Communities that genuinely desire to confront legacies of racism, poverty, and dispossession have to prioritize free, frequent, and comfortable public transportation alongside public housing.
Driving—as anyone who’s ever owned a vehicle knows—is an incredibly expensive activity. The average cost in the U.S. to own and operate a new vehicle in 2019 was calculated at $9,280 per year.1 That figures includes everything from fuel to maintenance and repairs, to insurance and licence fees, to depreciation of the vehicle’s value. While upfront prices to purchase used cars are lower, less fuel efficiency and more maintenance issues can lead to higher ongoing costs over time. Americans owe banks a total of $1.1 trillion in car loans.2
Quite predictably, such costs lead to unequal and inaccessible transportation, exacerbating existing divisions along race and class lines.3 Almost 20 percent of households in the U.S. without a vehicle are Black and 13.6 percent are Native American, compared to a national average of 9.1 percent.4 Low-income households spend 16 percent of household income on transportation; high-income earners spend 8 percent.5
This lack of access to transportation impedes access to employment, food, healthcare, education, and social services. Many jobs require a licence and a vehicle, an expectation that excludes applicants who can’t afford to drive or have had their licences revoked after being unable to pay fines for infractions as small as a burnt-out taillight.6 Distance from a job can have a significant impact on hiring practices. Callback rates fall by 1.1 percent for every mile an applicant moves away from a job; commuting distance and neighbourhood poverty can account for a full two-thirds of the penalty in job callback rates in Washington, DC.7 One study indicated that low-wage workers in San Diego with access to a car had thirty times as much access to jobs as workers who didn’t.8
Most households in food deserts don’t have access to a vehicle.9 Lack of access to reliable transportation also compromises the ability for people in low-income communities to get to medical appointments on time; about one of every four low-income patients have missed or rescheduled appointments due to mobility constraints.10 Gentrification of many cities has displaced low-income residents out of downtowns. Having relied on active and public transportation, they are now required to own personal vehicles for the first time in their lives—at greatly disproportionate cost.11
One of the chief appeals of ride-hailing services like Uber or shared autonomous vehicles as promoted by Waymo is that individual riders don’t have to own a car. They can simply use an app to summon one when desired. Proponents argue that eliminating the large capital cost of owning and operating a vehicle will make mobility more accessible, particularly for households that don’t currently own their own car and aren’t served well by transit or taxis.
The proliferation of privately owned electric vehicles doesn’t fit particularly easily into this vision, given the typically high cost of a new car. But various groups concerned with transportation equity have proposed state-led solutions that expand subsidies for electric vehicles, with a focus on low- income residents. Jurisdictions in California are leading the way, offering up to $9,500 in funding to purchase an electric vehicle if a low-income resident trades in an older gasoline- or diesel- powered vehicle.12 And utility companies in San Diego and Santa Rosa are working to improve access to charging stations in low-income neighbourhoods.13
The shared usage of electric vehicles is another commonly suggested remedy. Some cities, mostly in California, have introduced genuine car-sharing options using electric vehicles with a specific focus on low-income communities. BlueLA in Los Angeles charges a sliding scale between fifteen and twenty cents per minute, and features 100 cars and 200 charging points.14 Sacramento is introducing a similar program called Envoy, featuring electric vehicles available for rent at 71 spots around the city, including in low-income areas.15
There are promising examples of ridesharing in the Central Valley of California, where many rural low-income farmworker communities suffer from air pollution and isolation from basic services. In Cantua Creek, a community-led ride-sharing program that recently acquired a seven-seat Tesla Model X allows residents to take trips at the rough cost of a bus trip.16 In addition, they provide alternative ways to pay for the service, Spanish service, and the option to book over the phone. In the nearby community of Huron, a similar service described by its mayor as “indigenous Ubers” provide low-cost rides to residents in electric vehicles.17 Similarly, Winnipeg’s non-profit Ikwe Safe Rides, organized by Indigenous women, seeks to provide a rideshare service to mostly Indigenous women who, fearing sexual harassment, prefer to avoid taxis.18 New York City’s legendary “dollar vans” also provide an informal ridesharing network.19
Of course, this isn’t the model of ridesharing that “three revolutions” boosters are talking about; in fact, the headline for the New York Times profile of Huron’s ride-sharing service was “The Anti-Uber.”20 The modes that are redefining cities and towns and attracting by far the most political attention and venture capital are ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.
One assessment of 6.3 million Lyft rides in Los Angeles County seemed to confirm the political appeal of such services, finding that 99.8 percent of the county’s population was served by Lyft—and that low-income residents used it the most.21 Lead researcher Anne E. Brown wrote: “Users living in low-income neighborhoods ... may have low—or zero—personal car access and therefore use Lyft to provide rather than supplement auto-mobility.”22
In mid-2018, Lyft announced $1.5 million over a year for free rides to low-income people and military veterans for situations like job interviews and medical appointments. This followed its Relief Rides program, initiated in the wake of Hurricane Irma and California’s 2017 wildfire season to offer free rides to shelters, hospitals, and blood donation clinics.23 Lyft has also partnered with the Washington, DC, anti-poverty organization Martha’s Table for a six-month program to offer $2.50 shared rides so that 500 families can access grocery stores as a way to confront the crisis of food deserts. That program has been replicated in other cities, including Portland and Indianapolis.24
Autonomous vehicles are already being marketed as offering the same kinds of accessibility to low-income residents, improving transportation to places that would otherwise suffer continued neglect. Transportation policy expert Ashley Nunes has written of the importance of governments subsidizing access to autonomous vehicles for America’s poor, calling it “more effective than improving mass transit.” Nunes argued that low-income people are more likely to suffer from poor job prospects from mobility restrictions and to die in traffic crashes because they use older vehicles that don’t have features like cruise control and pedestrian detection. “That’s the real promise of driverless technology—lifting millions out of poverty without having them pay for it with their lives.”25
Personal ownership of electric vehicles does cut some costs by a significant margin. It costs about 40 percent as much to charge an electric vehicle as to fill a car up with gasoline, and electric vehicles have fewer moving parts and therefore lower maintenance costs.26 But the vehicle itself still costs a significant amount, even with a generous $7,500 U.S. federal tax credit: a Nissan Leaf, the cheapest popular option, is $22,500, while a Chevrolet Bolt costs $29,995 and a luxury Tesla Model S rings in at $72,000.27
That federal tax credit, introduced in 2008, is non-refundable, which means that a tax liability can be reduced to zero but no refund will be provided beyond that. In other words, an electric vehicle buyer would have to earn at least $52,000 per year to owe $7,500 in federal tax—and therefore get the full amount in a tax credit.28 Just over 57,000 taxpayers (both individuals and corporations) claimed $375 million in electric vehicle tax credits in 2016; 78 percent of those were claimed by filers with an annual gross income of at least $100,000.29 An estimated 70 percent of electric vehicle owners would have bought them without a subsidy, according to research published in 2019, which calculated owners’ average income at $140,000 per year.30
The future of the federal tax credit is uncertain. The legislation was designed to be phased out once a manufacturer had produced 200,000 electric vehicles; the supposed idea was to kickstart the industry rather than permanently support it. Tesla and General Motors have already surpassed that level of sales, so the subsidy for their vehicles is being phased out.31
Appeals to ride-hailing as a remedy to lack of access to automobility for low-income communities is similarly flawed.32 Using Uber on a regular basis would be about 80 percent more expensive than driving a personal vehicle, already an extremely expensive mode of transportation.33 Even at base rates, ride-hailing is inaccessible as a regular means of transportation for low-income riders. That becomes even more of an issue with surge pricing, in which rates multiply many times the regular fare at certain times based on supply and demand. People with a household income over $200,000 per year are far more likely to use ride-hailing options than people making less income.34
Transportation expert Hubert Horan has explained: “Surge pricing reduces wait times for wealthier people returning home from restaurants and nightclubs by eliminating all service for lower income people working late night shifts that have no transit options.”35 Surge pricing results in a form of redlining of low-income communities of colour when drivers choose not to operate in such areas.36 Low-income riders can certainly use these services from time to time, but they’re by no means a reliable form of transportation. “A lot of our residents can’t even afford it,” says Crystal Jennings of Pittsburghers for Public Transit. “Sometimes Uber trips can skyrocket with surge charges during the course of the day. A lot of people can’t pay for that.”
Alex Birnel, advocacy manager at MOVE Texas, told me that he spends a significant amount of money on ride-hailing because he has cerebral palsy and can’t drive. He says that public transit in his hometown of San Antonio is too unpredictable for many people to use it on a consistent basis. “When a city doesn’t have these resources or this infrastructure, you fall back on incredibly budget-busting private options,” he says. “So much of my monthly paycheque will go to Uber or Lyft. That’s because transportation at a moment’s notice is what’s desired. I want to be able to on a whim decide to go somewhere and not have to plan my day with three- to four-hour windows because of public transit.”
Part of the calculus has to do with basic costs of operation. Ride-hailing options, even when shared, are very inefficient compared to fixed-route transportation.37 Rides are artificially subsidized by venture capitalists because they can’t make enough money. But ride-hailing companies are also looking to make as much profit as possible.
Drivers, too, are seeking returns, and they get to decide on the hours they drive and where. Ride-hailing drivers may not always provide service to poorer communities, as those rides tend to be shorter and not taken during times of surge pricing.38 Additionally, as noted by Hana Creger of the Greenlining Institute, “there are no specific procedures to prevent discriminatory practices such as drivers going offline to avoid requests in lower-income areas.”39
Some research has indicated less prejudice by Uber and Lyft drivers compared to taxi drivers.40 But other studies have suggested that ride-hailing passengers with African American–sounding names face significantly longer waiting times and more frequent cancellations.41 Language barriers can also impede access, and ride-hailing services don’t offer alternative payment or reservation methods for riders who have no credit card or smartphone.42
About 8 percent of Americans are unbanked, meaning they don’t have access to credit cards or bank accounts, so they can’t use ride-hailing services.43 Only 67 percent of people who earn less than $30,000 a year own a smartphone, and 46 percent of people over the age of 65.44 Combined, that means that tens of millions of people—mostly low-income and/or seniors—effectively can’t use ride-hailing services at this point, and their access to transportation is worsening with the ongoing decline in transit. There is no indication that things will substantially change with the eventual shift toward autono mous vehicles. In fact, they could get even worse, depending on which scenarios governments allow.
Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute has said that there’s a popular idea that we may arrive at a moment when autonomous rides cost so little that the rate will be paid for by advertising. But he thinks such estimates fail to look at what the actual cost profile might look like, including maintenance and cleaning, empty vehicle travel, insurance, and roadway costs. Others disagree. Vox’s David Roberts has warned of an impending nightmare scenario in which a race to the bottom will lead to a company offering free service, which would require much higher vehicle miles travelled (VMT). “Insofar as they get revenue from advertising, owners of shared vehicle fleets will want more people to go more places in cars. Their revenue will rise with VMT, so they will strive to maximize VMT.”45
In such a scenario, well-off people would likely have the option of paying to avoid all of that tedium, like subscribers to Spotify’s premium service to listen without ads. Conversely, low-wage workers attempting to get to a job or grocery store would be subjected to a specific route that was based on whichever company had paid the most for the right.46
Far from a predictable, affordable option for people, the mix of heavy advertising, data collection, and potentially unpredictable pricing would only reassert accessibility for the wealthy. Due to rampant gentrification, wealthy residents could continue to live in downtown areas closer to their work, reducing any commute time in an autonomous vehicle to a fraction of what displaced workers would have to face at a higher personal cost. Regardless of whether riders are charged with money or advertising—or both—autonomous vehicles will likely replicate existing systems of inequality and racism that deprive entire communities of the ability to secure, safe, and affordable transportation.
Since urban transit is chronically underfunded, that lack of money must be made up from other sources: mostly through constant fare increases. A 2017 analysis found that an average monthly transit pass in the U.S. costs $67, but can range up to $121 in New York and $122 in Los Angeles.47 Single fares are often more expensive per ride, especially if a transit system is zoned (additional price for travel into different regions) or tickets are restricted to one-way travel on a network or don’t include transfers. Low-income riders often can’t afford to purchase a weekly or monthly pass, so they usually pay more in the form of single tickets. Larry Hanley, the late international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), told me: “Putting higher fares in is a completely inadequate and unfair strategy. Most of what’s going on in our society today is lowering taxes on the rich and raising taxes on the poor.”
Anti-poor discrimination in transit systems can manifest in other ways as well, particularly around the type of service prioritized in particular areas. Low-income bus riders are often disregarded as “captive riders,” suggesting they will continue to use transit regardless of how bad the service gets.48 The biases of political elites and the desire of transit agencies to boost ridership and revenues funnels most funding to attract affluent “choice riders” onto new rail service. Affluent residents, as a result, tend to have by far the best access to transit. Low-income households in Toronto’s inner suburbs, for example, have almost four times less access to transit service than do high-income neighourhoods.49
This bias is also evident in where transit agencies choose to build infrastructure that improves overall rider comfort: heated bus shelters, shaded benches, public washrooms. A lack of such amenities in a neighbourhood represents a hidden barrier for residents to use transit. Other barriers include limited bus service on evenings and weekends, which disproportionately impacts low-wage shift workers, and snow accumulation on sidewalks that makes access to transportation even more difficult for people using strollers, walkers, canes, or wheelchairs.50
Much of this dynamic has to do with who’s calling the shots about how communities are planned. Metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) play a major role in deciding how U.S. transportation funding is allocated, but their board members are disproportionately white; Hispanic and Black communities are underrepresented.51 Creger told me that the voting structure of MPO boards can give a small suburban community the same voting power as a large urban area. A Brookings Institution report suggested that most of the substantive discussions in MPOs take place among specialists on technical committees, not elected officials.52 Such organizational bias further disenfranchises low-income residents from having a real say over transportation decisions.
The same goes for the boards of transit agencies. A 2018 assessment of boards across North America found that most were overwhelmingly white: both Montreal’s and Vancouver’s had no Black, Indigenous, or people of colour (BIPOC) representatives on their boards. Of eight boards examined, only two included a rider representative: in Montreal and Washington, DC.53 The income or class position of board members wasn’t reported.
There are ways to democratize this process. Creger points to the increasing role of participatory budgeting in California, where public money must be dedicated from the start of a project in order to improve community involvement. She says that San Francisco’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission recently allocated one million dollars to such processes, to be specifically implemented in low-income communities of colour. “The more money that is allocated toward these projects, the more we can ensure that this actually results in tangible benefits,” she told me.
But as Steven Higashide has written in Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit, the “open house” approach to transit planning often structurally benefits wealthy residents and business owners, as they have more time and resources to organize. He stressed the need to proactively seek out the perspectives of transit riders and allies, abandoning lengthy development plans for much faster deployments of infrastructure like tactical bus lanes. A key part of this process, he has argued, is for planners to focus on maximizing access to destinations including grocery stores and healthcare facilities, not just jobs; most of the trips that people take, after all, are not for work.54
Transit development can cause displacement—but it doesn’t have to. Seattle council member Kshama Sawant told me, “We should not draw false causal relationships between public transit expansion and that being detrimental to the lives of working people. It’s exactly the opposite.”
Many tools have been used to ensure that low-income residents gain better transit and active transportation in their neighbourhoods without fearing that they will lose their homes, most notably the genuinely public ownership of housing stock, including government-owned housing and co-ops. Struggles for public transit and housing are closely linked and must be fought together.
In April 2018, Sound Transit—the regional transit authority that operates the Seattle metro area’s light rail and commuter rail services—announced that it was updating its policy for equitable transit-oriented development to apply an 80-80-80 rule ordered by the state legislature. It would offer 80 percent of “surplus property” following construction of new light rail lines to affordable housing developers, who would be required to make at least 80 percent of constructed units available to people earning 80 percent or less of the region’s median income.55
Several organizations in Toronto, including the Toronto Community Benefits Network, have been working to ensure that a community benefit agreement (CBA) is secured with Metrolinx as new light rail lines are built in coming years. The Toronto and York Region Labour Council explained in a statement that such an agreement would help address social inequalities by including employment and training opportunities for members of low-income communities.56
Some cities are also moving to mass-rezone single-family zones to allow for higher-density housing. Vancouver’s city council voted in 2018 to rezone 99 percent of single-family lots; a few months later, Minneapolis abolished single-family zoning entirely to allow for duplexes and triplexes.57 California Senate Bill 50, proposed by San Francisco state senator Scott Wiener, would require cities to allow construction of apartment complexes near transit stops while protecting existing renters from displacement.58
Many groups across the country are struggling for genuine community ownership and control of land and housing. Samuel Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, has argued that relying on zoning for housing justice is a dead end, and that we have to fight for “public housing, particularly, but also rent control and community land trusts.”59 Community land trusts, which are typically non-profit, community-led organizations that own the land via donations or purchase the land and lease it to individuals, provide an alternative long-term solution that can help slow gentrification.60 Universal rent control, limiting the ability of property owners to hike rents, is a particularly important tool in this struggle. Banning or seriously limiting the spread of companies like Airbnb, which further entrench the commodification of housing and drive up rental prices, would be another strong step.61 In June 2019, tenant activists in New York won what Stein described as a “historic expansion of rent stabilization, rent control, and anti-eviction measures.” While universal rent control was missing from the bill, it’s an excellent example of what’s possible when tenants organize.62
While ride-hailing companies might host an occasional PR campaign for a few hundred people to access groceries for a month, publicly owned and operated transit agencies are in a position to dramatically reorient funding and operations to benefit everyone, including low-income communities. Residents can fight back and build a far more equitable system. And there are plenty of examples over the years of this exact struggle unfolding with resounding success.
In the mid-1990s, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union famously sued the Metropolitan Transportation Authority under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act for “intentionally discriminating against racial and ethnic minority groups in the delivery of transportation services” by dedicating disproportionate funding to rail service that served predominantly affluent white riders while depriving the bus network—which mostly carried low-income people of colour—of needed investments to reduce costs and buy more buses.63 A judge awarded a temporary injunction against the transit authority, and a deal was later struck that cut fares and required hundreds more buses to be purchased. However, the transportation authority failed to uphold many of its promises, an impasse that was met by escalating tactics including a militant “no seat, no fare” campaign.64 That pivotal moment for transit organizing in North America inspired the formation of many bus riders’ unions and advocacy groups.
In 2009, several Oakland organizations filed a similar civil rights complaint against Bay Area Rapid Transit for failing to conduct an equity analysis of the Oakland Airport Connector project. As a result, the project lost $70 million in federal funding, which was reallocated to regional rail and bus improvements.65
Jennings says that Pittsburghers for Public Transit recently won a series of victories. For example, they blocked proposed service cuts to a low-income community that would have required inconvenient transfers—and actually leveraged it into a new bus rapid transit route. She told me about riders that she worked with: “We open them up to the possibilities of if they fight for what they believe in, that their service can and will be resolved and stay current or get better. We basically use a lot of community engagement: teaching them and helping them get their voices heard, speaking out about the issues that they have in their communities.”
Stephanie Farmer of Roosevelt University says that United Working Families—a Chicago-based independent political group made up of unions and community organizations—is agitating for transit investment for all of Chicago rather than allowing more ground to be ceded to private vehicles and grandiose plans. Creger says that there are good news stories emerging out of California, including the building of an all-electric bus rapid transit route in South Stockton, a low- income community of colour in Central Valley.66 She adds that progressive cities including Portland, Seattle, and Oakland are creating race equity departments that are being integrated with departments of transportation to help address injustices—but that there are still many examples of low-income residents not being at the decision-making tables, so many needs and priorities are still being left behind.
Toronto’s TTCriders has had success over the years, helping to pressure the city to introduce low-income fares, increase annual funding to reduce overcrowding, and implement two-hour transfers, which allow for more than one trip, reducing the amount spent on fares for a short or multi-stop outing.67 When it launched in 2015 ahead of the Pan American Games, Toronto’s Union Pearson Express to the airport cost $19 per trip for riders with a Presto payment card or $27.50 for riders without one. Following several years of organizing by the Our Union Pearson Coalition—made up of many groups including TTCriders and the Toronto Airport Council of Unions—Metrolinx cut those fares to $9 and $12, respectively (airport workers pay $3.50 for a one-way ticket). When the coalition formed, TTCriders argued: “Let’s make this line for everyone, and not just the 1%.”68 That organizing worked.
Low-income passes are also being increasingly discussed across North America. In 2017, Calgary introduced a sliding scale pass, available for $5.05 per month for the lowest-income segment of the population. The city sold 70,000 passes in the first three months, 70 percent of which were the least expensive option.69 Portland’s TriMet transit agency brought in a low-income fare program in July 2018. Qualifying riders can buy single tickets for half the price and monthly passes for almost three-quarters less.70 Amy Lubitow, a sociology professor at Portland State University who researches public transit ridership experiences, emphasized to me that the policy was “the result of lots and lots of community organizing,” rather than something benevolently gifted by the agency.
Discounted fares for low-income people are a good start—but they can rely on inconvenient and humiliating means-testing processes that require the user to prove their worthiness to administrators. In early 2019, it was reported that only 30,000 low-income New Yorkers would be eligible for half-priced transit passes, excluding most of the 800,000 people living below the poverty line.71 Low-income fares also maintain a relationship to public transit as a commodity, rather than a universal public service that everyone shares in and has access to regardless of income. That’s where the free transit (or more exactly, “fare-free transit”) movement, which is gaining rapid support around the world, comes in.
Almost one hundred cities and towns around the world have introduced fully free transit, over half of them in Europe.72 Free transit has produced extremely positive ridership outcomes. Chapel Hill in North Carolina saw annual ridership increase from three million to seven million passengers after eliminating fares, while in Missoula, Montana, a “zero fare” initiative and high-speed routes led to a 70 percent increase in bus ridership. The regional transit authority in Tampa, Florida, eliminated fares and improved service on a downtown streetcar thanks to a $2.7 million state grant, resulting in a tripling of service in only six months.73 In 2019, municipal governments in Victoria, British Columbia, and Kansas City, Missouri, voted to abolish fares on transit.74 And a week after Kansas City’s decision in early December, it was reported that Portland’s TriMet board was studying the possibility as well.75
Free transit expert Wojciech Kębłowski has explained that governments pursue the policy for a wide range of reasons: reducing car usage and pollution, improving access for low-income residents, or redefining the relationship of riders to transit as a public service.76 Eliminating fares for transit can result in significant ridership increases, requiring funding boosts to meet demand and increase service.77 Polling of 2,000 transit riders in Dunkirk, France—which made buses free to use in 2018, found that 50 percent of riders were new users and an incredible 48 percent were taking the bus instead of driving.78
As will be discussed in chapters 7 and 9, abolishing fares eliminates the need for fare enforcement—an overwhelmingly racist and classist practice—and protects transit workers from assaults related to fare disputes. By funding free transit through general revenue, preferably from higher income and wealth taxes on the rich, communities can directly confront the climate crisis (and other issues discussed in this book) while improving transportation access for low-income communities. When combined with greatly improved service, this policy offers a far more rapid and politically popular transition away from automobility than carbon pricing and other user fees—and has the incidental benefit of making boarding a bus more efficient, as there’s no fare to be paid or card to be swiped.
As transit wonks will often point out, free transit isn’t enough. We need a radical improvement in service, most notably improving frequency so that buses and trains show up more often and for longer stretches throughout the day. Some critics oppose the policy because of its potential to strip away reliable funding from agencies when they need it most. But free transit advocates aren’t suggesting abolishing fares and leaving it at that. They want to replace user fees with revenue from higher taxes on the rich, and significantly increase funding to anticipate higher ridership and improved service.
Here’s an example, using my home city of Winnipeg. The transit agency receives almost $90 million a year in fare revenue.79 Anticipating at least a 50 percent increase in ridership and a desire to greatly improve existing service, higher levels of government could completely abolish fares and increase frequency of buses for somewhere between $150 and $200 million a year—a paltry sum when compared to the urgency of the climate crisis. By comparison, the city’s police department has an annual budget of over $300 million. Free transit is incredibly achievable, as the organizing in Kansas City, Missouri, and elsewhere should remind us.
Struggles can be fought and won against ride-hailing companies.80 But they tend be defensive campaigns to prevent a transportation coup from spreading even further. While valuable, the win doesn’t change the material realities for low-income riders desperately in need of free and reliable transportation. That’s where community organizing for public transportation, especially free transit, comes in. Through bus riders’ unions and similar organizations across North America, we can greatly improve service for the people who need it most. Regular people know what needs to change. When asked what could draw riders of New York’s “dollar vans” back to the city’s transit network, they identified cheaper fares, faster bus speeds, and better spacing of buses.81
“Complaining about the TTC is an everyday part of life in Toronto. People are really angry about the constant delays. What we do is we try to turn that anger into political action. If everyone who’s angry about the TTC joined our organization and got active, we can make a lot of changes.”
—Shelagh Pizey-Allen, TTCriders, Toronto
Communities that genuinely desire to confront legacies of racism, poverty, and dispossession have to prioritize free, frequent, and comfortable public transportation alongside public housing, as well as the sustained expansion of a range of related policies to improve access: snow clearing, well-lit stops, public washrooms, easy-to-read timetables and routes designed for use by people with different abilities, shelters that protect from both heat and cold, and diverse ways to purchase tickets. The alternative is to knowingly deprive low-income communities of opportunities for employment, food, healthcare, and social services—leading to all kinds of preventable tragedies and suffering, and further entrenching automobile culture for the predominately affluent.
A real commitment to a massive buildout of public transportation—as well as safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists—that focuses on serving low-income residents, along with social housing and other anti-gentrification measures, will have tremendous impacts on the equality and well-being of communities. Every dollar spent on new roads, electric vehicle subsidies, and other privatized solutions is not only a distraction, it is oppositional to this goal. Knowing that, we must direct our organizing to the most equitable and just form of transportation available.