Why, in the United States, do we see such dramatic racial sorting across metropolitan areas? More than 50 years removed from the Civil Rights Movement which altered American social life, why is urban residential segregation still a dominant feature in the United States? The scholarly literature has yet to come to a consensus. There are two broad and well-researched areas of social science that attempt to uncover why neighborhoods in American cities are so racially homogenous. One espouses the belief that racial groups prefer to live near each other. The other upholds the idea that the American government squandered the wealth of communities of color and made it impossible for them to integrate with white people. A burgeoning area of research involves a combination of these two fields: racial groups may frequently prefer to live near each other, but even if they did not, American private and public institutions have made wealth building and residential mobility incredibly difficult for communities of color. This project seeks to supplement this flourishing literature on the American government’s role in fomenting racial segregation by analyzing an often overlooked public good—public transit. To do so, this project uses Philadelphia as a case study, examining how the legacy of redlining continues to impact citizens and how effective, equitable public transit has the capacity to reduce the harmful effects of this legacy, but often fails to do so. This project employs a mixed-methods approach. I use interviews and participant-observation, in pursuit of a community-based comprehension of this policy failure, to understand Philadelphians’ relationship with public transit. Targets of this research are primarily areas simultaneously experiencing lower incomes and limited access to transit relative to the rest of the city. I conclude that Philadelphia’s transit agency, SEPTA, is not sufficiently effective in counteracting the effects of segregation on wealth-building for low-income communities and communities of color.