“Public Transportation is Very Important to Wal-Mart”

Abstract

Over the past decade, cities across the United States eliminated bus service at an alarming rate. This article insists that a persistent association between the urban bus and racial others legitimized these cuts as their surrounding discourses highlighted tensions between the need to move low-wage minority workers from city to suburb to exploit their labor, and the desire to erase them as disposable elements of a neoliberal economy. It argues that this tension inclined politicians and voters in St. Louis, Missouri, and Atlanta, Georgia, to deny increased bus funding despite the prospect of reduced profits for suburban businesses.

Keywords:

• mobility
• neoliberalism
• public transportation
• race
• urban politics

Notes

Paul Krugman, “Edge of the Abyss,” New York Times, October 3, 2008; Jeff Zeleny and Edmund Andrews, “Obama Warns of Prospect for Trillion-Dollar Deficits,” New York Times, January 7, 2009.

Transportation for America, Stranded at the Station: The Impact of the Financial Crisis in Public Transportation (Washington, DC: Transportation for America, August 2009), http://t4america.org/resources/stranded/ (accessed February 17, 2011); Sarah Karush, “Transit Ridership in U.S. Increases,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 9, 2008; Press Release, “Public Transportation in Serious Funding Crisis due to Economic Recession,” American Public Transportation Association, April 1, 2010, http://www.apta.com/mediacenter/pressreleases/2010/Pages/100401_funding_crisis.aspx (accessed 28 September 2011).

Paul N. Tramontozzi, The Federal Free Ride: The Economics and Politics of U.S. Transit Policy (St. Louis, MO: Center for the Study of American Business, 1987); David W. Jones, Mass Motorization +Mass Transit (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Henry Malcolm Steiner, Conflict in Urban Transportation (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1978).

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 75–77.

John Burby, The Great American Motion Sickness, or Why You Can't Get There from Here (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 13.

The “spatial mismatch hypothesis” describes the increasing divergence between where poor workers live and where the jobs for which they qualify are located. See Evelyn Blumenberg and Margy Waller, “The Long Journey to Work: A Federal Transportation Policy for Working Families,” in Taking the High Road: A Metropolitan Agenda for Transportation Reform, ed. Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 197–225; Thomas W. Sanchez, “The Connection Between Public Transit and Employment,” Journal of the American Planning Association 65, no. 3 (1999): 284–296; Michael A. Stoll, Job Sprawl and the Spatial Mismatch between Blacks and Jobs (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2005).

Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 70–73; Noam Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999): 66–67.

On the definition of the “underclass,” see Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 37–69; and Douglas S Massey, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 2.

Elisa Crouch, “Metro Here Takes Biggest Hit among Transit Agencies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 19, 2009.

Karush, “Transit Ridership in U.S. Increases.”.

Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 36–49.

Ibid., 69–111; John E. Farley, “Racial Housing Segregation in the St. Louis Metropolitan Area, 2000,” Edwardsville Journal of Sociology 2, http://www.siue.edu/sociology/EJS/FARLEYV2.HTM (accessed October 27, 2011).

Editorial, “Metro's Money Mess,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 1, 2008.

Ken Leiser, “Workers, Employers Feel Pain of Bus Cuts Today,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 30, 2009. St. Louis City and St. Louis County had a combined population of greater than 1.3 million in 2000. See US Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts: St. Louis County, Missouri,” 2000, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/29/29189.html (accessed September 12, 2011).

Metro, “Survey: How to Encourage Others to Ride MetroBus?” March 9, 2011, in author's possession.

On the history and deployment of the underclass as a political construct, see Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), esp. 248; Robin Kelley, “Playing for Keeps: Pleasure and Profit on the Postindustrial Playground,” in The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, 1st ed., ed. Wahneema H. Lubiano (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 195–231; Michael Katz, The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Comprising 51% of the entire population, St. Louis African Americans outnumber Asians, Latinos, and all other ethnoracial minorities by a margin wide enough to infer their predominance in any description of “minorities” in the City. In fact, the racial demographics in St. Louis have always been more starkly black and white than most other regions of its size: in 1940, 99.9% of the population identified as either black or white, and this percentage had declined only slightly, to 96.7%, by the year 2000. See Gordon, Mapping Decline, 11; Harry Levins, “TRANSITion: Who Rides Metro? Low-Income Workers Need Metro to get to Their Jobs,” St. Louis Beacon, March 9, 2010, http://www.stlbeacon.org/issues-politics/96-Development/100860 (accessed May 12, 2011); US Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts: St. Louis (city), Missouri,” 2000, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/29000.html (accessed September 8, 2011).

Ken Leiser, “Potential Cuts in Public Transit are Decried at Public Hearing,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 4, 2008.

Editorial, “Yes to Proposition M,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 5, 2008.

Jim and Tracy Spies, “Letter to the Editor,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 7, 2008.

Jerry Ehrlich, “Letter to the Editor,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 13, 2008.

Todd Swanstrom, David Kimball, and Tom Shrout, From Checkbook Campaigns to Civic Coalitions: Lessons from the Passage of Prop A (St. Louis, MO: Public Policy Research Center, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2011), 3.

David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Andrew Hurley, Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Burton J. Bledstein, “Introduction: Storytellers to the Middle Class,” in The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class, ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2001), 1–25; Theresa Mah, “The Limits of Democracy in the Suburbs: Constructing the Middle Class through Residential Exclusion,” in The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class, ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2001), 256–266.

Benjamin DeMott, The Imperial Middle: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Class (New York: William Morrow, 1990).

A 2006 Economic Policy Institute poll found that 45% of Americans considered themselves “middle class,” while only 27% considered themselves “working class” and 8% considered themselves “lower class.” Robert J. Samuelson, “Myths and the Middle Class,” Washington Post, December 27, 2006.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 107–113; Richard Butsch, “Class and Gender in Four Decades of Television Situation Comedy,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9, no. 4 (1992): 387–399.

For the characterization of welfare as a “black” program, see Kevin Neubeck and Noel Cazenave, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor (New York: Routledge, 2001); Martin Gillens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-Poverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Ken Leiser, “Mass Transit: A Right or a Privilege? Metro's Cuts Touch on Larger Debate about the Role of Government in Society,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 5, 2009.

Ken Leiser, “Changing Their Ways,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 22, 2009.

Paul Lynch, “Letter to the Editor,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 9, 2009.

Leiser, “Mass Transit.”

Leiser, “Bus, Train Riders will Feel Pain.”

Swanstrom et al., From Checkbook Campaigns to Civic Coalitions, 7–8.

Michael Cooper, “Rider Paradox: Surge in Mass, Drop in Transit,” New York Times, February 3, 2009.

“Metro Riders Brace for Cuts” (KMOV, March 15, 2009); “Metro Offering Few Alternatives for Displaced Riders” (KMOV, February 9, 2009); “Riders Prepare for Metro Service Cuts” (KMOV,25 March 2009); “Stimulus Plan Leaves Metro in the Cold” (KTVI, February 4, 2009); Ken Leiser, “Workers, Employers Feel Pain of Bus Cuts Today,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 30, 2009; Michael Burke, “Bus Service Cuts put Working Poor Further Behind,” West County Journal, April 29, 2009; Leiser, “Mass Transit.”

The Greater St. Louis Transit Alliance, “Greater St. Louis Transit Alliance: About Us,” http://moremetrolink.com/about-the-alliance.html (accessed 1 August 1, 2011).

Michael Burke, “Bus Service Cuts put Working Poor Further Behind,” West County Journal, April 29, 2009, emphasis mine.

Editorial, “‘Yes’ on Prop A.”

Urban Review STL, “What the Passage of Proposition ‘A’ can Mean for the St. Louis Region,” http://urbanreviewstl.com/2010/02/what-the-passage-of-proposition-a-can-mean-for-the-st-louis-region/ accessed January 28, 2011; urbanSTL, “Proposition A—Metro Funding in St. Louis County,” http://urbanstl.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7749 (accessed January 28, 2011); Vanishing STL, “Vote YES on Proposition A this Tuesday, April 6th,” http://vanishingstl.blogspot.com/2010/04/vote-yes-on-proposition-this-tuesday.html (accessed January 31, 2011); Swanstrom et al., From Checkbook Campaigns to Civic Coalitions.

“Proposition A and Metro,” St. Louis on the Air (KWMU, March 23, 2010).

Ken Leiser, “Workers, Employers Feel Pain of Bus Cuts Today,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO, March 30, 2009).

Ken Leiser, “Bus, Train Riders Will Feel Pain,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, MO, December 20, 2008), Third edition.

Elizabeth Kneebone, Job Sprawl Revisited: The Changing Geography of Metropolitan Employment, Metro Ecomony Series (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, April 2009), 8.

Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 397.

Swanstrom et al., From Checkbook Campaigns to Civic Coalitions, 15.

Interview with Reverend Sammie Jones, October 10, 2011, in author's possession.

Press release, “Black Clergy for Public Transportation Ad Hoc Committee to Host Proposition a Voter Rally,” Black Clergy for Public Transportation, March 30, 2010, in author's possession.

Reverend Freddy J. Clark, “Better Transit Means a Better Future,” St. Louis American, March 25, 2010.

Editorial, “Vote YES on Proposition A on April 6,” St. Louis American, March 25, 2010.

In the northern suburbs, the number of votes in favor of Proposition A in 2010 exceeded the number of votes in favor of Proposition M in 2008 by 18%. Swanstrom et al., From Checkbook Campaigns to Civic Coalitions, 19.

Editorial, “Back in Service,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 8, 2010.

Editorial, “We are One St. Louis,” St. Louis American, April 8, 2010.

Tommie Pierson and Linda Dopuch, “Proposition A: What Changed?” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 10, 2010.

Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 17.

While Swanstrom et al. make the argument that the success of Proposition A was in part premised on motivating “yes” votes without motivating opponents, they fail to examine why the Advance St. Louis campaign effectively silenced the opposition. Swanstrom et al., From Checkbook Campaigns to Civic Coalitions.

Ben Smith, “Shortfall Forces MARTA Cuts,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 16, 2008.

Stacy Shelton, “MARTA Budget Gap up to $60 Million,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 13, 2008.

Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, “About MARTA,” http://www.itsmarta.com/marta-past-and-future.aspx (accessed December 5, 2011).

Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, eds., Highway Robbery (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004), 56.

Robert Puentes, “Fueling Transportation Finance: A Primer on the Gas Tax,” in Taking the High Road: A Metropolitan Agenda for Transportation Reform, ed. Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005), 72.

Sam Massell, “No Reason now to Deny MARTA its Sales Tax Revenue,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 17, 2009.

Aaron Gould Sheinin, “Federal Package has Money for MARTA,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 19, 2009.

Jay Bookman, “Our Editorial Board's Opinion: Issue In-Depth: Transportation,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 11, 2009; Jim Galloway, “Cagle: ‘We're about to See what can Happen When MARTA has to Cut Days of Service,‘” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6 April 2009.

Ariel Hart, “$25 Million MARTA Rescue Plan,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 10, 2009; Ariel Hart, “MARTA Fares will be Higher on Oct. 1,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 23, 2009; Ariel Hart, “Landmark Transportation Bill has Miles to Go,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 24, 2010; Ariel Hart, “Riders Feel Pain of MARTA Budget Ax,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 29, 2010; Ariel Hart, “MARTA Cuts Start Saturday,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 24, 2010.

Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, “Atlanta: A Black Mecca?,” in The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century: Race, Power, and Politics of Place, ed. Robert D. Bullard (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007), 156.

Thomas Wheatley, “MARTA Faces Drastic Cuts,” Creative Loafing Atlanta, April 5, 2010, http://clatl.com/atlanta/marta-faces-drastic-cuts/Content?oid=1431685.

Jim Durrett, “Why MARTA Matters to Atlanta,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 19, 2010; Jay Bookman, “MARTA's Woes Threaten Our Future,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 2, 2010; Dan Chapman, “Charlotte vs. Atlanta;Competition Heats up to be King of the South,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 10, 2009; Chick Krautler, “Time for Elected Officials to do Their Job-Lead,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 10, 2009; Margaret Newkirk, “Georgia often Sneers as Atlanta Struggles,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 10, 2009.

Drivers in the Atlanta metropolitan region lead the nation in miles driven per day, and the city is home to two of the nation's worst bottleneck areas, bested only by Los Angeles and Washington, DC, each of which is home to four. The Federal government has withheld road money as an incentive for Georgia to address its growing smog problem. Miriam Konrad, Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility Under Construction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 4; Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, eds., Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000): 41; Jason Henderson, “Secessionist Automobility: Racism, Anti-Urbanism, and the Politics of Automobility in Atlanta, Georgia,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, no. 2 (2006): 297.

Jim Dexter, “Letter to the Editor,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 8, 2009.

Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, eds., Highway Robbery (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004), 56; Arthur C. Nelson et al., “Rail Transit in the Suburbs: Case Study of Transit Use in Atlanta's Affluent Northern Tier,” Journal of the Transportation Research Board 1571 (2007): 142–150.

“YouTube—BITCH U RIDE THE MARTA BUS-SWD DRUM MAJORS,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQTuYo6HmiQ (accessed March 25, 2011). The video has over 310,000 views.

Jim Galloway, “Transportation Funding Still an Explosive Issue,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 6, 2009.

Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 20–21. From 1917 until 1963, the county unit system relied on electoral arithmetic to determine the winners of state-level elections, granting candidates all of the electoral votes for each county in which they won the popular vote. Rural counties, however, always controlled more than their population's share of electoral votes. In 1960, for example, although rural counties accounted for a mere 32% of the total population, they commanded 59% of the electoral votes in state elections. See Scott E. Buchanan, “County Unit System,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-1381&hl=y (accessed April 15, 2005).

Kruse, White Flight, 20.

Margaret Newkirk, “Georgia often Sneers as Atlanta Struggles,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 18, 2009.

Kruse, White Flight, 23.

Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 53–92.

Kruse, White Flight, 19–41.

Ibid., 5.

David L. Sjoquist, “The Atlanta Paradox: Introduction,” in The Atlanta Paradox, ed. David L. Sjoquist, The Multi-City Study of Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).

Clerk's Office, Georgia House of Representatives, House Journal, Day 25 (March 3, 2009): 1200; Georgia General Assembly, House of Representatives Proceedings (video recording), March 3, 2009, http://mediam1.gpb.org/ga/leg/2009/house_030309_1P.wmv (accessed October 4, 2011).

Ariel Hart, “Law Keeps MARTA in Line but Flexible,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 29, 2009.

Michael W. Tyler, “Well-Managed MARTA has made do with Little,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 9, 2010.

Ken Foskett, “Assembly Must Focus on Transit, Trauma Care,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 27, 2009.

Robert Gates, “Letter to the Editor,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 13, 2009. See also Robert Andrews, “Letter to the Editor,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 13, 2009.

Carrie Teegardin, “MARTA Dug Own Financial Hole,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 12, 2010.

Newkirk, “Georgia often Sneers as Atlanta Struggles,” emphasis in original.

William E. Schmidt, “Racial Roadblock Seen in Atlanta Transit System,” New York Times, July 22, 1987.

Associated Press, “Atlanta Weighing Transit Expansion,” New York Times, August 13, 1989.

David Firestone, “Overcoming a Taboo, Buses will now Serve Suburban Atlanta,” New York Times, April 8, 2002.

Ibid.

John McCosh, “MARTA Examines its Image Problems,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 13, 2001.

Thomas Wheatley, “MARTA Faces Drastic Cuts,” Creative Loafing Atlanta, April 5, 2010, http://clatl.com/atlanta/marta-faces-drastic-cuts/Content?oid=1431685 (accessed 24 March 2011).

Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Martin Gillens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Anti-Poverty Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).

Doreen B Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005), 86.