revenues could not be used to support the highway system.

    Of course there’s also the question of whether non-car-owners benefit from the transportation of goods by highway….

  8. Erik G. on September 10th, 2010 7:56 pm

    Silly Seattle! Just name a freeway after Rosa Parks…

    …like L.A. did:

    http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-79458823.html

  9. HRM on September 13th, 2010 9:20 am

    In many (most?) cities the primary transportation for the lower incomes (if it’s not by personal car) is by public bus transit. Last I checked, buses use the roads and highways as well. While I don’t feel that the excise taxes from gas etc should be used exclusively on highway/road development/repair, I think it’s misdirected if you think those ‘infringed’ individuals you are referring to are not also benefiting from the collected taxes.

  10. Bill B on September 13th, 2010 11:06 am

    hmmmm. don’t see how this helps.

    will Great City ever push for impact fees to fund our great city?

  11. Stu on September 13th, 2010 12:03 pm

    What some posters are forgetting is that this issue is not just about discrimination based on race or economic circumstance, but also about people with physical or mental handicaps, blindness, or age-related issues that pose a barrier to everyday travel.

    We have a growing population of aging adults, especially those from the “baby-boom” generation, who are either approaching the state of not being able to drive or have reached that stage.

    I think the question of whether transportation funding policy is discriminatory is both valid and worth testing.

  12. WHH on September 13th, 2010 12:25 pm

    States like Ohio spend about 98.5% of their transportation dollars on roads. This is mandated by the state constitution. Meanwhile, the state only spends about $11 million annually on transit and has at times, used transit money as a state match for highway projects, such as I-670 in Columbus.

    People who can’t drive or are economically challenged at forced to the fringes of society because they are left out. This is wrong and needs to change.

  13. Nate on September 14th, 2010 10:51 am

    Bill – re: impact fees — on builders? I guess it might depend on who they’re levied upon… What did you have in mind?

  14. Bike News Roundup: A Virginia man is murdered over a speed bump | Seattle Bike Blog on September 21st, 2010 9:31 am

    [...] Great City asks, Does Washington State’s 18th Amendment violate civil rights? It mandates that gas tax money be spent only on highways and other motor vehicle uses: For example, a skilled litigator could argue that the 18th discriminates against people based upon race. We know, for example, that nationally only 7% of white Americans do not own cars, while for latinos and blacks, those numbers are 17% and 24% respectively; since Washington State does not fund alternatives to driving, it is discriminatory against both of these minority groups. [...]

  15. Transportation is a civil rights issue : Great City on November 12th, 2010 10:32 am

    [...] few months ago, I wrote a deliberately provocative piece for the Great City blog that was meant to reframe some of our recent conversations around transportation and understand how [...]

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