A high-quality public transit system creates a variety of benefits for a metropolitan area. According to the Surface Transportation Policy Project, such systems enhance the local economy, improve public health, promote social equity, and protect the environment.

More specifically, transit:

• Increases worker satisfaction and productivity by lessening commuting time;
  
  
• Cushions the effect of high gasoline costs on working families;
  
  
• Reduces traffic and thereby lessens air pollution;
  
  
• Lowers highway maintenance costs by reducing road wear and tear;
  
  
• Encourages people to do more walking and thus reduces obesity;
  
  
• Expands job opportunities for workers who cannot afford a car.

Investing in mass transit is a key aspect of smart growth, but transit by itself cannot significantly mitigate the effects of sprawl. Even well funded transit systems cannot keep pace with development in outer suburban areas if new jobs are not transit-accessible.

Race, Poverty and Sprawl
The negative effects of sprawl disproportionately affect low-income families and people of color. Although some smart growth activists focus on environmental and quality-of-life issues, there is a social-equity wing of the movement that works on issues of race and class.

One way of framing this critique is by looking at automobile ownership patterns. Driven to Spend, a 2000 report by the Surface Transportation Policy Project, notes that African-Americans are about three and a half times more likely to not own a car than white families; for Latino households it is about two and a half times. This creates a severe job search impediment since most new jobs are located in suburban areas not accessible by public transit.

Those working families that do own a car are taking on an expensive burden. Purchase, maintenance, registration fees, parking fees, fuel and insurance costs can eat up a significant portion of the disposable income of a working family. Rising gasoline prices are making this burden much greater. For working families with or without a car, sprawl amounts to a tax upon their standard of living.

Subsidies, Transit and Job Availability
When state and local governments subsidize development projects, they are in a position to set eligibility standards for the receipt of government assistance. Such criteria could include a requirement that any subsidized project be accessible to public transit. Yet this common-sense notion is all but unheard of in the United States. A 2003 Good Jobs First study called Missing the Bus: How States Fail to Connect Economic Development with Public Transit found that not one single state requires or encourages companies that receive subsidies in urban areas to locate the projects at locations accessible by public transportation.

At the same time, there is evidence that job subsidies encourage companies to move to areas that are inaccessible for many urban working families. In our study, Another Way Sprawl Happens, Good Jobs First examined the movement of companies to Anoka (an outer suburb of Minneapolis), which had offered them free land valued at more than $7.5 million. This resulted in the movement of 29 companies with 1,600 jobs to a 300-acre industrial park. The net result of the subsidized relocations was to move the jobs away from the region's largest concentrations of people of color, away from pockets of poverty and away from households receiving public assistance.

The migrations also had a devastating effect on transit accessibility. Before the relocations, more than 70 percent of the jobs were accessible by regularly scheduled transit. In Anoka, they were no longer accessible. This movement especially harmed inner-city workers, who are more likely to rely on public transportation. A report on the region projected that 50 percent of its employment growth will occur in outer-ring developing areas where nearly half the projects are inaccessible by transit.

New Approaches to Transit and Economic Development
Policymakers have begun to devise new approaches to development that serve to link people to transportation. Among these are location-efficient incentives.

The basic idea of location-efficient incentives is simple: economic development subsidies should serve the public interest by promoting efficient use of land and infrastructure. By providing subsidies preferentially to companies locating near public transportation, or creating equivalent access or affordable housing, location-efficient incentives create more opportunity for low-income workers without cars, thus contributing to a healthier environment.

With such "double bottom line" use of incentives, state and local governments can achieve major savings on avoided costs for new infrastructure while the community affected by new development reaps the benefits of transit accessibility. In A Better Deal for Illinois, a 2003 report on state subsidy policy and practice, Good Jobs First proposed a state requirement that subsidized projects proposed for a metro area must be accessible by mass transit. This policy has since been debated by state legislators. Read the text of the location efficient incentive legislation here.

Creating better ties between transit and development does not always require subsidies. The rise in transit-oriented development, in which developers deliberately locate projects close to existing transit stops, suggests that the market wants more job and transit coordination.

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development defines TOD as walkable development that occurs within 1/2 mile of a rail or rapid bus transit stop, is linked to a network of walkable/bikeable streets, and contains mixed-use retail, residential, and workplace activities. TOD can provide residents with improved quality of life and reduced household transportation expenses. It can also provide the region with stable mixed-income neighborhoods that reduce environmental impacts and provide alternatives to traffic congestion.