We’ll need more than EV’s to fix our broken transportation system
Many forms of e-mobility must be considered in addressing the needs of all Americans.
By Hana Creger, Environmental Equity Program Manager for Greenlining Institute
Here’s an unpopular opinion: Every American buying their own electric vehicle is a nightmare scenario.
Everyone in personal electric vehicles (EV’s) would be great for cleaning up the planet but not so great for quality of life. This scenario spells worsening congestion, car dependency, and racial inequity. With so many exciting forms for electric mobility, such as e-bikes, e-scooters, electric carsharing and electric buses, the default should not just be more personal electric vehicles. That approach would be quite underwhelming for a country that prides itself on its innovation. And. anyway, we’ve been down that road before and we know that more car ownership leads to urban sprawl, gridlock, and sky high transportation costs.
Yes, we know that EV’s are cheaper to drive and maintain, but let’s face it: Cars, however you power them, are just more expensive to own, operate, and maintain compared to walking, biking, transit, or even an electric car sharing membership. This current economic crisis is exacerbating the number of debt-saddled Americans who can barely afford rent and food, let alone to browse for the latest EV model. It’s time to be more creative and deliver clean mobility options that are accessible, safe, reliable, affordable, and meet the mobility needs of everyone, particularly those who can't afford to buy a new EV. But there is a larger problem here:
America’s transportation planning and decision-making process has largely centered around white supremacy, racism, and capitalism. And yes, this also applies to electric vehicles.
To paint a full picture, let’s revisit some history. Racist redlining policies not only prevented people of color from accessing loans to buy homes or open businesses, they also segregated communities into undesirable areas, far from good jobs and transportation options. Then came the Interstate Highway System. Building our car-centric transportation system came at the price of communities of color that were literally bulldozed, particularly Black communities, which enabled white flight from the cities into the suburbs. This destroyed thriving local neighborhoods and economies, further entrenched poverty, and displaced residents of color in cities across the country. Anyone who has pondered the purchase of an electric vehicle (EV) has thought about the battery and its eventual replacement. It has seemed to just go with the territory.
Meanwhile, electric streetcars were replaced with more automobiles, fattening the wallets of suburban real estate developers and the automobile industry at the expense of our once walkable, transit-rich cities. The result of this purely profit-driven transportation model is a legacy of car-dependent cities, air pollution, and climate change that disproportionately harms low-income communities of color. Simply swapping out every gas guzzler for a Nissan Leaf won’t single-handedly reverse decades of injustice and does not check the equity box. EV’s are great for lowering emissions and air pollution, but low-income communities need so much more. We all deserve clean air, yet to fully address the transportation injustice that communities of color face, clean air is just the tip of the iceberg. We need a transportation system that serves people and communities first.
At the Greenlining Institute, we define racial equity as transforming the behaviors, the institutions, and the systems that disproportionately harm people of color. Equity is also about increasing access to power, redistributing resources, eliminating barriers to opportunity, and empowering low-income communities of color to thrive and reach their full potential.
Today, low-income communities of color are still systematically shut out of the transportation planning and decision making process. Top transportation decision-makers do not accurately represent the demographics of the regions for which they make decisions. This is important, because people’s lived experiences inform how they make decisions, and if those in power are primarily wealthy, white, able-bodied men, this results in transportation decisions that harm or fail to benefit every other group of people.
Furthermore, low-income communities of color face many barriers to participating in the public engagement process, and often do not have the time, ability, access, and privilege, to show up at public meetings and advocate for their needs. As a result of who influences and decides which forms of transportation get prioritized, it’s no wonder why cars continue to be the most convenient way to get around while low-income people struggle on underfunded public transit and unsafe sidewalks.
This overrepresentation by wealthy white men in positions of power has created more favorable conditions for personal EV’s to be seen as the default mobility solution for our climate crisis. Yet, with more diverse voices in the room, we’d hear a louder call for clean mobility solutions that meet the needs of people who do not own cars, such as those who are transit-dependent. EV’s do indeed bring enormous benefits to low-income communities of color. But making decisions about EV’s without fair representation only reinforces our long history of inequitable lack of representation and decision-making power. To truly address equity, we first have to radically change this paradigm.
First and foremost, this means that decision-makers and policymakers cannot continue to put the cart before the horse and deploy any mobility options before they deeply understand the priorities and concerns of that community.
We have to be comprehensive in our approach, and single-occupancy EV’s are not always going to cut it. We need multi-modal solutions because every community has completely different needs. Therefore, Greenlining as an organization does not believe in telling communities what modes of transportation to use, whether that’s electric cars, transit, bikes, or scooters -- just as long as it’s clean. It’s not our place. In fact, it’s also not the place for the private sector, academic researchers, or government to assume they know which modes belong in which communities. Residents are the experts on their own communities, they most deeply understand their needs, and therefore they should have the power to decide which modes work best for them.
A few years ago we developed a tool that does just that. Our Mobility Equity Framework compares various mobility options on how they perform across a variety of equity indicators -- and allows the community to decide which mobility options most equitably meet their needs. What’s important here is that there’s no one single set of equity indicators -- instead, each community must be involved in selecting the appropriate equity indicators that reflect their priorities. The framework’s three steps are centered around 1) a community mobility needs assessment, 2) an equity analysis, and 3) the community ultimately voting on which mobility options they want deployed. This framework aims to democratize transportation planning and decision-making, and has been implemented in San Francisco, the Seattle region, and adapted to congestion pricing studies and several California clean mobility grant programs.
This kind of equity and community-driven process is how we should make plans and decisions around EV’s and all mobility options, not just endlessly deliberating over how to reduce barriers to access. Because if a mobility option just simply doesn't meet the needs of the community, no matter how many financial incentives or culturally appropriate marketing techniques one deploys, that will never increase adoption. However, even once a community does select their desired mobility options, that’s only half the battle. We still need equitable guidelines and accountability for how to deeply involve the community at every step of the way.
Greenlining has produced a number of key resources to help guide the development and deployment of various pilots and programs:
Electric Vehicle Equity Toolkit, which lays out strategies to reduce access and affordability barriers, increase adoption, and promote co-benefits of EV’s for low-income communities of color. These benefits include high-quality job creation, fair labor practices, workforce development opportunities, and positive impact on the local economy.
Electric Car Sharing in Underserved Communities, which provides a series of recommendations to ensure program success, providing a viable option for those who don’t want or need to own a car.
Making Equity Real in Mobility Pilots Toolkit plays out four key steps to embedding equity throughout the mission, the process, the implementation and outcomes, and the measurement and analysis of any type of clean mobility pilot.
These tools are intended to be used by all transportation practitioners, from advocates to government officials and the EV industry. The EV field as a whole has a unique opportunity to reject the legacy of injustice perpetrated by the automobile industry of the past, and instead center principles and practices of racial equity. This means moving away from the goal of every American owning an electric vehicle, and instead toward every American deciding for themselves which clean mobility options best meet their needs.