Streetsblog Capitol Hill

The impaired hit-and-run driver who struck and killed her son on a metro Atlanta road in 2010 has been released from prison by now, but Raquel Nelson is still being prosecuted for her purported role in the tragedy.

The single mother of three was injured trying to prevent the collision that killed four-year-old A.J. Newman. That didn’t stop an all white jury from convicting the African-American woman of vehicular homicide last year. Prosecutors brought charges on the grounds that Nelson and her children were not in a crosswalk, though the suburban arterial that separated her apartment complex from a bus stop had no crossing nearby.

Nelson faced three years, while driver Jerry Guy, who has glaucoma and admitted to drinking and taking pain killers before the crash, was sentenced to just six months. After the trial attracted national media attention, a Cobb County judge offered Nelson a reduced sentence of one-year probation or a retrial.

Wanting to clear her name, Nelson chose a retrial. She has since teamed up with high-profile Atlanta defense lawyer Steve Sadow, who took on the case pro bono. Sadow asked an appellate court to throw out the conviction for lack of evidence. But late last month the Georgia Court of Appeals upheld the decision, according to legal website Law.com. “[We] conclude that the evidence presented at trial was sufficient to support the jury’s guilty verdict,” wrote Judges Charles B. Mikell, M. Yvette Miller and William M. Ray II.

The court cited a state law which “says that any person who causes the death of another, without an intention to do so, by violating traffic laws commits the offense of homicide by vehicle in the second degree,” according to Law.com. Sadow argued that the driver of the vehicle, not Nelson, caused A.J.’s death.

“While we have the greatest sympathy for [Nelson's] plight, this court must interpret the law and apply it with an even hand; the appellate process affords us no latitude to make adjustments for the ill-earned good fortune of the lucky, or as in this case, the heart-rending misfortune of the unlucky,” the judges said.

Cobb County Solicitor General Barry Morgan has said he will continue to prosecute Nelson. In a brief filed with the Court of Appeals, Morgan wrote: ”When a pedestrian chooses to cross a divided highway … outside the protection of a crosswalk, she risks her own safety [as] well as the safety of those with her.”

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the case will likely end up before the Georgia Supreme Court.

It was fitting that yesterday, the eve of the Atlanta region’s historic transportation vote, the Georgia NAACP filed a civil rights suit against the state Department of Transportation alleging discrimination in contracting. Meanwhile, the head of the DeKalb County NAACP has come out against the T-SPLOST tax proposal, saying it will hurt minority-owned businesses. He even took a shot at Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, a dogged supporter of the referendum, saying “certain blacks” had been duped into supporting the tax proposal.

The proposed one-cent sales tax to support $7 billion in road and transit projects has drawn opposition from some seemingly unlikely places. Considering that this spending package represents a significant investment in rail and bus service for a region with notoriously poor transit options (the funds split fairly evenly been transit and road projects), the fact that the Sierra Club of Georgia is against it may surprise some. The group has been one of the biggest critics of the plan, saying the “haphazard” project list does not constitute a cohesive transportation strategy and is too heavy on roads. Add to that the opposition of some of the black leaders in urban DeKalb County, and tack on the Georgia Tea Party, which draws its strength from the farthest reaches of the exurbs.

Meanwhile, the spending measure enjoys overwhelming political and business support in Atlanta. Coke, Home Depot, Delta, UPS, Clear Channel, Turner Broadcasting, and Georgia Power Company have all given money to support the $8 million campaign for its passage.

Yesterday, Georgia’s Republican Governor Nathan Deal held a rally with Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed, making a last-minute appeal to voters in the 10-county Atlanta region. Neither man was pulling any punches. Without this new tax, they said, metro Atlanta’s transportation system — and perhaps the whole regional economy — is headed in a bad direction.

If the referendum fails, “we simply don’t have the resources to ensure that Georgia has an adequate transportation network,” said Deal.

Reed dismissed the Sierra Club’s assertion that if voters turn down the package of 157 projects, a new, more transit-heavy list could be produced and passed quickly.

“It took four years to get a bill that you all could vote on,” said Reed. ”If we fail, nobody better come and ask me to do it again.”

Read more…

Note: The authors are active advocates in the urban sustainability movement, focusing on non-motorized transportation in low-income urban areas. As mixed race women of color, we believe that we are in a unique position to bridge the advocacy communities trying to better conditions for the urban poor and for the environment. In this series, we draw on our experiences in the bicycle and environmental movements to shed light on the unfortunate divides we have noticed between urban sustainability communities and low-income communities of color.

When environmental advocates talk about urban sustainability, we often focus on how people use space and how we can encourage design that has a lesser impact on the environment.  How do people get around, are there single or mixed use developments, how can we minimize commutes between work, the grocery store, and home? Rarely do we mention class differences in who lives in the same neighborhoods or, crucially, the issue of segregation and how discrimination has shaped where Americans live and with whom they associate.

Surely we’re aware of the legacies of 1950’s white flight and urban redevelopment, where cars enabled Americans to flee the supposed contamination of newly integrating city centers. We know about the subsequent trend where city agencies labeled those neighborhoods left behind as “blighted slums” ripe for redevelopment. And yet we remain silent about the parallel between these twentieth century traumas and our current interest in promoting urban sustainability in these same areas through large scale economic redevelopment. Because race and class inequalities have been left out of the conversation, eco-friendly developments that aim to increase property values and, consequently, reduce affordable housing stock, get promoted as the key to urban sustainability.

Sustaining the ethnic and cultural diversity of our shared spaces should be an explicit priority of the environmental movement, and this means confronting the trend toward making “eco-friendly” neighborhoods primarily exclusive enclaves of wealth. We have seen this in countless neighborhoods in Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, where bike lanes often get striped in “up and coming” neighborhoods only after more affluent residents move in.

Read more…

Raquel Nelson, the Georgia woman who faced vehicular homicide charges last year when her four-year-old son was killed by a hit-and-run driver, is back in court this week, appealing the results of her trial.

Nelson is asking a Georgia appeals court to dismiss charges of vehicular manslaughter and jaywalking rather than proceed with the retrial granted by a Cobb County judge in October. She is being represented on a pro-bono basis by high-profile Atlanta-based attorney Steve Sadow, whose former clients include rapper T.I. and Howard K. Stern, boyfriend of Anna Nicole Smith. Sadow agreed to take the case after learning of it through the media, saying, “I believe that her prosecution was an injustice.”

It seems even the prosecutors may agree with him. They declined to make an argument at the hearing Tuesday, a surprising move that may indicate that they’re not all that interested anymore in trying to put Nelson in prison. At the end of Nelson’s trial last summer, the judge made a similarly unusual move in offering a new trial before Nelson’s lawyer even had to ask. Experts speculated that she may have had regrets about the way she’d conducted the trial that may have led to the harsh verdict.

The case attracted national attention last summer for what was widely viewed as overzealous prosecution. The mother of three — who was also injured trying to prevent the collision that killed her son — faced three years in prison. Prosecutors based the charges against Nelson on the premise that she was partly responsible for the death because she was jaywalking. Meanwhile, driver Jerry Guy was sentenced to just six months in prison despite two prior hit-and-run convictions and his admission that he was drinking and under the influence of prescription drugs the day of the crash.

The case also focused attention on the perilous conditions for pedestrians in suburban Atlanta. The street Nelson was attempting to cross is a five-lane high-speed arterial. The closest crosswalk was a half-mile in either direction, which many argued was an unreasonable distance to expect pedestrians to travel to cross a road.

Read more…

USDOT Deputy Secretary John Porcari kicked off the Transportation Equity Network’s “One Nation, Indivisible” conference yesterday with a call to think long-term. By 2050, he said, we can expect the U.S. population to grow by 100 million people, and nearly all of them will live in large urban centers. Problems like crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transit systems, grinding traffic and pollution will be much worse then if we don’t start acting today.

“Are we doing right by the next generation?” Porcari asked. “We know we’re not.”

Echoing President Obama’s “winning the future” rhetoric, Porcari framed the administration’s push for a six-year, $550 billion transportation bill as a potential watershed that can reform a transportation system which has become increasingly burdensome for lower income Americans. “If you make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year,” he said, “odds are that transportation is your number one household expense, higher than housing.”

With the GOP-controlled House making noise about a much smaller reauthorization bill than the one Obama has proposed, better days for affordable transportation are not here yet, nor are they necessarily around the corner. Transit agencies have already been through a couple of years of widespread service cuts and fare increases. The brunt of these cuts have been felt by people of color — who make up at least 60 percent of public transit ridership.

So in addition to not doing right by the next generation, our current policies are not doing right by today’s generation.

Read more…

Local transit agencies that are planning service cuts and fare hikes as a result of budget constraints have been warned: cost-cutting measures shouldn’t unfairly affect people of color.

Peter Rogoff, head of the Federal Transit Administration, sent out a letter to local transit authorities last week reminding them of their duty to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which “prohibits federally-funded programs and services from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin.”

The Transportation Equity Network notes that people of color are up to six times more likely to depend on public transportation than white Americans. “As a result,” said TEN’s Laura Barrett in a statement, “the epidemic of service cuts and fare hikes around the country are having a devastating impact on the ability of millions of Americans to access jobs, education, health care, and opportunity.”

TEN applauded Rogoff’s letter, stating that “a budget crisis is no excuse for violating civil rights.”

This issue has been raised recently with respect to the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. MARTA was forced to impose widespread cuts to bus service and raise monthly and weekly fares last fall. Laurel Paget-Seekins of the Atlanta Transit Riders’ Union said the pain was distributed more or less equally, but since then, there has been a call to reinstate the Braves Shuttle, which took mostly-suburban baseball fans from the train to the ballpark. Paget-Seekins said MARTA is being pressured by some business and political interests to bring back the service. Meanwhile, she says her bus route has been folded in with two other routes and is often overcrowded.

“That’s why people are upset about this idea of putting back the Braves shuttles,” she said. “Because those of us who ride every day are still kind of suffering from the cuts that happened last fall.”

MARTA riders are 78 percent black and 14 percent white, she said. In addition, more than 50 percent do not have access to a car and more than 60 percent make less than $30,000 annually.

The Atlanta Transit Riders’ Union watches MARTA and local and state government agencies closely for civil rights abuses. The union has filed a complaint against the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, which runs a commuter bus service that doesn’t serve low-income communities, Paget-Seekins said. The FTA is now performing a compliance review in response.

The long-term impacts to transportation funding as a result of the Federal Transit Administration's (FTA) civil rights compliance probe of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) won't be clear for some time, but the action by the federal administration has transportation policy circles buzzing. Experts in civil rights and regional planning policy couldn't point to another instance of a metropolitan planning organization (MPO) like the MTC being required to submit to similar scrutiny from the FTA, while social justice advocates felt vindicated for their longstanding contention of discrimination in transportation funding.

The FTA probe stemmed from a complaint by Public Advocates, a civil rights law firm in San Francisco, over BART's failure to properly analyize the equity impacts of its fare policy for the controversial Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) as required under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As a result of the complaint, the FTA denied BART $70 million in federal stimulus funds for the project. Because the MTC channels significant federal funds to BART and because it continually approved motions to send stimulus funds to an agency that ultimately failed its responsibility to comply with Title VI, the FTA turned its eye on MTC.

According to Thomas Sanchez, chair of the Urban Affairs and Planning Department at Virginia Tech and a Brookings Institution fellow, the FTA's action against BART was unprecedented and perked up the ears of transportation policymakers around the country.

On the other hand, Sanchez said he wasn't necessarily surprised with the action at the MTC because of a previous lawsuit by Public Advocates, Darensburg v. Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which provided significant evidence in his mind that the MPO wasn't fulfilling its Title VI requirements. Sanchez said the commission had been asked numerous times by advocates like Urban Habitat to conduct an equity analysis of its funding practices in general, and had grown quite vocal with OAC complaints.

"I personally think it's a positive from a standpoint of accountability and transparency and holding these organizations accountable for a fair amount of federal money they are getting," said Sanchez.

Read more...

A $189 million budget shortfall for next year is forcing some tough choices on Washington D.C.'s local transit authority, which is poised to approve a package of fare increases and service cuts that includes a 35-cent hike for bus trips.

As riders brace for the lean times ahead, a front-page story in today's Washington Post asked whether that 20-percent jump for bus riders -- compared with a proposed 15-percent fare hike for rail -- disproportionately hits the city's lowest-income residents.

Transit planners and pundits alike have long debated the relative merits of bus versus rail, with some vocal supporters of the latter mode depicting the former as an inferior option that alienates middle-class travelers who might otherwise eschew a car.

But tucked in the middle of the Post's piece is a sign that buses could be making a comeback as more local riders' groups pursue activism and organizing:

For the first time, Metro is using Census Bureau and other data to identify the impact of fare and service changes on minorities and households without automobiles, under a mandate from the Federal Transit Administration [FTA], said Jim Hamre, Metro's acting director of bus planning. That evaluation is not completed, he said.

Why is that FTA-mandated analysis so crucial? It was first sought in 2007, when the agency formally advised recipients of federal grants on how to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Local transit authorities were told to survey minority and lower-income riders on the effects of fare and service policies, to ensure a minimum level of public outreach to all communities, and to craft concrete plans for giving equal access to riders with limited English ability.

That guidance might have fizzled in practice, but the FTA put teeth in its civil-rights enforcement, recently revoking $70 million in federal stimulus money from the Bay Area's Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) rail line after critics charged that the project would negatively impact minority communities. One advocacy group involved in the OAC complaint noted that the city's metro planning agency has set aside 94 percent of its transit expansion funding for rail, leaving 4 percent for buses.

Could local riders file a civil-rights complaint against a proportionally higher increase in D.C. bus fares, should it become official? Read more...

Advocates for urban transit riders in 14 metro areas climbed the Hill today to pitch lawmakers face-to-face on the need for extra federal transit operating aid, a grassroots lobbying effort that could face considerable challenges even as Democrats craft a new jobs bill with a focus on infrastructure.

Today's event, organized by the Transportation Equity Network (TEN), brought local community advocates to the House's Longworth building for roundtable sessions with aides to several members of Congress.

Federal Transit Administration executive director Matthew Welbes briefed the group on his agency's new shift away from a solely cost-effectiveness-based standard for approving new funding plans, and TEN co-chair Sarah Mullins hailed a victory for transit equity in Minneapolis, where light rail planners have added three new stops in lower-income areas.

But as the grassroots lobbyists prepared to make the case for more transit operating aid in the coming Senate jobs bill -- the House version allowed cities to spend 10 percent of their Washington funds on keeping trains and buses running -- Jim Kolb, staff director for House transport committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), was on hand with a candid assessment of the battle facing transit riders.

Kolb began by outlining an impasse that may be familiar to Streetsblog Capitol Hill readers: Oberstar's $500 billion, six-year transportation bill, which aims to fundamentally shift federal policymaking away from a road-centric perspective, is languishing as Democrats decline to find a way to pay for it.

Meanwhile, the uncertain flurry of short-term extensions to the current law and the stimulus' decision to route transport funding through state DOTs has given defenders of the status quo time to dig in their heels.

"A lot of folks who work for state DOTs have real concerns about the bill we put out," Kolb told the groups. "They don't want to have a conversation about accountability -- we have a different vision with our bill."

But with more than 10 percent for transit operating proving a hard sell in itself, getting a spending-shy Congress on board for that new vision is likely to be even more difficult. As Kolb put it:

Read more...

The Obama administration's warning that the Bay Area has jeopardized federal stimulus funding for its Oakland Airport Connector (OAC) project could have national consequences for other urban transit proposals that risk harming low-income riders, civil rights and transit advocates predicted yesterday.

Several Bay Area advocacy groups briefed the media on the civil-rights complaint they filed against the OAC, which the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) heeded last week in a letter [PDF] that threatened to yank $70 million in stimulus money from the project unless planners comply with federal equity rules.

Stuart Cohen, executive director of TransForm, said advocates' victorious bid to push Bay Area's transit planners to examine more cost-effective and equitable alternatives to the OAC would "have a ripple effect" as other cities re-examine how their transit plans would affect lower-income and minority riders.

The FTA's decision on the OAC, described as the first of its kind, "represents government at its best," PolicyLink president Angela Glover Blackwell told reporters, adding that by "us[ing] the power of purse to make transportation agencies accountable, government shows it can be consistent with its values."

So where else are civil rights complaints playing a role in local transportation decision-making?

Read more...