Transit equity must include racial equity

Public transportation, in theory, should be a system that moves people from point to point. Yet, how people are moved, when, and under what conditions, is variable. This variability is often classed and racialized. Examining mobile structures and spaces thus provides an important opportunity to unravel and explore how mobility reflects and reproduces infrastructural violence and the processes that renegotiate or disrupt outcomes such as racial residential segregation, gentrification, and economic disparities along racial lines as well. Detangling public transportation and transit from a racialized landscape is a daunting task. But cities must, at minimum, dissolve obdurate patterns that use transportation in ways that lends to the persistence of racial and economic inequities. Moving to transit equity would require an aggregate approach that considers the many spokes of inequity in the landscape and how transportation has supported them.