MILWAUKEE — Trudging through the summer heat with no respite in sight, a mirage appears on the horizon.
“Route 63,” the computerized female voice of an MCTS announces. Its riders stomped onto the cooled bus, feeling the relief from the pre-dog days of summer.
But for TJ Powell, it feels like an illusion that quickly disappears through a mental fog in his neighborhood which could possibly qualify as a transportation desert. The oasis he thought was there is gone before he knows it.
“Man, it sucks,” Powell said. “You sitting over there like, dang. I can’t go to work or hang with the friends.”
Powell relies on his car to get him everywhere but it’s not the most reliable. If it breaks down, he’s stranded on this transportation desert island.
“I usually ask my friend here, Mr. Dean,” Powell said. “Or send a prayer up to God and hopefully my car works.”
According to the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SEWRPC), Powell’s Silver Spring Neighborhood is categorized as having “basic” transit service quality. According to SEWRPC, that means it’s an area within walking distance of at least one local bus route but generally not more than two.
“The bus is hit or miss, to be honest with you,” Powell said.
Clarence Harris has a reliable vehicle so he doesn’t have to think about the other options. However, growing up in Chicago, he noticed a major drop off in service once moving here.
“We had the L and the bus in Chicago,” Harris said. “It ran often. We didn’t have this problem in Chicago.”
And for Ruth Moore, frequency is the biggest issue she’s noticed with transit services in this part of Milwaukee. Again, she has a vehicle but if something were to happen, it would upend her life.
“I wouldn’t have a choice,” Moore said. “My commute would double. If I have to catch a second bus, it’s going to triple.”
Areas classified as “basic” are often communities of color. The City of Milwaukee has been called the worst in the country for African American advancement. A study by UW-Milwaukee shows African American residents in Milwaukee are among the lowest in the country for homeownership rates and among the highest for rates of poverty and joblessness. While transportation isn’t the only reason, SEWRPC Chief Transportation Engineer, Christopher Hiebert says it plays a big role.
“Quality of life depends on not just the automobile,” Hiebert said. “It also depends on having transit, having bicycle-ped accommodations. Having options for transportation.”
SEWRPC is the planning agency for the seven counties in Southeastern Wisconsin including; Kenosha, Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Racine, Walworth, Washington, and Waukesha Counties. For over 60 years, it has worked to address problems beyond political boundaries while supplementing solutions for fiscal capabilities in individual communities.
“Our work centers on land use, environmental, and transportation planning,” Stephanie Hacker, Executive Director said. “We holistically provide a view of how the region can continue to flourish and keep a high quality of life for those working and living in the region.”
In order to flourish, Hiebert feels transportation is of the utmost importance.
“Transportation is key in everybody’s life,” Hiebert said. “Think about your own life and how transportation is involved in that. Transportation is key to the movement of goods, people, and information. It’s a very important part of people’s lives.”
“People who are transportation insecure find it hard to access places that you need to go to,” Alexandra Murphy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan said. “It can be hard to get to work on time, search for work, or take jobs where there are erratic schedules that don’t meet the bus schedules. It can be hard to take your child to school. It can be hard to get to parent-teacher conferences or to get to the voting booth.”
The impact of unreliable transportation led Murphy and her team at the University of Michigan to establish the Transportation Security Index (TSI); a 16-question questionnaire that can help identify potential transportation deserts.
“There are many people who own cars that can’t drive them because they can’t afford gas,” Murphy said. “Or they can’t afford to repair their cars. There are many people who don’t own cars that can’t get around.”
Murphy and her team identified a similarity between transportation insecurity and food insecurity, a metric used to identify food deserts. A food desert, according to the USDA, is an area where “at least 100 households are located more than one-half mile from the nearest supermarket and have no vehicle access.”
“One of the brilliant things that the food security index does is, rather than look at the inputs of the insecurity, it asks people question about the symptoms of food insecurity as they are experienced on the ground,” Murphy said. “The food security index asks questions like, in the last 30 days how often have you had to split a meal because you couldn’t afford to eat more? That’s how we ended up sort of using the food security index as our model.”
According to the TSI Murphy and her team have issued, she says roughly 25 percent of Americans are transportation insecure. That’s about double the percentage of people who are food insecure (12.5 percent) according to the USDA.
The I-Team brought Michigan’s to the Silver Spring neighborhood to ask some of the questions to residents. Halfway through talking to Powell, he couldn’t help but laugh.
“Man, you know it all,” Powell said. “It’s often.”
In the 16 questions, Powell answered “often” for 14 questions and sometimes for two of the questions. According to the TSI scale, he scored a 30 out of 32 possible points which qualifies him as having high transportation insecurity.
“That’s wild,” he said.
The other residents the I-Team questioned said if it weren’t for their vehicle, they would also answer “often” to many of the questions on the TSI.
“We found transportation insecurity is highest for those people who live in urban areas in the US,” Murphy said. “It’s the second highest in suburban areas and the lowest prevalence estimates in rural areas.”
Murphy says these results were relatively surprising. Most major cities, like the City of Milwaukee, have a robust transit system which are frequently the largest in their representative states.
“You would think that urban areas have all these transportation options,” Murphy said. “It’s more dense and therefore, we would think, that these rates would be lower. But there is literature in urban economics that says one of the reasons we see poverty so concentrated in cities is because of mobility options. People who don’t have cars, haven’t moved to the suburbs, they need all of those options. What it’s telling us is even with all of those options, it’s still not helping them move from insecurity to security. There are still a lot of factors that are shaping insecurity, even though people have a wide range of options in cities.”
“[The TSI] has great questions to ask people,” Hiebert said. “I think they’d be very helpful in trying to understand the kinds of issues that individuals are facing from a personal level.”
SEWRPC does not use the TSI but, Hiebert says, they implement a lot of the same techniques in trying to identify areas of need.
“We are working through community organizations and building relationships with various community groups,” Hiebert said. “We are able to get more participation and find out some of the same types of information that this TSI gets at.”
One area SEWRPC tries to identify is job vicinity. Hiebert says they use metrics to identify how far people can get or how many jobs are within 30 minutes of a location to help identify the quality of transportation for any given neighborhood.
“That prevents people from having opportunity,” Hiebert said. “So there may be more competition for the jobs they do have access to.”
To tackle these issues, since 2016 SEWRPC has a plan called Vision 2050. As the name suggests, it’s a goal to improve land use and transportation for Southeastern Wisconsin by 2050.
“I think we will see more BRT (bus rapid transit) in the region,” Hiebert said. “Milwaukee County has already implemented one BRT line. The east-west or Connect One. They are currently working on Connect Two.”
Connect Two is a BRT line that would essentially run the length of 27th Street in Milwaukee. Hiebert says it is moving toward project development and could be another example of increasing transportation security in the area. But these improvements aren’t just for four-wheeled vehicles.
“Bicycle and pedestrian conditions in the region have been improving considerably over time,” Hiebert said. “It’s actually one of the elements of our long-range plan that has been implemented the most.”
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