Op-Ed. Public transit advancing social justice

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  In “The abandoned social goals of public transit in the neoliberal city of the USA”, Joe Grengs’ focuses on the inequity of transit planning in 1990 Los Angeles, where new rail lines serving the suburbs were prioritized over needed bus service in the urban core.  A separate and unequal transit system was being developed which heavily favored white suburban choice riders over transit dependent urban core minorities.  Grengs’ asks, “should transit serve people who have few transportation choices, or should transit offer drivers an alternate to their cars” (2010. p. 52)? In this case, the answer I believe is transit dependent inner city people should definitely be prioritized over choice riders in the suburbs.  He goes on to ask, “should public transit serve as an instrument for advancing social justice” (p.52)? My answer to this though is not an easy yes. 


Although I strongly believe in advancing social justice, increasing transit service isn’t necessarily the way to do it. Transit can promote social justice to an extent, but that shouldn’t be the point of it. The point of public transit should be to shuttle people around in densely populated areas, whether rich or poor.  There’s many benefits to public transportation in dense urban areas, including reducing traffic, safer streets, more accommodating to bikes and pedestrians, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, more physical activity, and of course, accessible transportation for transit dependent people (apta.com, n.d.). Outside of a dense urban area, those benefits are greatly reduced if not eliminated. Advancing social justice needs bigger and better solutions than public transit can offer.  
Currently, Portland, Oregon is quite different than the L.A. in Grengs’ example. Our transit dependent, low income, and minority residents are moving out of the urban core and further into the outskirts of town (Sevcenko, M. 2018).  In many cases, this is not because they prefer to live far from the city center, it’s because housing is no longer affordable for many working class households. Having reliable public transit is absolutely essential for transit dependent people, but if somebody has to commute by bus for well over an hour to get to a job with a poverty level wage, this is an injustice, whether the bus stop is frequently serviced or not.  Not providing transit at all is surely worse, but the big problem here isn’t the bus service, it’s access to fair and affordable housing. 

No person should be forced further and further away from society because they don’t earn enough money to inhabit the place they require for survival. The concession for being relocated out to the boonies is an occasional bus that meanders through the isolated neighborhood. Jarrett Walker addresses the hard choice that transit companies have to make between ridership or coverage. There’s simply not enough funding for reliable widespread coverage and optimal service in the high-ridership area (Walker, J. 2013). Transit companies have to provide an inferior service to the people who might be most in need because of the lack of  ridership. Rather than this balancing of service to accommodate the people most in need, I think it would be better to bring the people to the resources, rather than a buses to the boonies.
There’s plenty of space in the city for more housing, but so much of it is covered in pavement and cars. Approximately 35-50% of a typical American cities surface area is pavement, and 90% of this is roads and parking lots (Chao, J. 2012). Having people forced to the perimeter and outside town to make way for more cars and auto infrastructure is backwards from the way it should be. Cars are great for people who live in isolated areas, where public transit doesn’t really make sense. Cars and their infrastructure in the city are a threat to humanity, that should be decimated. The answer to these two related problems is a huge increase in taxes, fees, and citations, all aimed at central city drivers, and this revenue stream from city drivers should primarily be used to fund subsidized housing inside the city center. 

Expanding bus or train service into areas with low ridership is an inappropriate use of a great resource. On the other hand, using cars to move people short distances through congested city streets is an equally inappropriate use of another great resource. Grengs suggests that, “[t]ransit once held promise as a means for advancing larger social goals. Congress embraced transit as a legitimate means of redistributing wealth, as an acceptable counterbalance to the damages imposed by a transportation system skewed toward the automobile” (p. 52). This is the problem; our foundation is not conducive to transit or active transportation, and to make matters worse, transit dependent people are pushed out of areas where transit can actually be effective and efficient. So if we want to advance social justice, we’d better focus on affordable housing, and fair paying jobs. In my next op-ed, I’ll address how we can solve the transportation problem that would come from ending the empty boonie buses, and what to do with all the cars that don’t belong in the city. 

Wells Wait




References

Apta. (n.d.) Public transportation benefits. American public transportation association. Retrieved from- https://www.apta.com/mediacenter/ptbenefits/Pages/default.aspx

Chao, J. (2012.) Parking lot science: Is black best? Berkeley Lab. September 13th, 2012. Retrieved from- https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2012/09/13/parking-lot-science/
Grengs, J. (2005) The abandoned social goals of public transit in the 
            neoliberal city of the USA, City, 9:1, 51-66, DOI: 10.1080/13604810500050161 
Sevcenko, M. (2018). Un-gentrifying Portland: scheme helps displaced residents come home. The Guardian. Retrieved from-https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/01/portland-anti-gentrification-housing-scheme-right-return
Walker, J. (2013). “Abundant access”: a map of a community’s transit choices, and a possible goal of transit. Human Transit. Retrieved from- https://humantransit.org/2013/03/abundant-access-a-map-of-the-key-transit-choices.html




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