There is a stereotype that public transportation is the domain of the minority poor in this country. While that’s accurate in some places, it misrepresents the broader reality. In fact, a plurality of users nationwide are white and only a minority are in poverty, according to a study by the American Public Transportation Association. Among Americans who ride commuter rail, subway, or light rail systems, a majority have a car at home.
In this chart, we’ve compiled the national results from that study and compare them with the demographics of transit systems in three U.S. cities: Washington, D.C., Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco (well, the Bay Area). The snapshot offers an intriguing insight into which Americans choose not to drive to work.
Click through for a full sized version of the chart.
Click on the chart to expand:
Yonah Freemark is an independent researcher currently working in France on comparative urban development as part of a Gordon Grand Fellowship from Yale University, from which he graduated in May 2008 with a BA in architecture. He blogs about transportation and land use issues at The Transport Politic and is a regular contributor to The Infrastructurist.
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I’ve never heard that “public transportation is the domain of the minority poor”, when you count all public transportation. The subway in New York, and most other commuter rail systems have been the domain of, well, commuters - basically the middle class with office jobs in city centers. I have heard it said that *buses* are the domain of the minority poor, and these statistics tend to confirm that.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:56 pm
This chart is fairly useless without knowing the population distribution of these groups when they’re not riding transit. For example, if Washington is 80% white and 10% black, then the stats say one thing, if Washington is 80% black and 10% white, it says something else entirely.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:54 am
I think it’s pretty clear there’s no real disparity in cities where public transit is good (aka in Europe and Japan). but in the States it tends to suck, and when it does people only use it that can’t afford a car.
May 23rd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I always felt the D.C. Metro was somehow very unwelcoming to blacks. The lines reached the suburbs long before they got near Howard University, much less into the hardcore ghetto like Anacostia. And physically, Metro’s towering escalators work fine if you’re wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. If you’ve got a stroller and a couple of kids in tow, or if you might be described as a big fat mama, then maybe less so. In NYC the teenagers on the subway seem as much at home as on their stoops, while on the Metro they seem in a hurry to get out of there, before they get stopped to show ID or something. But for a city that’s about 90% black, clearly the Metro does not serve those masses.
May 24th, 2009 at 10:54 am
For fact’s sake, some information:
Washington, DC (as of 2007):
56% black
36% white
8% hispanic
5% other
3% asian
Washington, DC Metro Area (as of 2006):
26% black
52% white
12% hispanic
2% other
8% asian
May 25th, 2009 at 9:29 am
…like to see bus system statistics broken out separately from rail. My perception is bus systems are mostly ridden by those with lower income while ridership of rail systems crosses all or almost all economic strata.
May 26th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Kentuckian is precisely right about the need to know the overall demographic distribution in order to make this chart’s data meaningful. Thanks to Yonah for providing it.
When you pair the population data with the chart, one conclusion is clear (and I live here, so I’m not just making an educated guess): there is a transportation and housing equity crisis in DC. The city is very segregated, and more African Americans take the bus because their neighborhoods are under served by the subway. However, on this same point, the DC subway system is fairly comprehensive, and you can’t expect a largely underground network to go absolutely everywhere.
Which brings segregation and housing into the picture. The city’s most populous, and most overwhelmingly African American neighborhood is Anacostia. Outside of Anacostia, majority black neighborhoods are likewise on the city’s perimeter. So the solution isn’t to make costly expansions of an already expansive subway system, it’s to bring African Americans back to the parts of the city that are well served by the subway.
All in all, this is a perfect example of the need to link transportation and housing policy.
May 26th, 2009 at 11:36 am
The data seems to back up what I’ve always observed in NY, which is that middle-class people will ride a train, but will not ride a local bus. Frankly, I think this had less to do with any kind of preconception about the bus being for minorities or the poor (though there may be some of that), and more to do with the fact that local buses suck. Note that I am differentiating express buses - used by middle-class commuters in the far outer boroughs - and bus rapid transit. But local buses are considered to be slow and unreliable, and with good reason. They are slow and unreliable. In Manhattan, you’re usually better off walking than taking the bus. In the rest of the city, you’re almost always better off driving.
May 26th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Interesting facts from Yonah on the actual population breakdown. I must have confused the black pop figures with Obama’s share of the vote in D.C.
I don’t live there, but have visited the city at least once a year for 30 years or so, riding the Metro almost always. I swear I have rarely been in a Metro car that had anything close to the 26% black pop of the metro area, much less the 56% of the District proper. Maybe once or twice near midnight, on the line to Anacostia, when I and some other white folks got off at the Navy Yard stop near a cluster of gay clubs, that may have left a car mostly occupied by blacks. I wonder if the Metro itself dares collect or publish a racial breakdown of its subway patrons.
As Ken says, the city, famed for its “Southern climate and Northern charm,” still suffers from segregated housing and transit equity problems. A glance at the District map shows that the black neighborhoods in the northeast quadrant are avoided by the subway lines.
I wouldn’t waste effort trying to find a few billion to add another tunnel in the inner city. But a good network of streetcars, perhaps along the New York Avenue corridor, and on U Street, the one-time heart of black Washington, would be a huge improvement over what they have got now.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Interesting article, especially considering that the regional transportation agency in the Bay Area (MTC) had a lawsuit against it for discrimination.
This blog gives a decent update on a case in which riders of color sued because more transportation funding went to agencies that catered to “whiter and wealthier riders.”
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2009/04/23/advocates-file-appeal-in-mtc-discrimination-case/
But people do have the perception that inner city buses are “ghettoes on wheels.” I’ve been told that, and asked to basically defend that.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:35 am
[...] Dept. of Demographics: Who Rides Transit? » INFRASTRUCTURIST [...]
September 15th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
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January 14th, 2010 at 3:54 am
This is an interesting posting on the demographics of public transit ridership. I also, however, have not heard the stereotype that “public transportation is the domain of the minority poor in this country”.
Thanks, Yonah, for posting the stats on racial demographics in Washington, DC for those that haven’t been updated their perceptions of DC’s racial makeup for a decade or two.
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