US faces effects of urban sprawl By Betty Liu

Published: March 28 2001 16:37GMT | Last Updated: March 29 2001 04:06GMT

In the rural town of Maryville, Tennessee, a few locals have found a simple solution to a complex problem burdening cities throughout the US - how to transport the poor to their jobs.

For the residents of this community nestled at the foot of the Smoky Mountains, the answer was obvious: give away free cars. And so for the past three years, 15 cars have been offered free of charge to the poorest of the 20,000 residents, enough so that the programme leaders claim there are no longer any applicants this year.

"We've pretty well fixed the problem," says Steve West, the used auto dealer who furnished the vehicles. "In our small town, that was the need and we filled it."

Such claims are rare for those wrestling with the consequences of urban sprawl, where growth over the past decade has mirrored the frenetic pace of the US economy.

As cities across the US are flattening out, absorbing counties 10 to 30 miles away, a troubling trend is revealed, which state and federal governments have only just begun to address in the past few years: the inability of the poor to travel to areas of employment.

That problem, relatively easy to remedy in a town such as Maryville, is a daunting task for urban planners in metropolises such as Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago.

It is particularly difficult because the issue unveils a host of other complex topics, the deterioration of city centres, isolation of minorities within city limits, and increasingly exclusive policies among those, mostly affluent whites, living in the suburbs.

"What you're seeing are two trends in this country - jobs moving away from the city to the outlying suburbs and the poor, particularly minorities, continuing to live within the city core," says Bruce Katz, director of the Center On Urban and Metropolitan Policy at the Brookings Institution. The lack of proper public transit in most of these fast-growing cities has in effect shut the poor out of these jobs, a phenomenon policymakers term "spatial mismatch".

"The magnitude of the problem differs from place to place. It's absolutely severe in cities like Atlanta where most of the growth is up north, but all the poor people live in the southern side of the city," Mr Katz says. "It's less severe in Chicago where there's a mature transit system and some job growth within city borders."

Even that is not enough. An initiative in the early 1990s to link African-Americans living in the western end of Chicago to industrial parks around the O'Hare international airport eventually failed because travel times were too long. In Los Angeles, the problem is not that mass transit is inconvenient or inaccessible, but that it is overcrowded, causing long delays for many commuters.

But nowhere is the problem more acute than in Atlanta, whose massive counties are among some of the fastest-growing in the nation but whose mass transit system ranks among the worst.

Its subway line, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (Marta), only traverses two of the city's 10 counties and has been ridiculed as a choo-choo train for tourists, not serious commuters.

"The system was laid out pretty well for what Atlanta might have looked like in the 1950s," points out Michael Rich, a professor of political science at Emory University. "Having a token isn't going to be that big of a help if there's no bus or train that goes to your job in the first place."

Employment in Atlanta's most distant county, Cherokee, is expected to rise 133 per cent in the next 25 years, almost three times the rate of Fulton county, which spans part of the inner city, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission.

And even as some counties, such as Cobb, are putting in place their own transit systems, the design is more to shuffle suburban residents into downtown rather than the opposite.

Such incongruous policy has deepened the racial rifts in Atlanta, pitting the mostly black city officials against their white counterparts in the suburbs. Both have blamed each other for Atlanta's nefarious transportation problems.

Residents in pricey suburban neighbourhoods have rejected several proposals to extend subway lines into their districts, presumably to keep low-income minorities out. They argue that more people and businesses would move into the city if officials improved roads, encouraged neighbourhood revitalisation programmes and cleaned up corruption.

As in Maryville, efforts to alleviate the transportation hurdles are often remote and limited. In 1998 the federal government implemented a $750m job access programme to encourage cities to find ways to transport welfare recipients to places of employment.

Some companies have tackled the issue on their own, such as United Parcel Service.

The Atlanta-based package delivery corporation has worked with public transit authorities in Chicago and Philadelphia to help bus workers to sorting facilities in the suburbs. In its home city, UPS provides employees with discounted subway passes since its facilities are all located near transit stations.

"I don't think decentralisation of jobs on one side, concentrated poverty on the other is an inevitable trend," said Mr Katz.

"The answer is not only to cure the mismatch, but to also grow some of these cities in a balanced and fair way." That will inevitably take much more than giving away a few free cars.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2001