The abandoned social goals of public transit in the neoliberal city of the USA

A preface and a bus rider’s story: “two‐tiered” transit system in the making? Imagine a bus stop in a typical working‐class neighbourhood of inner‐city Los Angeles, a city with an extraordinary array of peoples and cultures. The bus pulls up with standing room only, filled with a variety of people: Mexican, Salvadoran, Korean, Filipino and African American; men and women going to jobs, some of them janitors, some street vendors. People on the bus include women clutching children and grocery bags, kids going to school, elderly folks off to the Senior Centre. The ride is like always: hot, noisy and desperately crowded. The riders come from decidedly different backgrounds, yet share the same experience daily—jostled against one another, staring blankly out cracked windows, minding their own business, intent on getting where they need to go. And getting it over with as quickly as possible. In another part of town, people of a different income class are riding in a new train. They come from the suburbs, clacking away at laptops and sipping cappuccino on their way to downtown jobs. These are people taking advantage of what Mike Davis (1995, p. 270) calls “the biggest public works project in fin de siecle America”, an ambitious series of commuter rail lines that were budgeted at $183 billion over 30 years (Sterngold, 1999). These train riders choose to leave their cars at home to avoid the maddening freeway jams of Los Angeles. Some ride the train on principle. Trains are, after all, better for the environment. Back on the inner‐city bus … someone’s handing out leaflets and talking about forming a union—of bus riders? First in English then in Spanish, the organizer tells riders how the train that’s always in the newspapers is costing more than planners expected, and that politicians now propose to take money away from buses to keep building the train lines. Then the organizer talks about racial discrimination. Racial discrimination? What do buses have to do with racial discrimination?