In this pressing, topical piece, Musayeroh Bah addresses some of the issues with the United States transportation system, focusing on its inaccessibility to many citizens. Coming from New York City, she brings a perspective that values walkability, which not only shines through, but also influences what she sees as solutions to these long-standing and systemic problems. –Suzanna Strauss ’24, editorial assistant
I’m Walkin’ Here!: Improving Walkability And Public Transportation For All
Musayeroh Bah ’26
New York City, rated one of the most walkable cities in the world. Anyone who lives there can tell you about the extensive subway and bus systems, the shops and landmarks you can reach through them, and the jaywalking woven into our culture. As a Staten Islander, only a ferry ride away from the city, I experienced this first-hand. However, while our city seems ‘accessible’ on paper, this accessibility varies based on who you are. The ferry is free, but bus and subway rides afterward cost $2.75 with only one free transfer. Without a student MetroCard, I would have spent about $500 in one semester alone traveling to and from school. These problems exist beyond the confines of New York, as well, affecting people throughout the country. Gas for a car would cost even more if I lived in Ohio or Georgia, like my extended family. Visiting them for only a few days showed me what it was like to have no walkability: getting outside the neighborhood of copy-and-pasted homes always took a 30-minute car ride. To live there, I’d have to think about car payments alongside a mortgage. And it’s not as though you could only limit your transportation expenses to running errands; transportation fundamentally allows us to engage with our community. Increasing walkability and public transport access not only fosters community, but offsets carbon emissions and even improves public health (Speck). If we want to make our society stronger and more connected, governments and urban planners should work towards recognizing and fixing systemic barriers to walkability, subsidizing public transportation, and building less car-centric infrastructure.
As with most anything in the US, poor walkability and public transportation systems start with racial realities influencing infrastructure development. To talk about how cities and suburbs got to this point, we can start at the rise of suburbia, when walkability was no longer considered integral to designing residential and commercial landscapes. After World War II, a phenomenon known as “white flight” came into existence: white families moved out of urban areas into newly built suburban ones, created to combat rising housing prices in previous years, to segregate themselves further from rising minority populations in cities (Nicolaides and Wiese). Commercial actors took note of these changing demographics, and soon, suburbs “attracted new factories . . . and bolstered services for local residents, while excluding unwanted groups such as blue-collar workers, African Americans, and other people of color” (Nicolaides and Wiese). Companies wanted to make sure that their goods were advertised to, and located near, the White middle class, who they believed held the most disposable income. As a result of these cultural and economic shifts, suburbia and commercialism were intertwined as the new face of post-war America. In popular media, the ideal American life was represented as “cozy…with the latest products and appliances” (Nicolaides and Wiese). One of these “latest products” was the car, a once-aspirational good transformed into something necessary for any ideal American family. This environment of commercialization gave rise to the car culture and surrounding infrastructure that we currently see today.
From this time on, cars naturally came to be one of the biggest barriers to accessible transportation. As suburbanites purchased more cars to make travel more convenient, planners increasingly designed roads exclusively for drivers, over other modes of transportation and pedestrians themselves. In “Conflicts in Planning for Cars”, John P. Huttman explains that “highway expansion was necessitated by the expanded traffic from suburban residential areas to central city work destinations . . . . The increase of highway facilities [stores, gyms, etc] expanded rather than diminished the demand for highways” (92). These developments made walkability and accessible public transportation less possible because with more road-centric designing, people were forced to find vehicular solutions to reaching important destinations. While buses may seem like a low-cost alternative to buying a car, highways and “highway facilities” only brought about more cars, which added to traffic congestion and made buses a low-cost, but slower alternative (92). The focus on making roads more accessible to cars in design plans only served to make public transportation less accessible, and walkability less achievable, since those who could afford cars could enjoy easy travel, while those who needed cheaper alternatives were left with increasingly less convenient options. Since buses and sidewalks were no longer reliable and timely options, cars emerged as the best, but least affordable, choice. Commuters grew increasingly dependent on cars to get them to where they needed to go, and people who couldn’t afford such an option were forced into alternatives that were increasingly less timely and efficient.
One actionable solution to reducing car dependency is as simple as reducing traffic flow, but instead of more highways and freeways, we need fewer. While this may seem illogical, this solution has improved walkability before. When two well-known highways in New York and San Francisco were destroyed, “most of the car trips simply disappeared . . . people just found other ways to get around, or felt less compelled to be mobile” (Speck 94). In this way, minimizing highways benefits both drivers and pedestrians: fewer cars on the road, and thus less traffic, is a direct outcome of having fewer highways taking up space in neighborhoods. There’s a decline in traffic for buses and a smaller population of those who still need to drive–and less pollution for everyone else.
Another barrier to improving infrastructure is the lack of investment in public transportation. Even with the best-designed streets and neighborhoods, not everyone can walk around freely, due to disabilities or other reasons, so accessible public transportation is equally as important as walkability. However, the current reliance on fares as a means of covering operating costs prevents many from using public transportation over cars, or from using it at all. In 2017, fares in the US amounted to $10 billion in public transportation revenue, while federal and state funding then, and historically, contributed less (Hughes-Cromwick and Dickens 23). People who can’t afford to own cars use the public transportation system for that reason, so why would a huge public service rely on individuals who can’t afford much else, yet also can’t afford to not travel at all? This gives clear rise to fare evasion, which is usually a crime of desperation. The money used to stop fare evasion takes away from the amount earned by fares, meaning that more funds are needed to actually ensure that public transportation operates efficiently. Rather than punishing people who can’t afford to take the bus or to travel in some other way, it’s better to allocate public funds towards making transit more accessible. This is a more productive and helpful system for the population that uses it. Putting more public funding towards public transportation doesn’t mean having to end fares altogether, but rather, it will ensure that more fares are paid by those who can afford them than unnecessarily punishing those that can’t. This ultimately increases economic productivity by helping less-wealthy citizens get to their jobs, shop, and participate in society.
Increasing public transportation funding solves not only an issue of monetary waste, but an ethical quandary too, resulting from the lack of safety disadvantaged groups feel around buses and trains. In New York City, many videos circulate of NYPD stopping fare evaders to give them a ticket, with confrontations regularly getting violent. Knowing that Black and Brown people are more likely to face violence from police officers, why allow the possibility of these altercations happening at all? Evading fares isn’t a violent crime. It would be easier and safer to just remove the fare so that people who feel forced to evade fares can simply pass through easily. In fact, police are often an unproductive way to solve structural problems. In Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests and the Pursuit of Freedom, Derecka Purnell explores theories of abolition, one being that police officers are not a definitive fix to crime. The necessity of solutions other than law enforcement to societal problems is exemplified in the history of St. Louis, Missouri: “instead of improving the quality of the neighborhood, St. Louis, which has the highest rate of killings by police . . . spends more money on police” (3). Similar to how fare evasion is usually combated through a higher presence of police and more sophisticated and expensive technology, St. Louis combats police brutality with more spending on the police force. The problem’s origins are never addressed, and spending on a futile solution doesn’t fix the problem. St. Louis could do better if they were to explore a different solution, and governments should keep that in mind when trying to decrease non-violent offenses like fare evasion.
These efforts must address more than just logistical concerns. They also need to acknowledge systemic disparities that affect disadvantaged groups. It isn’t enough to redesign streets, you have to address what makes people reluctant to travel outside besides not having enough crosswalks. In one study on how factors besides urban planning affect walkability, the authors relayed that “low-income and racial/ethnic minorities face . . . higher pedestrian injury and fatality rates than more advantaged groups” (Adkins et al). These groups are also placed in bad environmental conditions and disproportionately exposed to “emissions linked to asthma and other respiratory diseases . . . areas of the city categorized as low income and highly walkable have some of the highest rates of nitric oxide exposure” (qtd. in Adkins et al). While improving roads and the walking landscape can encourage more people to go out, people of color and those at low-income levels often struggle with feeling safe enough to go outside, and the data shows that they aren’t wrong to feel that way. Urban planners should make sure that they know the circumstances of a neighborhood when planning how to improve it; and they should work with various agencies and the community itself to address problems outside of poor street design. This direct communication with the community works: in one study, researchers were able to pinpoint how neglected alleyways can be transformed into green spaces and walkable shortcuts, despite the stigma attached to them, by informing themselves of the perspectives of participants who lived near them. Participants “generally responded favorably to images of alleys that had been landscaped with plants, trees, and flowers” (Wolch et al.). People want their neighborhoods improved, but in a way that recognizes and adequately addresses the thoughts and concerns of the community members who will be using the infrastructure. Planners must take care to acknowledge this when designing or redesigning the areas that people live in.
Along with present-day findings on how community input can be used to improve towns and cities, an analysis of how poor walkability and inadequate public transport developed also provides additional ways to reverse the effects of the past. Whether it’s through removing unnecessary highways and roads, allocating more public funds, like taxes, towards public transportation over rider fares, or implementing suggestions from the residents of an area while redesigning it, there are varied, actionable solutions for solving the problems our history burdens us with. Governments and urban planners need to bend less to pro-car interests, and focus more on addressing the concerns of the pedestrians and bus riders that trust representatives to make their neighborhoods safe to live in. This means that planners must involve the community that their designs will impact, and by extension, that governments should be more encouraging towards community-based planning to support the happiness and productivity of their constituents. These solutions won’t just make a neighborhood easier to walk around, but will allow communities to form and grow. In a world that feels increasingly divided, redesigning our living areas may be what we need to get people outside, to experience the good that this world has to offer.
Works Cited
Adkins, Arlie, Carrie Makarewicz, Michele Scanze, Maia Ingram, and Gretchen Luhr. “Contextualizing Walkability: Do Relationships Between Built Environments and Walking Vary by Socioeconomic Context?” Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 83, no. 3, summer 2017, pp. 296-314, https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2017.1322527. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.
Hughes-Cromwick, MacPherson, and Matthew Dickens. 2019 Public Transportation Fact Book. American Public Transport Association, Washington, D.C., Apr. 2019, https://www.apta.com/wp-content/uploads/APTA_Fact-Book-2019_FINAL.pdf. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.
Huttman, John P. “Conflicts In Planning For Cars.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, vol. 4, no. 2, 1977, pp. 90–97, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23262150. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.
Nicolaides, Becky, and Andrew Wiese. “Suburbanization in the United States after 1945.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Oxford UP, p. 47, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.64. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.
Purnell, Derecka. Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests and the Pursuit of Freedom. Astra House, 2021.
Speck, Jeff. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save American One Step At A Time. First Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Thornton, Christina M., et al. “Disparities in Pedestrian Streetscape Environments by Income and Race/Ethnicity.” SSM – Population Health, vol. 2, Dec. 2016, pp. 206-216, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2016.03.004. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.
Wolch, Jennifer, et al. “The Forgotten and the Future: Reclaiming Back Alleys for a Sustainable City.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 42, no. 12, Sept. 2010, pp. 2874-2896, https://doi.org/10.1068/a42259. Accessed 3 Oct 2023.
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