Infrastructural excess: the branding and securing of bus rapid transit in Cleveland, Ohio

ABSTRACT

This study develops the notion of infrastructural excess to foreground how representational strategies and security practices combine to facilitate a specific political rationality of public bus transit. Critical analysis of bus-rapid transit (BRT) in Cleveland, Ohio, highlights how bus service improvment is undermined by the necessity of transforming the image of bus transit to catalyze urban revitalization It argues that the branding and policing of BRT, features nonessential to service delivery, constitute an infrastructural excess, which enabling busing to serve land development goals. The notion of infrastructural excess calls attention to busing as a new site for the enactment and enforcement of capitalist values at the expense of working class residents and transit riders. The case of Cleveland’s HealthLine demonstrates the complex implications of placing an economic imperative on a social service and the ways that BRT reproduces injustice on a racialized and classed public transit landscape.

KEYWORDS:

• Public transportation
• spectacle
• security

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an Independent Research Travel Grant from the UT-Austin School of Architecture. The paper benefitted immensely from the supportive and constructive criticism of Jason Cons. I am further grateful to Bjorn Sletto, Deidre Zoll, Adam Ogusky, Magdalena Novoa, Kenza Yousfi and Elizabeth Mueller for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This paper represents one portion of a larger research project which also explores resident and transit user perceptions of the BRT (see Zigmund, 2012).

2. It is operated by the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Agency (RTA). Since the Healthline, two additional BRT lines have been developed. According to their website, the RTA provides roughly 45 million rides/year on four rail lines, four trolley lines, three BRT lines and 55 bus routes.

3. Cesafsky (2017), Paget-Seekins (2015), and Ureta (2015) are important examples of such studies in a Latin American context. Furthermore, BRT, moving from Global South to Global North, represents a reversal of traditional notions of policy circulation (see Wood, 2014). Unfortunately, I only have space to briefly comment on this interesting dynamic.

4. In interviews with then-Planning Director Robert Brown, then-City Council President Martin Sweeney, and local reporter Steven Litt, it was stressed that the project’s success would be determined by its ability to generate economic growth in the form of increased real estate values, jobs, and tax revenue (also see Zingale & Riemann, 2013). As developed below, this development imperative was also built into federal funding formulas for BRT projects.

5. “When analyzing the spectacle one speaks, to some extent, the language of the spectacle itself in the sense that one moves through the methodological terrain of the very society which expresses itself in the spectacle” (Debord, 1977, §11).

6. The dominant paradigm in professional and academic transportation planning distinguishes two categories of transit riders, “choice” users, those with various transport options but select a certain mode because they view it as superior, and “captive” riders, defined as those without a driver’s license or access to a car (Jacques et al., 2013).

7. According to Michael Schipper, RTA’s Director of Engineering, Curitiba’s Rede Integrada de Transporte provided the initial design concept and was only system local policymakers toured (M. Schipper, personal communication, July 17, 2012).

8. I am grateful to Jason Cons for this insight.