Recent graduate Quinn Molloy (PhD, 2024) found that found that Black households spend more on transportation than white households.
The study, published in the journal Transportation Research Record by recent Department of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies graduate Quinn Molloy ’24 Ph.D., evaluated the impact of car dependency on equity and sustainability in the United States.
Molloy and her colleagues wrote about their findings in their analysis “Black Households Are More Burdened by Vehicle Ownership than White Households.” They showed that while the country’s transportation system comes at a high cost all around, it is especially burdensome for Black Americans.
“It is intuitive that people in the United States who have had systemically suppressed income, who have had to bear the larger burden of transportation infrastructure running through segregated neighborhoods have different and worse outcomes when it comes to transportation spending,” Molloy says. “It’s not so surprising.”
Molloy, who took an interdisciplinary approach to her dissertation working with Carol Atkinson-Palombo, a professor of Geography, Sustainability, Community, and Urban Studies; and Norman Garrick, an emeritus professor in the College of Engineering, said working across the two disciplines allowed her to look more holistically at how infrastructure “impacts people in the real world and how things like transportation planning and transportation engineering are not math puzzles.”
“They are human beings with lives that are impacted by the world that is built for them, and that is really important,” Molloy says.
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