“We should be looking for love!” shouted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, flanked by his nine children, at the Great American State Fair in June. “Get married and have lots of kids!”
The Trump administration shamelessly tried to turn Duffy’s ethos into a policy issue when it announced a bizarre new plan earlier this month to tie huge federal transit funding to high birth and marriage rates.
If the scheme comes into force, communities with large numbers of traditional nuclear families will receive 10 per cent of funding for new trains, bus routes and ferry lines. “If you want federal funding, your plans need to be aligned with where communities and families are actually developing,” Duffy Transportation said in a statement.
Trump, the self-proclaimed “president of fertilization,” and his group of representatives of the neo-patriarchal tradition have long been concerned about the country’s declining birth rate. But as dubious as this new policy may be, it stumbles upon a real pain point with the nation’s public transit systems: They’re not as family-friendly as they should be. Whether or not these troubling birtherist guidelines take effect as written — and they probably will — they raise important questions about how American families use our transportation system now, and how these policies could actually make their lives easier in the long run.
The same problems that affect all passengers – long waiting times, difficult-to-reach stations, inadequate coverage and crowded peak times – often have a double impact on households. That’s why so many people are fleeing the country’s densest, most accessible cities in search of suburbia where they don’t have to lug strollers up yet another broken escalator to a subway platform.
Families who can’t afford to trade in MetroCards and bus passes for minivans may find themselves with overpriced housing and particularly substandard transportation options, forcing them to endure brutal hours-long commutes. The most important factor predicting social mobility in the United States is neither crime rates, nor test scores, nor the presence of a “traditional” two-parent household, but access to adequate transportation, according to a landmark study. For every extra minute a child spends in school, they are less likely to escape poverty as adults.
For this reason alone, American families with children do deserve special attention when it comes to how, where, and why we build public transportation. At this point, the Trump administration did some right things, even if they did it for all the wrong reasons — reasons that I, a childless woman of childbearing age, find vaguely nationalistic and, most importantly, personally creepy.
But families often need mass transit the most in the places where it’s hardest to raise children — that is, in dense cities rather than already car-centric suburbs. In that sense, especially, in fact, for those families who really rely on public transportation every day, the situation is likely to get worse.
What family-friendly public transportation actually looks like
Marriage and birth rates may sound like reasonable indicators of where families live, but in fact, according to analysis by the Urban Institute, places with the most “traditional” nuclear families tend to be whiter, wealthier than the overall population, and more likely to travel by car rather than train or bus.
We’re talking about suburbs here, and while these suburbs certainly deserve their own transport infrastructure, they rarely rely on trains or buses in the same way that car-free households living on the outskirts of big cities do. Yet the Trump administration has generally expressed disdain and even outright disdain for these communities—some of which, in fact, do have high birth rates.
Take Chicago’s Red Line, for example. It is the busiest corridor in the city’s L rail system, serving approximately 138 million passengers annually. The line has long been in need of expansion, and the $5.7 billion expansion project, nearly 60 years in the making, finally broke ground earlier this year. It would add 5.5 miles of track and four new stations in the city’s southernmost neighborhood.
For more than half a century, families on Chicago’s Far South Side have cobbled together a grueling commute that forces them to switch from buses and trains to get to downtown Chicago, helping to explain why the area’s unemployment and poverty rates remain so high. Many of the new stations will be built in communities like Roseland, considered one of the most challenging places in the country to raise children, but thousands of local families still find ways to raise children.
Rossland’s birth rate is well above the national average, meaning Duffy’s transport department should theoretically be keen to provide additional funding for transport projects there. But first they have to be willing to fund it, which they may not have been willing to do if past policies had worked. Just last year, the Trump administration chose to freeze federal funds already allocated for the red line extension, plunging the long-awaited program into another long-term infrastructure purgatory.
The move plays into a broader pattern: The Trump administration has blocked dozens of transportation projects, including the Red Line, in what appears to be a broader push for a lack of federal infrastructure funding in Democratic-led cities. While a federal judge ultimately intervened to allow the redlining extension to proceed, more similar projects in other urban communities could be deprioritized if the Trump administration’s new guidelines take effect after public comment closes in November.
Ultimately, it’s suburban residents who are most likely to benefit from the Trump administration’s proposed policies.
One example is Utah’s FrontRunner 2X, a commuter rail project that will shorten travel times for Utahns across the state and will also help Salt Lake City handle an influx of visitors when it hosts the Olympics in 2034. The project received the same federal funding as Chicago’s Red Line extension. In contrast to this more urban initiative, FrontRunner 2X is the rare public transportation project to receive sustained support under the Trump administration.
Utah has one of the highest birth and marriage rates in the country, so it’s no exaggeration to say that if the Trump administration gets its way, the country will see more projects like FrontRunner 2X funded, while others like the Red Line extension face bureaucratic bottlenecks and funding freezes. Despite Roseland’s high birth rate, the community’s marriage rate is among the lowest in the country, meaning that even if a project there did manage to get federal support, it would still receive far less money from the federal government, by this new calculation, than in a place like a Salt Lake City suburb where married families with children are more common.
Trump’s new pro-birth transportation agenda at least suggests that after spending two years doing nothing, firing Amtrak executives and promoting cars big and small, he may finally have a semi-coherent transportation strategy. His transport department has allowed some truly family-friendly upgrades to the country’s transport infrastructure, including funding to add space for prams on trains and buses.
But you can’t claim to support American families while taking federal funds away from programs that could actually change their lives. I’m not one to condemn the revival of commuter rail, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of American families — Duffy says he’s desperate to have more kids — who have no choice but to wait an hour for a bus to get to work.