Transit justice as spatial justice: learning from activists

ABSTRACT

The provision of mass urban transit is frequently tied to agendas of social justice and equity. Yet there are persistent challenges to locating justice within urban mobility regimes. Drawing on two cases of transit activism – Free Transit Toronto and Black Lives Matter in the San Francisco Bay Area – this paper identifies three limitations to transport justice scholarship and practice, namely the theorization of mobility, space, and justice. These activist struggles demonstrate that justice cannot be adequately defined through an abstract accounting of how harms and benefits are distributed, but also concerns the contextual and conflictual processes of producing space and subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Mass urban transit
• transport justice
• spatial justice
• black lives matter
• Toronto
• San Francisco
• free transit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Whereas ‘transit equity’ is the term most frequently employed in planning discourses, ‘transport justice’ tends to dominate the academic literature. Activist organizations, including those considered here, utilize both ‘transit equity’ and ‘transit justice’ in their campaigns. For the purposes of this article, a distinction is made between transit equity concerning the redistribution of goods and transit justice, implicating other dimensions of equality and freedom. Transit justice will be treated as an instance of transport justice (entailing different transportation modes).

2. Several recent works on transport justice have productively engaged the Capabilities Approach, for example, to demonstrate the broad way that transit conditions life chances (see especially Hananel and Berechman 2016; Pereira, Schwanen, and Banister 2017). Yet the solutions these authors provide tend to focus on improving transit policy based individualized measures of travel time, affordability, and access, missing the full extent of relationships that comprise mobility and the social movements defining justice goals in practice.

3. When the GTWA disbanded in 2015, the Free and Accessible Transit Campaign decided to continue as an independent organization, taking on the new name Free Transit Toronto. In recognition of this continuity, this paper refers to both organizations.

4. These movements – as complex webs of people, ideas, and institutions – are themselves already engaged in dialogue with justice scholarship. This paper is meant to complement these activities and to join this conversation by identifying some lessons (my own framing) that might be useful for transport equity scholars.

5. The arguments here about transport justice are largely in line with Sheller’s (2017, 2018) formulation of mobility justice. While my focus is admittedly urban, I use transport here as a platform and a perspective from which to view mobility relations more generally. However, whereas Sheller argues that ‘mobility justice’ is a distinct concept that overcomes the limitations of both transport and spatial justice, I suggest here, in a slightly different way, that a generous reading of both transport and spatial justice, derived in part from social movements themselves, can give rise to the mobile ontology and global interrelationships she advocates.

6. It is this emphasis on the production of space and subjects that distinguishes formulations of spatial justice from the notion of the ‘just city’ (Fainstein 2010). While Fainstein’s arguments are extremely useful for unpacking various dimensions of justice and their often competing orientations, her account does not go far enough to consider the unique considerations of mobility, nor does it (like transport justice accounts based on the Capabilities Approach) challenge fundamental production systems.

7. It should be noted that ‘justice,’ even for the movements in question is not fixed or universal but is worked through in practice. One can imagine many significant conflicts in struggles over transit space – including struggles among activists themselves. These internal tensions make finding one-size fits all solutions particularly daunting and dangerous.