Dive Brief:
- Part of a directive from new Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy would disproportionately benefit higher-income areas with higher shares of White residents rather than dense, more diverse urban communities, according to an Urban Institute analysis.
- The directive Duffy signed Jan. 29 orders the department to, in part, prioritize transportation funding — federal grants, loans and contracts — for communities with marriage and birth rates “higher than the national average.”
- That aspect of the policy would further cement U.S. reliance on cars, according to analysis co-author Yonah Freemark, fair housing, land use and transportation practice lead at the Urban Institute. “[R]ather than concentrating investment in areas where transit works and where pedestrian infrastructure is feasible, the policy would invest in areas where little other than roadway projects are realistic,” he wrote in an email.
Dive Insight:
Per the DOT order on the new funding policy, the change is meant to help “bolster the American economy and benefit the American people.”
But according to the Urban Institute analysis, written by Freemark and Senior Research Associate Lindiwe Rennert, when it comes to the policy’s prioritization of communities with high marriage and birth rates, the “benefits for the American economy are questionable” and it “would not benefit the American people as a whole.”
Giving preference to Whiter, wealthier and less dense areas in grant and other funding decisions would exacerbate structural inequalities by neglecting communities most in need of transportation investments, which are more likely to be lower income and communities of color, the authors write.
In addition to looking at the impact of the policy on the country as a whole, the researchers examined its impact on census tracts in Chicago’s Cook County. They found that the tracts with high marriage and birth rates are home to 28% of the county’s White residents, compared with just 5% of its Black residents. The average poverty rate of census tracts with high marriage and birth rates is roughly half of the total poverty rate of Cook County overall.
With the funding policy as issued, “historically underinvested communities will continue to struggle to fund their basic mobility needs,” said Freemark.
In addition, prioritizing projects according to communities’ birth and marriage rates would be more likely to contribute to environmental degradation and sprawl, the authors say, since these areas tend to be exurban communities that largely depend on highways. Comparing data on marriage and birth rates with survey data on transportation, the authors found that nearly a third of people who commute alone in their cars live in census tracts with high marriage and birth rates, while just 14% of transit commuters do so.
In Georgia, for example, more diverse cities like Atlanta, Columbus, Augusta, Macon and Savannah would be deprioritized in favor of wealthier, less-diverse exurban communities. But dense development creates more fiscal benefits, the Urban Institute authors write, pointing to research by land use consulting firm Urban3. That firm and other researchers have found the resource spread, commuting requirements and associated pollution tied to sprawl fiscally inefficient.
According to Freemark, the DOT “should be thinking less about birth and marriage rates, and more about how to encourage access to jobs and reduce pollution.”
