Racial demographics of areas have often impacted transportation planning in the United States. Even when there is no explicit intent of racism, there are often still racial disparities in various transport-related statistics, including pedestrian fatalities.

Racism has been an ongoing issue in the United States, reflected in numerous aspects of American life and culture.

In the Southern United States, Jim Crow laws were in effect from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. These laws required virtually all aspects of Southern life, including public transit vehicles, to be segregated by race. However, less overt segregation also happened in other parts of the country.

After World War II and through the Civil Rights Movement, white middle-class residents of many urban areas (both within and outside the South) moved to rapidly-developing suburbs in large numbers, a phenomenon known as white flight. Catalysts for this population shift included mandated desegregation of public facilities such as public schools (later including practices such as busing) as well as the Interstate Highway System, redlining, exclusionary covenants, and mortgage discrimination making it easier for whites to move to suburbs, while black populations and other communities of color could not, even when they could afford it.

This wave of suburbs was designed around the car, and were conceived as racially exclusive communities. (Even today, suburbs tend to be whiter than the cities they surround.) As a result of suburbanization and rising automobile use, public transit ridership massively dropped in cities across the US post-World War II, continuing a general downward trend since the 1920s.

Today, while driving remains by far the most popular mode of transportation nationwide among all US racial groups, people of color generally use transit, walk, and cycle at higher rates than whites in many US cities and metropolitan areas, where usage of non-car travel modes is heavier, and make up a larger share of transit ridership nationwide.^[1]

After World War II, highways were built and expanded nationwide as part of the Interstate Highway System. As mentioned above, highways were a driver of white flight to suburbs. Additionally, highways were often built straight through neighborhoods populated primarily by African Americans (or other communities of color such as Asian Americans^[2]), requiring residents' homes to be demolished by eminent domain. In many cases, even when a white neighborhood or other alignment (such as an old railroad track) would be more direct, the planners still would build through the non-white neighborhood due to lower land values and lack of political power to oppose construction, both symptoms of racial discrimination.^[3] Alternatively, some alignments were chosen to physically separate white neighborhoods with neighborhoods populated primarily by people of color.^[4] In some cases, highway revolts were started, to protest said construction.

Fatal pedestrian accidents, already a bigger issue in the US compared to many other developed countries^[5] and continuing an upward trend as of 2023-2024,^[6][7] disproportionately impact people of color (specifically African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and American Indian and Alaska Native populations).^[8] Additionally, the enforcement of jaywalking laws by police has at times had racial disparities,^[9][10][11] leading some US cities and states, such as New York City^[10] and California,^[11] to decriminalize jaywalking in the 2020s.

Public transit in the United States, especially local buses, and to a lesser extent passenger rail, have a huge stigma associated with them, specifically that they are mainly used by poorer people, especially racial minorities, who often have no other way of getting around. This stigma creates obstacles for funding, as well as implementation, such as local opposition to buses running to richer areas and malls on the grounds that it would bring crime.^[12][13][14]

On the other hand, many forms of public transit (primarily heavy or light rail, streetcars, bus rapid transit and park-and-ride buses), in addition to walkability and bike lane projects, have been accused of gentrification at the expense of people of color,^[12] or been designed in a manner that reinforces racial disparities.

• In Atlanta, it is often argued that racial politics play a role in the operation and future service planning for MARTA, the city's transit authority. Opponents of Georgia's transportation policies have alleged a race-based two-tiered system, where billions are spent by the state on highway expansion to aid the automobile commutes of mostly White residents of the suburbs and rural areas (like GRIP), while service cuts at MARTA have hurt mostly African Americans in low-income areas where residents cannot afford automobile ownership.^[15] Proponents contest that a portion of state funding for highways comes from the gasoline tax, a user fee analogous to the fare MARTA riders pay. Supporters of MARTA have alleged that the lack of participation by other metro Atlanta counties is rooted in racism and classism.^[15][16] In 1987, David Chesnut, then chairman of MARTA, stated, "The development of a regional transit system in the Atlanta area is being held hostage to race, and I think it's high time we admitted it and talked about it."^[17] As part of its Title VI plan, MARTA data revealed that 75 percent of MARTA riders were Black in 2015.^[18] MARTA is often given the racially charged backronym "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta", referring to its mostly African American ridership, particularly outside of rush hours.^[19][20] Suburban counties' opposition to MARTA expansion is often due to fears of it causing increased crime, as well as the cost of expansion and perceived lack of need for the service.
• In the 1990s in Buffalo, New York, Walden Galleria management opposed a bus from the majority Black inner city — and not those from majority white suburbs and even Canada — from stopping on the mall grounds. As a result, bus riders from the inner city getting off the bus had to cross seven lanes of traffic without a crosswalk to reach the mall. This led to the death of a 17-year-old Black teenager, Cynthia N. Wiggins, who was crossing the street from the bus stop to her job when she was hit by a dump truck, after which the mall was accused of racism. In settling a wrongful death claim against Walden Galleria and NFTA Metro and to prevent a boycott of the mall, the bus stop was soon moved to a point inside the mall, where it remains today.^{[21][22][23][24][25]}
• Washington Metro's College Park station, on the Green Line, was built further from the University of Maryland than planned due to opposition from university leaders. At the time, Washington D.C. was overwhelmingly Black, and the university was overwhelmingly white. In 2017, former Maryland Governor and Prince George's County Executive Parris Glendening admitted the university's decision to have the Metro station as far away from campus as possible, or 1.6 miles (2.6 km), requiring students to take a student-operated shuttle bus to access the campus, was a "disaster" and racially biased. He claims that it was primarily due to administrators and community residents saying they did not want crime or undesirable people coming to campus on the Green Line from the poorer neighborhoods of Washington.^[26][27]

• Although Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in the San Francisco Bay Area was built to race-neutral specifications, the system's design was alleged by Robert O. Self’s book American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland to be focused on serving white suburban commuters. A notable example of design that has been considered to have racially biased effects is the gap of 2.7 miles (4.3 km) between Fruitvale and Lake Merritt stations, the longest distance between any two city stations in the system. Here, trains run non-stop through the racially diverse urban neighborhood of San Antonio, Oakland.^[12][28] However, in modern times, Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in its ridership, with whites and Asians underrepresented.^[29]

Policing on many city transit systems, including New York City Transit, is often unfairly biased towards people of color, particularly Blacks and Latinos.

Minorities are regularly underrepresented in public transit leadership, despite being overrepresented (in most cases) in lower-level staff and system ridership.^[30]

• Environmental racism
• Anti-urbanism
• Societal effects of cars#United States
• Car dependency
• Motonormativity