Black Households Are More Burdened by Vehicle Ownership than White Households

By Quinn Molloy, Norman Garrick & Carol Atkinson-Palombo

Today I spent 65% of my monthly income to get my car’s exhaust replaced. This is not shocking, unheard of, or even rare. The United States has been built to accommodate the automobile. In doing so, we have accomplished what transportation historian Peter Norton describes as normalizing the abnormal. It is expected that every American adult own a personal vehicle, and thus it is normal for Americans to allocate more than 15% of their total annual spending toward cars. It is normal for Americans to have no alternative to vehicle use to safely accomplish their daily travel, and thus are coerced into perpetual vehicle spending for their adult lives. These circumstances surrounding high levels of spending on cars have become so normalized that the damage that they cause is only recently being discussed as a critical issue in general discourse and is still limited in research and other academic endeavors.

When we say that transportation is expensive, we mean that automobile ownership is expensive. People who do not own a car might have a difficult time getting around, but they are burdened by transport costs at much lower rates than vehicle owners. Transportation is the second highest cost for households after their rent or mortgage, most of which goes toward vehicle purchasing and use. Even if a household can minimize the number of cars they own, buys used vehicles, and avoids driving, they will likely spend more than $5000 per car annually. This relatively high spending floor is more difficult for lower income households to afford. For a minimum wage employee working full time, $5000 would be more than 30% of their annual take home pay, compared to 7% for a household making the median US income.

Not everyone is equally burdened by transportation systems that favor automobile ownership. Black households in the United States are less likely to own vehicles. This means they are both less likely to benefit from government investment in vehicle-oriented infrastructure, and more likely to suffer from reduced access to necessities in places built to the scale of the automobile. Black households experience negative secondary effects of vehicle prioritization at higher rates, such as injury and fatality, asthma or other respiratory disease, and police ticketing.

Vehicle primacy is, frankly, a worse deal for Black Americans than others. This is highly influenced by historic, racially motivated development patterns where predominantly Black neighborhoods were the target of urban renewal and associated highway building. Disparate impacts persist in transportation spending. When lower vehicle ownership rates are controlled for, Black households spend more on transportation than their White counterparts, whether or not that household is experiencing poverty. They are also more likely to be burdened by similar costs as there is a well-documented difference in income between Black and White households. In households consisting solely of two adults, insurance spending is higher in Black households across all age categories, even as fewer average vehicles are owned. Spending disparities reveal inherent inequity in systems that prioritize vehicle use.

Densely built places with a variety of land uses, where high-quality transit is available, more easily accommodate households who forgo vehicle ownership. Places that prioritize vehicle ownership are, in their current iteration, incompatible with equity and sustainability. While transportation spending is more burdensome for some households, it impacts everyone. Imagining a reduction in vehicle ownership is, to many Americans, terrifying. This is entirely justified, as quality of life is highly reduced for those who do not own vehicles outside of the handful of urban areas with effective transit. It may seem as though embedded, built environment spending, such as that on housing and transportation, are fixed costs. This is not the case. We know under which circumstances people spend less on transportation: those where they can easily opt out of vehicle ownership. We have highly successful, mature technologies, in trains, buses, and bicycles that are used by millions of people to mitigate transportation costs every day. We have vibrant, mixed-use cities to use as design blueprints for the types of places where these technologies are the most effective. Vehicle dependency is a bad deal for everyone, a worse deal for our most vulnerable households, and something we have both a reason and the tools to address immediately. The creation of places where car ownership is optional is a poverty reduction strategy that has meaningful equity implications.

Article Details
Black Households Are More Burdened by Vehicle Ownership than White Households
Quinn Molloy, Norman Garrick & Carol Atkinson-Palombo
First Published April 29, 2024
DOI: 10.1177/03611981241231968
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

About the Authors

Featured

Dr. Carol Atkinson-Palombo is a Professor at the University of Connecticut's Geography Department. With expertise in urban ecology gained through a National Science Foundation IGERT program, and academic training in economics and urban planning as well as geographical sciences, her research focuses on interdisciplinary, policy-relevant studies for practical application. She utilizes GIS-based spatial analysis, statistical modeling, and qualitative methods to assess sustainable city policies, particularly in transportation sustainability. Dr. Atkinson-Palombo also focuses on innovations for just transitions to a low-carbon economy, and actively participates in service activities that emphasize diversity and equity at the university, national, and international levels.

Norman Garrick is Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at the University of Connecticut. He specializes in the planning and design of urban transportation systems, including transit, streets, street networks, parking, as well as transportation safety and sustainability and transportation poverty. His research and writings have reached a wide audience through outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Denver Post and The Hartford Courant, The Atlantic, CityLab, Planetizen, New Urban News, Streetsblog, Streetfilm and Public Radio both in the USA and abroad. In addition to his academic career, Dr. Garrick has worked as transportation consultant on numerous design charrettes including urban revitalization projects with the Prince of Wales Foundation in Kingston, Jamaica and in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and hurricane recovery in Louisiana and Mississippi. Dr. Garrick is a Fulbright Fellow as well as the recipient of the Transportation Research Board’s Wootan Award for Best Research Paper in policy and organization, and numerous awards for teaching at UConn.

Quinn Molloy, PhD is a graduate researcher and teaching assistant finishing her final semester at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on transportation equity and affordability as they relate to vehicle dependency. Before her academic career, she worked for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation as a geospatial analyst.