Although 60 percent of transit riders are people of color, says New York’s TransitCenter, 66 percent of transit agency leaders and managers are white. The organization sees this “gulf between ‘who decides’ and ‘who rides'” as a major problem.
Click image to download a 5.2-MB PDF of this report.
The TransitCenter is a well-intentioned organization whose thorough reports on transit issues are generally skewed by the fact that the group is located in the one American city that heavily relies on transit. In keeping with social justice rhetoric, this particular report views transit as a racial issue, whereas I view it as a class issue, namely a gulf between the middle class (people with college educations) and working class.
According to the National Household Travel Survey, 43 percent of transit riders in 2017 had a bachelor’s degree or better, making them middle-class. This was undoubtedly an overestimate, as I suspect college-educated people were more likely to respond to the survey. Indeed, 38 percent of survey respondents had a bachelor’s degree or better, compared with just 30 percent of Americans over the age of 18. This suggests that only about 34 percent of transit riders are middle class.
On the other hand, virtually 100 percent of transit agency leaders and managers are middle class. Even if a few don’t have bachelor’s degrees, the professionals who run transit agencies fit squarely within the definition of middle class, that is, people who work with their minds rather than their hands. Thus, the class gulf between transit riders and managers is much bigger than the racial gulf between riders and managers.
This class gulf is more important than the racial gulf because middle-class transit planners and managers spend an inordinate amount of their time trying to design transit systems that they themselves would want to use, that is, systems for the middle class. That’s why there is such an emphasis on rail transit, which is transit for the middle class, and why transit agencies like Los Angeles Metro and Atlanta Metro are willing to cut bus service, which is most heavily used by the working class, in order to help pay for more trains. To the extent that the racial gulf described in the TransitCenter’s report is important, it is mainly because a disproportionate share of people of color are in the working class.
Even the class gulf is less important than another critical gulf: the gulf between user fees and political funds. In 2019, 78 percent of the funds spent by transit agencies were political, rising to 88 percent in 2020. This means that transit agency managers have to spend more than three-fourths of their efforts trying to please politicians (who are also mostly middle class), leaving managers with little time to try to please transit riders.
This money gulf is the gulf the TransitCenter should criticize. It is because of this money gulf that transit agencies spend way too much on new infrastructure and way too little on maintenance. It is because of this money gulf that most transit system route maps today don’t look all that different from streetcar maps a hundred years ago: any change will upset someone who might write letters to politicians, so better not to change.
Transit agency decisions are ruled more by money than by races or classes. Unless the sources of money are perfectly aligned with transit users, transit will fail to provide those users with the best possible service. That means funding transit out of user fees, not tax dollars, which is probably the opposite of what the TransitCenter would like to see.
Let’s put a pin in this discussion. The grand scale fantasy of replacing white managers with people of color would be as effective as black politicians when they came.
“Yet blacks there have made far more political progress than the economic progress”
Asians by contrast made greater economic progress than political progress. The asian success story puts to rest the gross idea; racism is so bad it stiffles advancement. Immigrants from Asia–people who were not white, not rich, and not “connected”–have quietly succeeded. While the children of these people are winning spelling bees and getting top scores on the SAT, black “youths” are committing half the country’s violent crime, half the nation’s homicide victims….and perpetrators.
It’s culture….and the sooner you abandon it…the faster you progress. Whites invented ghetto and southern drawl culture crap in the 1800s and didn’t do them any good. What made blacks think they could succeed sticking to the same.
Transits demise began when whites and other upper income types demanded transit in their vicinity. But it spearheaded a massive infrastructure plan that was way more expensive than cities could afford…but to look glamorous they kneecapped basic service aimed at those needed for. In essence doing for transit what they did for neighborhoods. Gentrification
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black “youths” are committing half the country’s violent crime
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And yet 99% of blacks don’t commit violent crime.
Last year about 9500 murders were committed by blacks.
There are 40,000,000 blacks.
Melanin is not significant when it comes to violent crime. It’s other factors.
Yep. The politicians are funding the managers’ salaries with taxpayer money in exchange for the managers funding the politicians’ election campaigns with their own money. The managers are probably getting an easy 20% ROI.
No culture is the factor….
Black identity has become a hot item in the movies, on television, and in the schools and colleges. But few people are aware of how much of what passes as black identity today, including “black English,” has its roots in the history of those whites who were called “rednecks” and “crackers” centuries ago in Britain, before they ever crossed the Atlantic and settled in the South.
lyrics: Jeezy: I said I’m higher than a muthafucka, right now. I’ll shot a nigga dead in his shit, …”
White liberals come into this story because, since the 1960s, they have been aiding and abetting a counterproductive ghetto lifestyle that is essentially a remnant of the redneck culture which handicapped Southern whites and blacks alike for generations.