Equity and transit

From an equity standpoint, I know it sounds terrible, but--where we want to put new fixed guideway transit is not where underserved populations are, but rather where the parking garages are. Because the hard truth is that increasingly, the places where rising rents are displacing the poor and transit-dependent to aren't suitable for transit. They are ever more suburban and lower density, with sparse street networks and poor walkability. 

The hard truth about being poor is that: a) you are a renter, and b) you live where you can afford to live. Which requires making the classic trade-off between space and rent. If you need more space, you are going to wind up with longer journeys. And classically, if you can't afford the journey, you face an ugly choice between  substandard dwelling (often of questionable legality) or of overcrowding.  So you go where you can. And as always, rents are lower with the nuisances are worse, the safety less, and the accessibility more limited. 

So improving to low-rent places is a bit of a mugs game, as it's also where the nuisance is most extreme, safety an issue, and the needle hardest to thread. And once you've improved the access, you'll see the poorest, least-resourced again displaced to someplace worse. Of course, over time, the nuisance and the safety will improve, as better resourced newcomers agitate against the nuisance, public safety campaigns are enacted, and 'blighted' (low-rent) structures are replaced by new development. But all of things only ratchet up the asking rents, displacing every more of those in poverty, even as they remove the cheap and run-down buildings that businesses and their customers rely on. (This cycle is not new--Jane Jacobs inveighed against it happening in NYC generation ago). 

So if we actually want to do something on the basis of equity, what to do? First, transit should serve low-income jobs. Jobs are much more highly concentrated than population is, and the job remains low income, even if the population they serve becomes more affluent over time.  Second, the transit network needs to be flexible. the location of the low-rent district (and hence low-income households) is going to shift over time. This is especially true with low-income owners--they buy in while it's cheap, but over time become more affluent, which is strongly linked to additional vehicle ownership and thence to lower transit ridership. So if you need to serve a low income population, fixed guideway transit simply isn't the way to do it. Third, transit needs to be a network (a frequent network) so as low-income renters shift location, they can still use or re-use part of their existing trip-pattern for getting to work, rather than being forced to dissolve a whole series of arrangements to make a single shift in housing or employment.