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As the first congenitally blind member of Congress and a former president of the Bay area Rapid Transit (Bart) Board, I know that the ability to move – to get to work, to school, to the doctor – is a freedom our nation’s civil rights laws have long promised to protect. Last month, the Trump administration derailed that promise.
Through a regulatory maneuver designed to evade public scrutiny, the Department of Transportation announced it will no longer hold transportation agencies accountable when their decisions produce discriminatory outcomes – no matter how severe – so long as the discrimination was unintentional. As a result, decades of civil rights protection were erased by regulatory fiat.
The consequences are far-reaching. The Department of Transportation touches the daily lives of millions of Americans, overseeing highways, transit and aviation, and channeling billions in taxpayer dollars into infrastructure across the country. Until last month, those dollars came with a condition: projects had to be reviewed for basic fairness, and agencies could be held accountable if their decisions caused significant harm along racial lines without a proper justification. That condition is now gone.
What did that protection look like in practice? In 2009, Oakland residents – represented by lawyers from Public Advocates – petitioned the Federal Transit Administration to investigate Bart over a 3.2-mile extension to the Oakland international airport. The project traversed predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods but excluded stops that would have connected local residents to job centers along the route, while charging a premium fare that priced them out entirely. Not only was the project not designed to serve local residents, the community was already suffering from reductions in local bus service.
The FTA found Bart out of compliance and pulled federal funding from the project. That is disparate impact liability working exactly as intended: making discrimination visible and holding agencies accountable.
That tool is now gone.
This isn’t an isolated rollback. Donald Trump is systematically dismantling disparate impact liability across federally funded programs – in employment, housing, and lending, and now transportation. Protections won over a century of civil rights struggle by our elders who fought with blood, sweat and tears, are being erased one regulation at a time.
That’s why earlier this year, I called on the Department of Transportation to protect disparate impact regulations. Our tax dollars should not be going towards projects that do not abide by our basic civil rights.
Transportation has always been a civil rights battleground. Homer Plessy challenged segregated train cars in 1892; bus riders in Montgomery and on the Freedom Rides won integration during the civil rights movement. People with disabilities fought for accessible transit and propelled the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990. Each of these movements understood something essential: the freedom to move with dignity is not a convenience – it is a prerequisite for full participation in society.
That truth hasn’t changed. Eliminating a bus line through a predominantly Black neighborhood cuts off access to jobs, healthcare, education and community life just as surely as refusing to let Black passengers board. Building a highway through a Latino neighborhood means those residents breathe more pollution than their neighbors do. The United States has a long history of infrastructure decisions that have harmed, displaced and isolated communities of color. Disparate impact analysis is what makes those patterns visible, and what gives communities the standing to fight back.
Ideally, we wouldn’t need such tools. But the legacy of deliberate segregation and unequal resource allocation is not only history. Today, it continues to shape who gets access and who gets left behind. Disparate impact liability is about ensuring equitable outcomes. As federal civil rights protections collapse, states and local transit agencies must fill the gap by voluntarily adopting disparate impact standards, continuing to collect demographic data and conducting equity analyses before decisions are made, not after harms occur. California, with its own civil rights framework, has both the tools and the obligation to lead.
As a disabled person who has never been able to drive, I have found a lifeline in public transit – getting me to school, to work, to pick up my daughter from daycare as a young single mom. For me, and for millions of others, affordable and reliable transit is not a policy preference. It is what makes full participation in society possible. The freedom to move with dignity is a cornerstone of civil rights. We must protect the tools that defend it.
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Congresswoman Lateefah Simon represents California’s 12th congressional district in the East Bay. She is the first congenitally blind member to serve in Congress and a strong advocate for transportation and disability justice. She previously served as Bart president and executive director of the San Francisco Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights
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Guillermo Mayer is an attorney and the president and CEO of Public Advocates, a 55-year old civil rights law firm and advocacy organization dedicated to challenging the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination
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