Clean Air Coalition Campaign Featured in Slate Magazine

America’s Unfair Rules of the Road

How our transportation system discriminates against the most vulnerable.

By Corinne Ramey  - Slate Magazine 

Feb. 27 2015   At the easternmost edge of Lake Erie, where the lake meets the Niagara River, the Peace Bridge connects the United States and Canada. The two-thirds-of-a-mile-long bridge is one of the busiest border crossings between the two countries, connecting Canada’s Fort Erie with Buffalo, New York. Every day, an average of more than 15,000 vehicles, about 3,400 of which are trucks, drive over its steel girders.

In the shadow of the bridge sits a small neighborhood called the West Side, where the asthma rate is more than four times the national average, and residents report a host of other health issues. Advocates say the thousands of trucks driving overhead spew harmful diesel emissions and other particulates into their community. The pollutants hover in the air, are absorbed into buildings and houses, and find their way into the lungs of neighborhood residents, who are primarily people of color. “It’s constant asthma problems on the West Side,” says Sharon Tell, a local resident.

Idling trucks, with their engines running, are a regular presence on residential streets. “You see them park on our streets now, and sleeping overnight,” she says. “It’s so much, and we’re right there.” Tell is one of several residents who wore an air monitor funded through an Environmental Protection Agency grant. Her device collected more than 1.8 times the EPA recommended limit of particle pollutants. Tell could only wear the monitor for eight hours during a single day—the cost of conducting the air quality test is prohibitively expensive—but the result was deeply alarming. According to the EPA’s standards, the recommended limit on particle pollutants should not be “exceeded more than once per year on average over 3 years”.

Far from addressing the community’s concerns, plans are now afoot to expand the Peace Bridge. A proposed expansion of the bridge’s on- and off-ramps will further encroach into the neighborhood’s streets. Residents say their concerns about the constant truck traffic and its deleterious health consequences are being consistently ignored. “We have to move past the point where your zip code determines the quality of your life,” says Virginia Golden, a Buffalo resident and activist.

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Race and transportation have long been intertwined, whether it be federally funded highways that plowed through, or isolated, minority neighborhoods; Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott; or segregated streetcars and trolleys. And there has been tremendous progress within the past century, particularly when Brown v. Board of Education struck down “separate but equal,” leading to the eventual desegregation of public transportation. In the 1990s, two pieces of legislation, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act and the Transportation Equity Act for the 21^st Century, increased community involvement and awareness of civil rights issues in transportation planning. But discrimination, while certainly less overt, remains today.

Race and transportation have long been intertwined, from federally funded

highways that plowed through minority neighborhoods to Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Photo by Glenn Asakawa/Denver Post Staff

Sometimes, as in Buffalo’s case, communities feel cut out of the decision-making process. Those in power make decisions about transportation planning, resulting in ill-planned bus routes, transportation more likely to benefit those with cars than those without, and bleak environmental costs. In some cities, roads continue to pull apart neighborhoods, prioritizing commuters over communities. Nationally, the United States remains a country where many forms of transportation are effectively still segregated—whites and minorities ride different kinds of transportation, resulting in an unequal ability to reach jobs, education, and a better life.

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