“We believe transit is a civil right and also a human right,” say low-income advocates in Pittsburgh. An article jointly published by the Huffington Post and The Incline claims that, “Six decades after the Montgomery bus boycott and the Freedom Rides, public transit isn’t just a platform for the civil rights struggle, it is the civil rights struggle.”
Sadly, this terribly misreads the real lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott. That boycott succeeded where previous efforts had failed because many blacks in Montgomery had their own automobiles and shared rides with those who had previously used the bus system. As Washington Post writer Warren Brown says, blacks used “their private automobiles to drive around Jim Crow.”
Similarly, complaints about poor transit service to low-income neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and elsewhere ignore the fact that transit is not the way to get out of poverty; the automobile is. As the latest Access Across America reports show, an hour-long transit trip by the average resident of Pittsburgh reaches less than 7 percent of the region’s jobs, but a 20-minute auto trip can reach 12 percent of the region’s jobs while 40 minutes in a car reaches nearly 50 percent.
If Amazon says this book is out of stock, email On the Road Lending to purchase a copy.
That’s why people who really care about helping low-income people out of poverty, such as Michelle Corson, focus on helping people purchase an automobile. Located in Dallas, Corson is the CEO of On the Road Lending, which so far has helped more than 200 low-income people purchase a “reliable car under warranty.”
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Corson points out that the $6 billion spent on Dallas light rail would have been far better utilized giving cars to low-income people (which would have cost far less than $6 billion). Her book, Freedom of Motion includes data showing how cars can do more than transit to help low-income people and provides many case histories of people who were homeless or otherwise in dire straits and were able to recover via automobility.
The claim that transit is a human right, or even a civil right, warps the whole idea of rights. The rights to free speech or freedom of religion are rights to do things without the heavy hand of government interfering with your choices. Claiming a right to subsidized transit, or subsidized anything, is equivalent to claiming the right to use the heavy hand of government to take other people’s money and give it to you.
It would be offensive if transit agencies deliberately avoided, say, black neighborhoods in favor of white. But the reality is that most poor people have cars and the fastest-growing transit segments are among high-income people. Thus, it might not be surprising if transit agencies aren’t providing the same services to low-income neighborhoods that they did a few years ago.
Instead of seeking increased subsidies, the transit justice movement should oppose transit boondoggles such as light rail and exclusive bus lanes. That would free up funds needed to increase bus service throughout any urban area.
People have a vast myriad of interpretation of what a “right” is.
That’s why healthcare isn’t a right. Rights are the fundamental normative rules of what is allowed of people or owed to people, according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical theory. Simplify it, A right is a freedom permissible and practiced without confrontation or an imposed obligation except the obligation of non-interference. No right should impose an obligation of coverage or subsidy in order to implement it.
@LazyReader:
“A right is a freedom permissible and practiced without confrontation…”
So if you believe you have a right to life, and I confront you and tell you that you don’t have that right?
I think it’s very difficult to define a right. I am suspicious when an anti-social person conjures up a human right to cover their behaviour.
@ Antiplanner:
“As the latest Access Across America reports show, an hour-long transit trip by the average resident of Pittsburgh reaches less than 7 percent of the region’s jobs, but a 20-minute auto trip can reach 12 percent of the region’s jobs while 40 minutes in a car reaches nearly 50 percent.”
That’s down to a lack of effective, er… – planning.
Monocentric or polycentric, the city has to put the employment together in clumps so that transit can properly service it. Cars are too expensive and space hungry to be the answer to everything.
What seems to get lost on a lot of urbanistas is what Michelle Corson is doing, the poor people get help. They’re so caught up in their utopic vision of dense cities that they forget their are more important things than their aesthetics. The world needs more Michelle Corsons.
If planning can provide monocentric cities where transit is time and cost effective, where are the examples of this? All data I am aware of shows that monocentric cities have the longest commutes on transit with the commuters normally only paying a small part of the real cost. I had a planning student try to tell me once that Tokyo was well designed as most people commuted on transit. When I pointed out that they average commute of one hour was the longest in the world, and one of the most expensive she had to admit that maybe it was actually one of the worst planned cities.
”
Cars are too expensive and space hungry to be the answer to everything.
” ~ Francis King
Only a zealot could cough up a slimy hair ball like this. Amazingly for all the talk about cars being too expensive, even the poorest of the poor can afford them. _YOU_ may find them as being too expensive, the vast majority of people do not.
Build an environment for cars, not people, then more people will need cars :$
.
Then you would be wrong. The most basic rights, and those which ought to be afforded to all in any society, are negative rights. Most fundamentally, I have the right to have you not aggress against me or coerce me.
Contrast this with the notion of positive rights, which currently takes the form of political activists taking any public service they happen to like and insisting that it be provided by government and paid for by others. Much like this latest plea from HuffPo that public transit be considered a “right”.
Like most world cities, Pittsburgh’s urban structure is not a function of planning. Neither is Dallas, the city to which Corson applies her services. There is no shortage of space there to be concerned about.
I don’t think that it is possible in any event, but it is certainly not the job of local governments to try to shoe-horn all employment into dense clusters so that they can be served by a second-rate mode of transport. And forcing that outcome would, in addition to distorting land markets, also lead to some severe externalities (most notably congestion) that government has proven incapable of effectively managing.