The Motor City Transit Blues
Structural racism has held back Detroit transit for decades. How can transit boosters break through?
“Twenty-five percent of Detroiters do not have access to a car. We need a bus system. People need to get to work, to school. The bus is a racial equity issue. People have the right to move around their city, to enjoy the cultural attractions, go to see friends, family, to the doctor. Access is the idea. Transit should be an option equal to cars.”
—A Detroit Pro-Transit Advocate, Interviewed in 2015
Previously on the newsletter here, I described what I call the racial dilemma. This dilemma about racism is a central feature of politics in the United States. Many, if not most, federal, state, and regional policy decisions in the US have implications for race-based inequities. Yet, these racial implications can often be rendered invisible by color-blind racism. This creates a tension in American politics that deeply affects advocacy organizations, especially those that aim to redress systemic inequities. In short, determining how to approach racial politics—the racial dilemma—remains necessary for most advocacy organizations in the U.S. today. How does this play out in advocacy for improved transit?
Advocates for improved transit in U.S. cities almost always have communities of color as constituents. But, of course, communities of color in U.S. cities rarely have sufficient political power, on their own, to bring about significant improvements to public transportation. Even if communities of color were empowered to improve transit, public transportation is always controversial.
New transit proposals have to deal with a wide range of questions that inevitably lead to a lot of heated debate: Where should new bus or train routes go, and where should they NOT go? What is more important: frequency of service, or including a larger geographic area in the transit system? Who will pay for infrastructure improvements and system operation and maintenance, and what kinds of taxes will be raised? And so on. Even among groups that support transit in principle, many of the complex answers to these tough questions will cause divisions, even among allies. And, of course, opponents of transit will have plenty of opportunities to point out deficiencies in the proposed changes.
Pro-transit advocates, then, nearly always must find ways to build support among groups that usually don’t use transit: car owners. Attracting the support of car-owning “choice riders,” and others—in ballot referendums, in public hearings, and so forth—may be a necessity for public transportation reforms that effectively address social justice concerns. However, these “conscience constituents” (people who support change even if they do not directly benefit from it) are often disproportionately White and more affluent than the “core” supporters of transit: those who rely on transit by necessity rather than choice. The overriding objective of gaining support among choice riders, largely “White liberals,” as conscience constituents (especially in segregated American metropolitan areas) has often led to a strategy of avoiding any public discussion of race and racism—to avoid upsetting potential White allies.
Alternatively, some advocates might make a strategic decision to intentionally develop support of anti-racist individuals (including “White liberals”), developing new anti-racist constituencies, across racial and geographic boundaries. This approach would seem to require a coordinated campaign across almost every aspect of a transit advocacy organization. The organization would need to prepare research describing the disparate impacts of the existing transportation systems, and then they would suggest transit projects that might not conform to the wishes of the regional elite. To gain sufficient support for these proposals would require coalition building across boundaries that are often not crossed: political, racial, and economic lines.
Some research suggests that some advocacy organizations navigate the racial dilemma by “triangulating” support among various subgroups within their larger base of support. For example, Strolovitch (2007) describes how advocacy organizations balance the needs of various groups of those they aim to represent. She demonstrates that by doing so, many organizations (often unwittingly) downplay the needs of the most vulnerable or most oppressed subgroups within their constituencies. She finds that there are many reasons why the most disadvantaged subgroups receive often less attention from advocates. Strolovitch specifies various structural issues in the ways that advocacy organizations receive financial support, how they are perceived in their field, and the extent to which they believe they can build legitimacy with policymakers (2007: 9). She also notes that some organizations defy this trend. Those that engage in what she terms “affirmative advocacy” recognize a need for “proactive efforts to overcome the entrenched but often subtle biases that persist against marginalized groups in American politics” (2007:10). She argues that organizations employing a strategy of “affirmative advocacy” must consciously adopt a set of practices for their work such as promoting inclusion internally and “resisting the silencing effects of public and constituent opinion that are biased against disadvantaged subgroups” (2007:10). The research presented in this article is, in part, an attempt to determine whether such “affirmative advocacy” happens among advocacy organizations focused on public transportation, or if there are some other ways that these advocates have dealt with the racial dilemma.
Advocacy organizations working on public transportation in Detroit provide an important case study for the larger questions about racial politics. First, Detroit has a large transit-dependent population, a group that includes a disproportionate number of people of color. Secondly, Detroit has social justice-oriented transit reform efforts that have continued for more than thirty years. Finally, Detroit has recently (since 2010) experienced major changes in transportation policies and practices, and these changes provide an opportunity to examine how racial politics affects transportation advocacy efforts in these cities. Of course, Detroit is not perfectly representative of American cities in general, but many of the political dynamics around transportation that can be observed there have parallels in many (if not most) large American metropolitan areas.
Transit advocates in Detroit have been wrestling with the racial dilemma for decades. At the end of World War II , as suburban communities sprung up rapidly around the city, Detroit’s relatively effective rail and bus public transit systems faced rapid disinvestment and collapse. As early as 1956, Detroit’s extensive streetcar system shut down completely. Despite various reform proposals over the past 60 years, public transit in the area has yet to fully recover its pre-1960 heyday. Today, only a patchwork system remains to provide bus service to some parts of the fourteenth-largest metropolitan area in the United States, home to some 4.3 million residents. Many parts of the urban and suburban core remain completely inaccessible by public transit, and much of the region has only intermittent access to bus routes. Frankly, traveling around Detroit by bus is extremely challenging. The Detroit Free Press reported a harrowing tale of one Detroiter who walked a total of twenty-one miles each workday to connect to two different bus networks, to make the daily round-trip trek from his home in the city to his job in a suburb (Laitner 2014). Unsurprisingly, in 2017, barely one percent of Detroit-area residents commuted to work on public transit, while more than 80% drove a private car by themselves, alone (source: U.S. Census reports, 2017).
The reasons for the post-war collapse of Detroit’s transit services are many, and they are typical for major urban centers in the US. As the automobile became available for most middle-class families in the middle of the 1900s, policymakers and developers moved quickly to satisfy the demands of producers and consumers of the almighty car. Car-centric infrastructure gained nearly unlimited public funding, much of it originating in user fees like tolls and gasoline taxes. The American landscape was transformed by the construction of bridges, paved roads, and of course the Interstate Highway System. The shape of today’s metropolitan areas, including Detroit, conformed to meet the needs of these automotive systems. Old neighborhoods gave way to road construction. Suburban areas rapidly developed. Community centers—shops, medical facilities, schools—moved away from some historic locations toward new gathering places created by automobile traffic patterns. Older transit technologies—especially rail—were literally and figuratively displaced in the car-centric society that emerged.
As had happened with older transit technologies, these new roads and bridges were created in such a way as to enforce racial segregation and to maintain the dominance of Whites. In the Detroit area, beginning in the 1940s, many wealthier families moved north and west, into places like Oakland County, western Wayne County, and further out from the city. At first, commuter light rail systems continued to cater to these suburban neighborhoods, connecting downtown Detroit with suburbs as far as Pontiac in the north and out to Ann Arbor in the west. But by the 1980s, even these commuter rail systems shut down, even after a futuristic, automated monorail (the Detroit People Mover) was built in downtown Detroit to spur interest and investment in transit.
Emblematic of the effects of racial segregation, the transit services that developed as a replacement for commuter rail were bifurcated between city and suburb. Today, the City of Detroit has a bus system run by its Department of Transportation (DDOT), and another set of patchwork bus systems operate in the suburbs. The suburban busses are managed by the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART), but the “regional” moniker is misleading. SMART cannot operate in fifty-one suburbs in the Detroit region because individual local municipalities can “opt -out” of the system. This has enabled various suburbs to basically wall themselves off from bus transit—thereby avoiding sending most of their tax revenues to the regional system. This is the complex situation that persisted from the 1990s until the 2010s: Detroit’s public transit systems consist of disjointed, inadequate bus networks across a region stretching out over 1,300 square miles.
Detroit’s public transit system has been described as “America’s worst,” and that poor evaluation is hardly surprising after reviewing recent political dysfunction around transit in the area. Due to longstanding city/suburb and city/state tensions, almost all transit proposals made since 1960 have been contentious and subject to opposition from at least one of the region’s power brokers. The longstanding political divisions between rural, suburban, and urban leaders have persisted even as incentives have changed, in part due to racial politics. Despite decades of transit reform failures, in general, most people living in the City of Detroit and many people living near the city in “first ring” suburbs remain supportive of expanded transit in the specific form of higher taxes to subsidize more bus routes. People living farther from the city--in suburban or rural areas that exist as White enclaves—have been less supportive of new transit, generally. Simply put, much of the challenge for advocates has been convincing skeptical car commuters in the greater Detroit area to support new tax revenue for public transit when voting and contacting their representatives in the government.
Since the 1990s, several Detroit-area advocacy organizations have taken on public transit as a major priority. Transit Riders United (TRU) was perhaps the first advocacy organization entirely dedicated to transit; it was founded in 1999. Since then, TRU has become an institution at the center of transit advocacy in Detroit. It entered the advocacy scene alongside the prominent advocacy group Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength (MOSES), which was founded in 1997 as an interfaith community-based organization. MOSES has a broad social justice mission, and it includes transportation as one of its core focus issues. More recently, beginning around 2013, MOSES was involved in the launch of the Detroit People’s Platform (DPP) and the Motor City Freedom Riders (MCFR), two organizations that have each done significant advocacy work around transit.
Over the past twenty years, these organizations have taken on multiple aspects of transit advocacy, most notably “watchdogging” government and local transit agencies like DDOT and SMART. They hold public forums to educate the public, and they have worked with policymakers and regional stakeholders (including corporations, charitable foundations, and other community-based organizations) to build support for new transportation projects.
These organizations have occasionally used race-conscious strategies to pursue their goals, and other times they have taken a colorblind approach. A pivotal moment came in 2003, when TRU and MOSES joined with a suburban municipality and other plaintiffs in filing a racial discrimination lawsuit over the way that transit decisions are made in the Detroit area. The suit alleged that a regional agency with authority over transportation in the Detroit metropolitan area—the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG)—had a voting structure that racially discriminated against Black residents. SEMCOG was comprised of representatives appointed by county and city governments, and the lawsuit alleged that residents of Detroit were systematically shut out of regional decision-making due to wielding a low number of votes on the council. For example, while the City of Detroit had a population of nearly 1 million people (most of whom were Black), it had only two votes. But Livingston County had three votes on the council, even though it was a sparsely populated exurban area with a population around 200,000 (more than 95% White). TRU and MOSES argued that this structure meant that outlying residents—who tended to oppose new regional transit projects—had an unfair and outsized influence on SEMCOG. They felt that the lawsuit would compel a new voting structure that would be more responsive to the city’s needs and thus friendlier to transit. In 2006, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the lawsuit could not go forward, in part because the City of Detroit was not part of the suit, and therefore the plaintiffs had no legal standing. The court also found that SEMCOG was not technically subject to the principle of proportional voting. Even though the suit did not win in court, SEMCOG reformed its voting structure shortly after this court decision. Today, SEMCOG has a two-tiered system, one population-weighted and the other based on a concept of one vote per municipal government. Proposals must have the support of both tiers to move forward. Advocates at TRU and MCFR believe that this arguably democratic reform happened largely because of the racial discrimination lawsuit drawing attention to the structural lack of political power held by Black residents in the city.
After this mixed victory in 2006, however, TRU and MOSES mostly backed away from any further explicit efforts to discuss racial discrimination over the following decade… which gets us up to the Trump Era.
I’ll be back on the newsletter soon with more on the racial dilemma in Detroit transportation, including an overview of a key transit ballot measure from the November 2016 election (remember that one?).
Thanks as always for reading, and please let me know what you think either by sending me a message or popping a comment box on the website here.