We’re not used to thinking about transportation as a raced policy area. But, like all other policy areas, transportation policy has the potential to improve racial equity or widen racial disparities. But writer and historian Dr. Ibram X. Kendi asserts that all ideas, actions, and policies are either racist or anti-racist, removing the gray area of so-called ‘race neutrality’ in his recently published book, How To Be An Anti-Racist. This means that transportation policy – like all other policy areas – has the potential to improve racial equity, or widen racial disparities.

For the final episode of our policy design series, Talk Policy To Me host Reem Rayef interviews two transportation experts about how planners and policymakers can build transportation systems that serve all communities, and improve accessibility for those who need it most. Dan Chatman, Associate Professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of City & Regional Planning, discusses how public transit infrastructures can facilitate increased racial segregation, and describes the inequitable distribution of transit’s costs and benefits between white and non-white communities. Lateefah Simon, District 7 Representative on the BART Board of Directors and President of the Oakland-based Akonadi Foundation, makes the concept of anti-racist transportation policy concrete through discussion of current policy debates happening at the BART Board of Directors. Dan and Lateefah are passionate about centering racial equity in designing both transportation infrastructures, and the policies that we lay over those infrastructures. If you listen closely, you can hear them banging their fists on the studio table, as they drive home their points on transit justice.

The inequities of transit and transportation systems are clearly visible in the Bay Area, where BART lines and highways bisect historically Black neighborhoods, transit fares are regressive, and transit-oriented development is code for Black displacement. But the system isn’t broken beyond repair. Listen to this episode of Talk Policy To Me to learn how policymakers are integrating radical ideas of anti-racism into bureaucratic and regulatory processes to bring about justice in transportation systems, and beyond.

For more information about anti-racism, check out Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How To Be An Antiracist. It’s an impactful and important read.

For reading about equitable and just transportation policy in California, visit TransForm at www.transformca.org.

The study referenced in the interview with Dan Chatman, titled “Race, Space, and Struggles for Mobility: Transportation Impacts on African Americans in Oakland and the Bay Area” can be found here.

Thanks to the UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute for the use of footage from the September 2019 talk by Ibram X. Kendi which was excerpted in this episode. The speech and panel conversation can be found in their entirety here.

Transcript

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi: It would force Americans if we eliminated the term race neutral from the American vocabulary to to recognize that all policies are either racist or anti-racist. If we eliminated terms like racially charged, you know, they use so many now, I don't, I'm not, I can't keep up with them. But I know that's one of them. If we eliminate all of those racially, whatever they call it, terms and realized all ideas are either racist or anti-racist, then we can truly have an accounting of ourselves of our ideas of our policies and of our country, because at some point we are going to have to stop denying that we have met aesthetic racism. 

Reem Rayef: Writer and historian Dr. Ibram X. Kendi leaves no daylight between racist and anti-racist policies. In his book How to Be an Antiracist, he defines racist policies as those which fail to advance racial equity. Those that explicitly seek to undo the metastatic racism that characterizes our legal systems and infrastructure, those are anti-racist policies. Dr Kendi spoke about the simple but radical framework in a completely packed Berkeley auditorium earlier this fall. Students, faculty and community members filled every seat of Zellerbach Hall to hear Dr. Kendi explain the importance of naming racist policies and dispensing with the false notion that anything is race neutral. We are accustomed to thinking about the explicit racial implications of policies that fall into certain categories like criminal justice, housing, immigration, voter registration reform. We scrutinize the laws and regulations and administrative actions that fall into these categories. Comparing their impacts on black and brown communities to their impacts on white communities. And we should. But other policy areas like transportation policy, aren't subjected to the same level of scrutiny. When it comes to planning transit systems and investments in highway infrastructure, we tend to prioritize cost minimization and effectiveness and energy efficiency, without considering how the distribution of costs and benefits might fall along racial lines. So what does anti-racist transportation policy look like? And how can we incorporate the principles of anti-racism into how we design transportation policies and plan transportation infrastructure? From the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans, I'm Reem Rayef, and this is Talk Policy To Me. 

Reem Rayef: So to get a clearer sense of what anti-racist transportation policy is and how it's formed, I spoke to Dan Chatman, associate professor in the Department of Regional Planning here at Berkeley. We began by talking through the ways that transportation can reduce racial disparities. Basically, how can we tell when transportation planning is racist? To guide our conversation, I started with a quote from a reading he assigned in his course this semester. It's from a 2013 study titled Race, Space, and Struggles for Mobility. The quote reads, "A closer look at the historical record shows the deep imprint that overt racism has left on the built environment and allows us to appreciate how racially neutral decision making of the period since the civil rights movement by layering onto a segregated metropolitan geography acts to reproduce and reinforce racial barriers to opportunity."

Dan Chatman: Part of what the authors are referring to is a transportation system that has allocated the negative aspects of transportation to African-American and poor neighborhoods and Latino neighborhoods, and the benefits of that transportation has been much more widely spread. It has been capitalized into the property values of largely more affluent, largely white homeowners. So that's part of what they're talking about there in terms of this kind of racial inscription upon the landscape, and then specifically what we're talking about is all the impacts of freeways cutting through neighborhoods and kind of destroying them and West Oakland is a really good example of this, but there are examples of this in San Francisco historically as well, as well as infrastructure for the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, which has similar negative impacts in terms of its sort of casting shadows and having noise, but giving the real accessibility benefits primarily to the farthest flung stations getting access to downtown San Francisco. That's that's the real accessibility value that's created by BART. So there are the negative aspects of transportation having to do with the noise and the shadows and the infrastructure dividing neighborhoods. So that's part of what they're talking about there. But they're also implicitly talking about the racist land use decision making that created segregation in the first place that then could result in there being these siting decisions that were disproportionately having impacts on African-Americans and poor and Latino neighborhoods. So when they say that this there's this kind of race neutral policy following upon these racist decisions over time, all they're really saying is, look, the built environment and spatial patterns of segregation are persistent over time. And if you ignore those, they're they're going to stay persistent and you're going to tend to make decisions over time which follow upon decisions that were made prior, and those will tend to reinforce those preexisting conditions. And that certainly has happened in the Bay Area and throughout the United States. And I think there's, it's hard to know what to necessarily do about it other than to be explicitly aware of it all the time. And I think that there are cities that are starting to do that. And if you're much more aware of these things as planners and aware of this history as planners, then maybe you're going to take a second look and certainly engage in public participatory processes that grapple with those historical facts.

Reem Rayef: Public participation should play a central role in design processes. According to Dan, by engaging with community members and making genuine efforts to gather input, policymakers and planners can avoid the bleak outcomes that Dan describes in West Oakland, where freeways were built through historically black neighborhoods to the benefit of wealthy suburbanites seeking access to the city. Participatory processes, however, are hard work. 

Dan Chatman: But I think a modern participatory process is one that uses communication, that is the communication that people use today, so those that are actually able to engage with social media, that are able to use the different sorts of communication tools that people use on their phones. In the United States context, right, where there is an almost ubiquitous use of smartphones, and is doing a certain amount of of actually, I mean, this is the hard part, this is what costs money is going and knocking on doors, and meeting people where they live and finding them where they are, is something that is much harder to do than these other forms of communication. So participatory processes that call meetings, announce meetings, and have meetings where people show up in groups are much less, they're much less representative. They attract the people who can make it and are most worked up about something or know something about or know in advance about something and aren't actually the people who are most affected necessarily, right? Sometimes they are and sometimes they're not. So, I mean, I would think that a participatory process that is actually trying to think about representation of the population, seriously, they don't all do that. Some participatory processes are carried out because they're required to by law. And if you have enough people show up at meetings, then you've kind of done your job. And the people who show up at meetings are mostly different than the people who don't. And so figuring out a way to do that, I think is a big challenge. And I don't claim to have the answers on that other than to say the issue really is representation. And representation requires those sorts of individual efforts for recruitment as well as you know, what's increasingly done more and more is working with community groups. But even that is problematic because community groups and leaders and community groups aren't always representative of actual people living in neighborhoods. Right. So so it's a thorny problem, but it's the problem that we should be focusing on. 

Reem Rayef: So while getting the right people in the room can be a challenge, Dan believes that participatory processes are crucial to stopping damaging projects before they ever get built. Even if those damaging projects might have looked good on the surface. As a transit enthusiast, it's easy to get excited about the potential economic and social benefits of investments in public transit. However, if implemented without proper community engagement, these projects can facilitate and exacerbate racial segregation. 

Dan Chatman: The thing about rail and the thing about mobility, motorized mobility in general is that it enables segregation. It enables it to persist in the following way. The way you get around segregation is that you just provide the transportation connections that enable it to exist. That's the reason why we have segregation in the first place. We had motorization that happened that enabled it to occur in a different way than was possible before. It wasn't possible to have complete separation of people. You had to have much more commingling and you had all kinds of oppression and terrible things that went along with that. Don't get me wrong, it's not like it was necessarily better to have a society filled with, you know, we had slavery in United States and people were living in the backyards of of, you know, plantations. The fact that the people were closer together wasn't somehow a good thing in that context. But the only point is that transportation enables segregation, motorized transportation in particular, and rail is particularly good at it because it is best for longer trips compared to buses, let's say. So when you say does the new BART station sort of somehow redress this racist landscape? The answer is probably not. It probably doesn't. You can answer it in a big picture way, which is what I was just trying to do. Or you can answer it in a more narrow way. What's the more narrow way? Well, who in that neighborhood is likely to use BART and why? Where are they going? Are they actually going to benefit or not? The thing about BART, like most rail systems, is many of the stations are filled with parking and the people who are using that are coming from farther away. So you can't necessarily just do an analysis of who lives nearby and say that you're done. No, you're not done at all because, especially for outlying, any new BART station, look at the Warm Springs station surrounded by hundreds of parking spaces, and that's how it's going to work. So the benefits are relatively widespread. And the question is, who's likely to access the locations enabled by BART? And that still remains, as I said before, primarily downtown San Francisco, to some extent downtown Oakland. And it's the people who are employed in those jobs, particularly because BART is largely used for work trips. 

Reem Rayef: Planners and policymakers seeking to build equitable transit systems must have a clear sense of who they're building for and then involve those people early in the design process. Increasing transit ridership and getting cars off the road shouldn't always be the end goal of an anti-racist transportation policy regime.

Dan Chatman: But another big part of it is, has got to be about looking at the transportation needs of people who are most disadvantaged and of people who are in these historically oppressed groups. And that needs to be one of the main focuses of planning as opposed to leading with we want to have more transit ridership slash we want to retain our transit ridership or we want to reduce our auto use because leading with that doesn't meet people's needs first. And I think, for political reasons and for reasons of justice and process, you need to lead with people's needs. You need to understand those within the context of sustainability as opposed to starting with environmental needs and then sort of trying to tweak things because turns out the environmental needs aren't the same as people's needs. I mean, so what I'm saying here is part of it is just about the process, right? What process do you follow? And then part of it is about, well, what are your, what are your out of the box solutions that you think you're going to be proposing? And those out of the box solutions probably need to be things that are pedestrian oriented, that are bus oriented rather than rail, and that are about managing the auto better. And then there's larger policy questions about how difficult or easy it is for people who are poor to own and operate and have access to cars that are reliable. And there are some important policy questions there as well. 

Reem Rayef: After the break, we'll talk to, Lateefah Simon, a member of the BART board of directors, about how planners and policymakers work from existing infrastructures to build equitable anti-racist transportation systems. 

Sarah Edwards: This is our last episode in the theme on policy design and implementation. If you've missed any of the episodes, here's what we covered. We talked about design nudges with Professor Elizabeth Linos. We talked about school integration with Professor Rucker Johnson. We talked about human centered design with Brandon Green and the Oakland Civic Design Lab. We talked about tax policy with Professor Gabriel Zucman. You can find all of these episodes and more on our website at talkpolicytome.org or wherever great podcasts are found. Subscribe now to make sure that you catch all of our new theme coming in February 2020. 

Lateefah Simon: The BART board of directors is to me, one of the greatest honors I've ever had because I am a public transportation rider. I'm dependent on public transportation as a single mom. I have never driven a car. I'm legally blind. That's the micro. The macro is that public transportation is absolutely essential, not just in urban areas. Right. But in rural spaces around the country and around the world. Without it, folks lack the human right of mobility. 

Reem Rayef: That was Lateefah Simon, the elected Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART director for District 7, which includes San Francisco. She is an expert on public transit, and she believes that mobility is a human right, not just a nice to have public good. She is three years into her four year term on the board and has spent her time in office applying this deeply humanist lens to policies and planning around public transit. Lateefah was born and raised in San Francisco. So she came to the BART board, having seen the construction of BART and the ways in which the physical infrastructure itself is raced. 

Lateefah Simon: BART has a very clear and transparent history of racist policies. Before you were born, there were decisions made. In Marin County, the Marin County City Council, in its outline, it's very clear, they absolutely said they didn't want vagrant and homeless people and criminals having easy access to where they are. So now they want in. Well, guess what? It's very, very difficult to lay new rail. We ain't coming. Why BART was designed at different stages, where it goes, it's raced its raced. It's very construction outside of the tube coming into West Oakland, destroyed, with knowledge of this destruction, a vibrant black community on 7th Street. They felt that they weren't accountable to these low income black folks, but also business leaders, doctors, accountants, dentists. West Oakland was a thriving community and the seventh street corridor, many folks thought of it as one of the Harlems of the West. BART tore apart that neighborhood. The construction of the BART architecture was about white comfortability, right? It was about folks leaving San Francisco, leaving East Oakland. East Oakland was an Irish neighborhood. Right. When white flight was real, the construction of BART became a real thing. I mean, that's sort of the urban planners were like how we gonna get all these people to the financial district? And if you look at the original sort of the iconography and typology of BART, the design, the illustrations where you, why the chairs look like airport chairs, right, not transit chairs. They were to comfortably bring in white folks to downtown. They weren't thinking about mommas like me who had strollers and groceries. Right. It was not designed for working class people. And guess what? Because of working class realities, the majority of our riders are folks like my mom, you know, who worked her whole life for public service. She's retired. She's a fixed income. She's not making much. She's going to the doctor when she needs to, going to visit her girlfriends. What if we would build systems around poor Latina women? Can you imagine what they would look like? Asian-American women who are taking care of full families? What if we actually built cities around the majority? They would look a lot different. 

Reem Rayef: It's a perfect encapsulation of the story Dan described before the break. Transportation infrastructure responded to a market for racial segregation and now continues to edify it. There is an inextricable relationship between our transportation infrastructure and our land use. It's too late to tear up the BART lines and plan them more equitably, so Lateefah is laser focused on making sure that the transportation policies that direct who gets to use BART and how center communities of color. That means policies around fares and policing. Let's start with fares. Lateefah has already contributed to designing a means based fare system that will relieve the financial burden of BART on riders who are already eligible for services like Medicaid and SNAP. This will launch early next year, but she still thinks we can do better. 

Lateefah Simon: Hopefully in our lifetime, the Bay Area and the rest of the country will have a super affordable transit for folks. You should not have to pay twenty dollars to get to and from on public transportation every day. And for folks who are coming from Richmond, from Antioch, working in hotels by the airport, they're paying that amount. So, free transit would be a goal, but low income options.

Reem Rayef: Policing of BART has also been top of mind for Lateefah, who is trying to balance the safety of riders with concerns about police harassment of black men, unhoused folks and other vulnerable identities on public transit.

Lateefah Simon: I voted against the idea that we would ban busking or having artists in our spaces. I took a lot of flak from that. And I was very clear I don't love panhandling. And sometimes I don't love hearing loud music when I had a hard day. And I'm also an elected and I swore on the Quran and the Constitution, and I believe in the idea that people should be able to express themselves if they're not hurting other people. So we have to back away from racist policies that may not appear on first read, unless you're looking and you understand the historical nature of othering policies. If we're trying to stop violence, that has nothing to do with panhandling and loud music. Right. So we have an aggressive panhandling policy already on the books. What you're then proposing is comfortability and you can't legislate that. People are extremely uncomfortable around black boys. So do we legislate comfortability to make sure that black boys only walk on one side of the street? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But in making those decisions, you know, I get thousands of e-mails that are raced. You know, people calling me names that my grandmother was called in Arkansas. And it's hurtful, but at the risk of pushing forth racist policies, that's my job. 

Reem Rayef: And in implementing these anti-racist fair policies and policing policies, Lateefah echoes Dan's calls for participatory processes. These processes should not only center, but privilege the voices of those who need transit the most. 

Lateefah Simon: It's not just about what I think. It's about consistently doing the organizing and listening to folks who have real policy experience. I don't care if you've been to policy school, you've lived the impact of policy. So you have ideas. You can actually invoke them. I need to make sure that we're not just sort of litigating these concerns in the boardroom. And let me tell you, office hours at cafes, that's not how we're gonna do this work. We're gonna have to organize with communities that are, have organized themselves. So, you know, I want to get us out of the boardroom, myself and my colleagues as well. And I feel like no one has gotten this right around the country, around public transit, around safety, around affordability. And I do believe that people have the answers. We actually do work for them. I work for, for the person who's been sleeping on the trains all day. I'm a public servant. Maybe that person fair evaded. Right. I want to understand not only why, but how they can actually, one, be humanized and not have to sleep on a moving car. We owe good policy to everyone.

Reem Rayef: At the end of our interview, I asked Lateefah for some advice. How can we advance radical principles like anti-racism within more bureaucratic roles where policy is made, like the one she holds at BART? As it turns out, it begins with policy design.

Lateefah Simon: I think there are politics in every bureaucracy, meaning there is deep in tension around race and class in any skeletal policy design because you're thinking about who is worthy and who is not. And we make concessions every single time we have an idea. Of course, you have to make choices, but make sure in that choice you're making, we are very clear of who we're leaving out. It's not acceptable to just skim over it. You made a choice. So for us, in policy design, I think it's extremely important to at least one, start by being honest about who we're leaving out, right? Always, whether it's wealthy folks or poor folks, who are you leaving out and why? That's important. And then secondly, I think that just for us always to realize humans create institutions every day, I'm drastically shocked and touched by how much work we have to do to create anti-racist systems. You have to have anti-racist leaders who are not afraid to be wrong sometimes, but are ready to course correct. There are certain parts of our district who deeply, deeply live in disgust of other parts of our districts. I am not in disgust of homeless people or poor folks or young people who are allowed in boisterous. I believe that we serve them and I want us to make policies that are not just literally about ejecting them from our system. I want folks to have decision making power to work together to figure out how, not just how we get our trains on time. We're fine with the trains being on time. All right. They're like, we're like in the 96th percentile of on time, on time arrivals. But the reality of racism and classism, that is what's pervading us or preventing us from being able to be the transit system that is world class. So we've got a ways to go and I'm happy to be part of, part of the group of people who have to make really difficult decisions to get us there. 

Reem Rayef: Talk Policy To Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. For Show Notes, visit talkpolicytome.org. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck. Michael Quiroz is our audio engineer. I'm Reem Rayef. Thanks for listening.