The environmental justice movement in the US has been recognising inequalities in access to transportation since the mid-1960s. The problem was even raised by Martin Luther King when he called for structural reforms to deal with race and poverty. The US case studies have shown that, since this time, there has been a gradual (but far from problem free) shift towards both formal government recognition of the problem and policy commitment to resolving it. The question is whether this has made a visible difference on the ground.

Clearly, there are numerous contributory factors in transportation disadvantage, including people not being able to afford their own vehicle; lack of public transportation to and from work or other means of transportation; public transportation not being offered on the weekends or evenings when jobs are available; lack of childcare; no public transportation in rural areas and the job market locating further distances from the centers of cities and urban sprawl. Equally evident, given the multiple and complex nature of the problem is that there is no single solution.

Improving access to employment

A particular focus of the US environmental justice in transportation agenda over the past 40 years or so has been on addressing the increasing problem of access to employment in the face of the increasing physical isolation of unemployed people from job opportunities. This is commonly referred to in the US literature as the reverse-commute phenomenon, although the spatial mismatch between people and jobs is not always as ‘inner-city to urban periphery’ focused as the title would suggest.

As Cervero has identified in Chapter Ten, Job Access and Reverse Commute (JARC) and other specialised transportation programs first arose as a policy concern in the wake of urban riots in the late 1960s. Despite limited proof of the success of these earlier programs, and following a period of transit subsidy cuts and campaigns to privatise services in the early 1980s, interest in reverse commuting regained momentum in the 1990s. This was, in part, prompted by 1990s federal public policy directives setting limits on welfare dependence, notably the setting of a five-year lifetime limit on cash assistance.