[rad-green] Free transit is just the beginning

*https://briarpatchmagazine.com/blog/view/free-transit-is-just-the-beginning
<https://briarpatchmagazine.com/blog/view/free-transit-is-just-the-beginning>*


*Briarpatch          Nov 29, 2019 *

Free transit is just the beginning

*by James Wilt
<https://briarpatchmagazine.com/contributors/view/wilt-james>   *
<https://briarpatchmagazine.com/images/articles/_resized/MTA-protest-1.jpg>

Protesters jump turnstiles in the New York City subway, during a protest
against police presence in the MTA on November 1, 2019. Photos via
Decolonize This Place, by Javier Alvarez.


Militant transit struggles are breaking out across the Americas.

In Chile, transit riders responded to a proposed 4 per cent fare hike
with explosive
protests
<https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/chile-fare-hike-protests-state-of-emergency-1.5327591>
that
included mass turnstile jumping, peaceful marches, and vandalism or
destruction of subway stations in Santiago. New York Governor Andrew
Cuomo’s decision to hire 500 more transit cops
<https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/11/14/mta-will-spend-249m-on-new-cops-to-save-200m-on-fare-evasion/>
for
New York City’s subway – along with increased fares and a series of viral
videos of incidents of police violence in the subway – have triggered massive
fare evasion actions and rallies.
<https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/underground-resistance-mounts-against-subway-policing-nyc>

Last week, bus riders in Vancouver were refusing to pay fares
<https://www.citynews1130.com/2019/11/18/fare-evaders-some-metro-vancouver-transit-users-refusing-to-pay-as-strike-hits-day-18/>
until
TransLink offered a fair contract to transit workers, while activists in
Montreal marched
<https://twitter.com/Courage_CA/status/1199536411671695360> for
a transit-focused Green New Deal. Others in Toronto plastered the city
with beautiful
posters <https://twitter.com/dhunnasim/status/1199172886566711296> calling
for free transit and proper funding of the TTC. Fare strikes and rallies
for free transit are scheduled in several cities for November 29
<https://crimethinc.com/2019/11/18/friday-november-29-nobody-pays-an-international-call-for-a-strike-against-the-rising-cost-of-living>
–
the same day as the global climate strike. Transit workers are striking
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/for-striking-metrobus-workers-the-fight-for-more-rights-and-better-pay-outweighs-the-financial-hardship/2019/11/24/e5765194-0bc6-11ea-bd9d-c628fd48b3a0_story.html>
against
their private employer in Washington, D.C. while Vancouver SkyTrain workers
voted 96.8 per cent in favour
<https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/metro-vancouver-bus-seabus-shutdown-averted-as-tentative-deal-reached>
of
job action. Campaigns continue to escalate in power and scale.

But it’s the specific demands for free transit that knit seemingly
disparate movements for climate action, anti-poverty, and prison and police
abolition together into a potentially world-changing force.

It’s no coincidence that these efforts are all taking place at the same
time. Public transit is one of the most powerful sites of struggle that we
have in our cities, given it’s the backbone of how many people get to work,
grocery stores, schools, and social activities. The physical nature of the
service – requiring strangers to congregate in bus shelters and train
stations, often anxious about delays and costs – represents a site of highly
effective collective power
<https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/public-transportation-security-safety-laws-protests-equity/602212/>
if
harnessed. But it’s the specific demands for *free transit,*
<https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/08/public-transport-can-be-free> through
spontaneous actions of turnstile jumping and campaigns like “swipe it
forward,” <https://www.amny.com/transit/swipe-it-forward-1-36554632/> that
knit seemingly disparate movements for climate action, anti-poverty, and
prison and police abolition together into a potentially world-changing
force.

Technocratic transit wonks often condescend
<https://twitter.com/CJEdmonton/status/1196858325205319680> to advocates of
fare-free transit, arguing that municipalities need more funding to improve
service and that calls for free transit undermine that goal. Of course it’s
true that transit departments need massive amounts more money – but that
shouldn’t be coming from regressive fares that increasingly benefit
corporate owners like SNC-Lavalin’s botched light-rail project
<https://ca.news.yahoo.com/not-good-enough-city-manager-205501078.html> in
Ottawa. Instead, excellent transit systems can and should be fully funded
by increasing taxes on rich households and corporations and rerouting
current spending on roads and highways.

Such a transition will have a huge range of benefits: boosting ridership,
cutting emissions, making streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists, and
ensuring that everyone has the ability to travel regardless of income. It’s
an exceptionally straightforward policy to implement, and can serve as a
clear rebuttal to the growing trend of privatization and austerity.

Transit agencies will no longer have to worry about “fare evasion,” which
has long been used to justify dystopian securitization measures. After the
TTC’s alleged loss of $61 million
<https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ttc-fare-evasion-broken-machines-overcrowding-1.5030854>
due
to fare evasion in 2018, it launched a widespread ad campaign to threaten
riders with $425 fines and dozens of new fare inspectors and transit
enforcement officers. Similarly, New York responded to a reported loss of
$215 million last year from fare evasion by hiring 500 more Metropolitan
Transportation Authority cops
<https://gothamist.com/news/mta-hiring-500-new-cops-fix-quality-life-issues-subway-system>
–
costing almost $250 million over four years (that’s in addition to the over
700 existing transit police and 2,500 NYPD officers who patrol the city’s
subways and buses).

<https://briarpatchmagazine.com/images/articles/_resized/MTA-protest-2.jpg>

Unsurprisingly, such enforcement is highly racialized: two-thirds
<https://newrepublic.com/article/155540/class-war-fare-dodging-crackdowns> of
the MTA riders arrested for fare evasion in the second quarter of 2019 were
Black, while a decade’s worth of TTC data
<https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/07/02/ttc-ticketing-data-raises-concerns-that-black-transit-users-are-being-fined-at-a-disproportionately-high-rate.html>
indicated
that Black transit users have been fined at a rate almost double their
demographic. Transit police are increasingly profiling and detaining
undocumented people
<https://thetyee.ca/News/2014/07/10/Transit-Police-Immigration-Status/> on
transit, leading to deportation and incarceration. While getting rid of
fares doesn’t eradicate racist policing, it removes one of the main tools
used to harass and detain in transit spaces.

Free transit also protects transit workers. Bus drivers, especially, are
forced to bear the brunt of rider anger at high fares and poor service.
According to a survey conducted by the Amalgamated Transit Union of
drivers, 73.6 per cent of assaults
<https://www.atu.org/atu-pdfs/health-safety/ATU-ASSAULT-SURVEY-FINAL.pdf#page=26>
are
caused by fare disputes. If we want to reduce the very threat of attack and
abuse that workers face on the job, we should remove the primary source of
incidents: fare disputes.

Ditching fares means that people are no longer denied transportation due to
lack of money. It also means that riders can board the bus far more
efficiently, not having to scan their transit pass or put a pocket full of
coins in the farebox, increasing the ability for the vehicle to remain on
schedule, and for riders to be able to rely on its service. Some cities
have half-heartedly introduced low-income transit passes but they’re often
still far too expensive or require a byzantine means-testing process.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/nyregion/fair-fares-metrocard-discount-nyc.html>
It
would be far simpler just to abolish fares.

<https://briarpatchmagazine.com/images/articles/_resized/MTA-protest-3.jpg>

It’s not some utopian demand. Over 100 transit systems operate fare-free
around the world, including much of Estonia.
<https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/05/estonia-will-roll-out-free-public-transit-nationwide/560648/>
Dunkirk,
France, became one of the largest examples, when it introduced free buses
<https://www.france24.com/en/20190831-france-dunkirk-free-transportation-bus-success-climate-cities>
to
its population of 200,000 last year. About half of riders surveyed said
they were new transit users and were using it instead of driving a car, a
clear indication of the policy’s power to reduce transportation emissions
in a city. Such an approach can be scaled up to any level, of course,
including to intercity bus service
<https://www.atucanada.ca/press-releases/atu-calls-renewed-vision-prairie-intercity-public-transit>
or
national passenger rail.

Free transit is about much more than transit: an end to austerity, a
refusal of police power, and a demand for decommodified and universal
public services. We simply can’t build the world we dream of until we
confront ruling class power in all its forms. As geographer Juan Correa
told *CityLab,*
<https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/10/chile-protest-santiago-metro-public-transit-fare-inequality/600874/>
people
in the highly unequal
<https://thecityfix.com/blog/chiles-protests-reveal-countrys-transport-inequalities-dario-hidalgo/>
country
of Chile attacked the subway because companies were extracting profits from
them through higher fares: “This was a moment of rage, of stating that this
institution was public, but they make me pay and with a hike that is
unjustified.”

Free transit is a struggle for genuinely public and democratic control of
our society. Activists in Chile and New York City are showing us how to
win. Let’s join them at the turnstiles today.

James Wilt is a freelance journalist and master’s student based in
Winnipeg. He has also written for The Narwhal, VICE Canada, Canadian
Dimension, and the National Observer, and is working on a book about pub

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