Transportation and Community development
Transportation affects every aspect of our lives and daily routine, including where we live, work, play, shop, go to school, etc. It has a profound impact on residential patterns, industrial growth, and physical and social mobility. Roads, highways, freeways and mass transit systems do not spring up out of thin air. They are planned. Someone makes a conscious decision to locate freeways, bus stops, and train stations where they are built. Transportation is no less a civil rights and quality of life issue. Safety and accessibility are the most significant considerations in transportation planning. Zoning and other practices of exclusion result in limited mobility for poor people and those concentrated in central cities.Over the past decades, automobile production and highway construction have multiplied, while urban mass transit systems have been dismantled or allowed to fall into disrepair. The end result has meant more pollution, traffic congestion, wasted energy, urban sprawl, residential segr
Poor people and people of color are subsidizing our addiction to the automobile. They pay the highest social, economic and environmental costs and received the fewest benefits from an automobile-dominated transportation system. Highway cuts through inner-cities, creating environmental hazards and fracturing communities physically, socially and economically. Measurably higher levels of immediate and long-term toxic effects from air, water and noise pollution and debris degrade local land values and further destabilize urban areas. These same areas are challenged by low employment and economic opportunity, poor services, crumbling infrastructure and loss of tax revenues to the suburbs, which are now called " edge cities" or "exurbs". All communities have not received the same benefits from transportation advancements and investments. Some of the governmental policies in housing, land use, environment, and transportation may have even contributed to and exacerbated social inequities. Some communit
Some common words found in the essay are:
, transportation system, urban sprawl, justice ecological sustainability, healthy livable sustainable, social justice ecological, mass transit systems, social economic, social economic environmental, poor people, rural communities, justice ecological, economic environmental, social justice, ecological sustainability, mass transit,
Approximate Word count = 675
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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