Is Future Mobility the New White Flight?

Imagine walking out your front door to meet an autonomous vehicle you hailed to take you to get groceries.

Imagine bypassing highways and surface streets through dozens of neighborhoods as you zip underground from one point to the next.

Imagine taking a helicopter to JFK International Airport without ever having to look another person in the eye — for just $225 (with some catches).

All of these scenarios are possible now, and they all have something in common: moving people away from public transit into primarily single-occupant modes of transportation that skew toward the affluent and predominantly white.

We’ve been here before, of course. In the 1950s and 1960s, white people fled cities for single-family homes in the suburbs. Their exodus was made possible by the sprawling network of roads and highways that often demolished whole city blocks in the name of progress.

While the postwar period of highway growth and sprawl eventually slowed, white flight took on new forms and still persists today. In fact, it’s not possible to denigrate modes like the bus without also talking about issues like race and class. According to a 2012 article published by CityLab, in Los Angeles, “92 percent of bus riders are people of color.”

It’s telling, then, that LA is the same city that people like Elon Musk want to reshape in his image all while denigrating any non-car form of transportation as “lack[ing] dignity.”

Musk was born in South Africa, which is the most unequal country in the world according to a recent report from the World Bank. It’s also a country still struggling with the effects of decades of apartheid.

And when it comes to haves and have-nots, Tesla owners fall squarely into the former category. Data on vehicle owners paints a picture of drivers who are predominantly male, affluent (most make over $100k per year, even those choosing the “mass market” Model 3), and white (judging from the YouTube videos).

It’s not just Musk and his tunnels creating this new era of mobility-powered white flight. Ride-hailing companies have effectively killed an entire industry in our biggest cities, driving many of the profession’s minority and immigrant taxi drivers to suicide.

Now a fixture in most cities, officials are reluctant to impose burdensome regulations to curtail some of the ride-hailing industry’s more egregious practices, including wages that sometimes dip below minimum wage. Many drivers tell stories of struggling to make ends meet, adding to inequality.

And whereas public transit is publicly funded and, by its very nature, for everyone, ride-hailing has seen some of the same issues around rider discrimination that affected the taxi industry, making it more difficult for poor and minority riders to get around in some cases. Even in downtown Washington, DC, scooters highlight the disparity in the availability of these services.

And autonomous vehicles promise to make things even more difficult for some. Driving jobs — trucking, delivery, and taxis — threaten to eliminate many higher-paying jobs that people of color have relied on to make a living as wages in other industries stagnate or fall.

Adding insult to injury, recent reports have noted how the artificial intelligence used by autonomous vehicles to “see” their surroundings may overlook people of color in a pedestrian context. While subsequent reporting cast some doubt on these conclusions, the story did highlight the ongoing problem of bias in the industry.

As private industry and the public sector grapple with these rapid technological changes affecting transportation, libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute are seizing the opportunity to rail against light rail and other forms of public transportation, citing the “inevitability” of fleets of autonomous vehicles.

While the arguments made by the Cato Institute underestimate the significant challenges ahead for the autonomous vehicle industry, they make sense in the context of the broader discussions taking place. It’s difficult to fault the Cato Institute for being opportunists when everyone from the mayor of Chicago to the former Secretary of Transportation in the Obama administration are singing the same tune.

As seemingly everyone is focused on the future of transportation for some, many people of color are being caught in increasingly predatory and aggressive lending practices while Congress green lights further discrimination. The result is often a cycle of vehicle repossession and debt that follows borrowers long after the car is gone.

Despite the hype and challenges ahead, all is not lost. Cities that have committed to improvements to bus service have actually seen their bus ridership increase despite declining ridership nationwide.

Public transit remains an essential component of our cities, especially for low-income and minority populations. No scooter or flying car will change that fact in the near term.

As more and more people in the transportation planning sphere look up to the sky for the future of travel, it’s important to keep our eyes on the road ahead as we navigate the social and racial equity challenges inherent in shaping how people move.