Prologue

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.—Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jaìl, Aprii 16, 1963

A REMARKABLE MOMENT IN AMERICAN URBAN HISTORY - and geography—occurred in October 1996 in a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. A class action lawsuit brought against the Los Angeles Metro­politan Transit Authority (MTA) by a coalition of grassroots organizations on behalf of those who depend on public transit for their basic needs was resolved in an unprecedented and momentous consent decree. It was decided that, for at least the next ten years, past decades of discrimination against the transit-dependent urban poor, those who could not afford to run a car, would be remedied by making the MTA give their highest budget priority to improving the quality of bus service and guaranteeing equitable access to all forms of public mass transit.

The direct outcome of the case of Labor/Community Strategy Center et al. v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority, also described as the Bus Riders Union (BRU) decision, was no simple slap on the hand. According to the consent decree, not only was the MTA required to purchase a specific number of new environment-friendly buses, it would also have to reduce overcrowding, freeze fare structures, enhance bus security, reduce bus stop crime, and provide special services to facilitate access to jobs, education, and health centers. If followed to the letter, these requirements would soak up almost the entire operating budget of the MTA, making it impossible to continue with its ambitious plans at that time to build an extensive fixed-rail network in keeping with the perceived view of Los Angeles as a major world city. A Joint Working Group of the BRU and MTA was also created to maintain a lasting influence of the BRU on transit policy.

As a direct attack on racist practices, the Bus Riders Union decision signaled a revival of the civil rights movement and stimulated comparisons to the famous Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 on the racial desegregation of schools. Here, too, it was deemed that the rights of a particular segment of the population were being denied by the existence of two separate but unequal systems in the provision of a vital public service, in this case public mass transit. At the same time, it was also a stirring expression of the environmental justice movement, combating racial injustice and discrimination based on place of residence and affirming the view that where one lived could have negative repercussions on important aspects of daily life as well as personal health.

Nothing quite like this had ever happened before with regard to public transit services in any major American city. Giving such priority to the needs of the inner-city and largely minority working poor was a stunning reversal of the conventional workings of urban government and planning in the United States, as service provision almost always favored the wealthier residents even in the name of alleviating poverty. It also ran against the grain of American politics at the time, with its neo­conservative ascendancy, detrimental welfare reform, and weakening civil rights and antipoverty efforts. There were very few examples anywhere across the country of successful grassroots social movements affecting urban planning and governance at such a scale of financial commitment. In essence, the consent decree resulted in the transfer of billions of dollars from a plan that disproportionately favored the wealthy to a plan that worked more to the benefit of the poor.

Even more surprising was that this decision occurred in Los Angeles, historically not known to be a progressive urban environment for either labor or community organizations. Los Angeles had been the focal point for two of the bloodiest racial justice-based urban uprisings in U.S. history, in 1965 and 1992, after both of which there was relatively little success in alleviating the problems causing the riots in the first place, from extensive poverty and discrimination to racist police violence. By the mid-1990s, public attention had shifted toward an ambitious but costly fixed-rail building program that fed local pride and the desire to join the list of great world cities with advanced subway-tube-metro systems. With a few minor exceptions, however, rail construction ended soon after the BRU decision and the accompanying loss of public support for the expensive and problem-filled rail project.

The two key organizations behind the successful class action law-suit were the Bus Riders Union itself and the lead plaintiffs in the case, the Labor/Community Strategy Center (L/CSC), which initiated the court action and spearheaded the creation of the larger coalition. The Bus Riders Union/Sindicato de Pasajeros is not a traditional labor union but rather an assertively multiracial and antiracist mass organization of the transit dependent aimed at improving the public transportation system and the lives of the more than 400,000 predominantly minority and female working poor of Los Angeles. It forms a branch of the L/CSC, or Strategy Center, an activist organization founded in 1989 as, in its own words, an antiracist, anticorporate, and anti-imperialist think tank/act tank focusing on theory-driven practice. It aims at generating mass campaigns of the working class and oppressed nationalities, in particular black and Latino workers and communities. The Strategy Center runs a National School for Strategic Organizing and publishes Ahora Now, a bilingual political magazine.

After the consent decree was announced, the victorious BRU and Strategy Center organizers proclaimed their achievements in deservedly epochal language. They were “driving the bus of history,” producing “bil­lions for buses” in an ongoing struggle for justice at the “intersection of mass transit, civil rights, and the environment,” creating “a new vision for urban transportation” and “a new theory of urban insurgency in an age of transnational capitalism.” In an article published in the Socialist Register in 2001, Eric Mann, director of the Strategy Center, described their effort as “a race struggle, a class struggle, a women’s struggle all at once.”  […]

Hollywood too noticed the significance of the decision. Activist and Academy Award-winning cinematographer and director Haskell Wexler spent three years with the BRU and produced a feature-length film detailing its visionary efforts, adding to his earlier works on labor issues (Matewan, 1987), the Vietnam War, torture in Brazil, and the uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. While rooted in the local milieu, the BRU victory look on a global significance, enhanced by the international ambitions of its leaders.

Defining Transit Equity and Justice

Many factors figured into the stunning court decision in 1996. In part, it reflected the recognition that any investment in alternative forms of mass transit (such as fixed rail or subway construction) that compromised vital bus services, especially for the inner-city poor, was discriminatory and unjust. In specific legal terms, it violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the generative act that defined and propelled the civil rights movement. The transit needs of the poor and racial minorities were never ignored entirely by the transportation planners, but it was argued that they were systematically subordinated to the needs and expectations of those living well above the poverty line. A massive redistribution of resources and a major shift in public policy were deemed necessary to redress decades of systematic geographical and racial discrimination.

This long entrenched form of discrimination in meeting the mass transit needs of the poor was rooted in an even larger pattern of discriminatory investment that had shaped the geography and built environment of Los Angeles and other major metropolitan areas throughout the twentieth century. I refer here to the pronounced investment gap between the building and maintenance of roads and freeways on the one hand, and the construction of all other means of mass transit on the other. The outcome of this socially and spatially discriminatory process was an unjust metropolitan transit geography, favoring the wealthier, multicar-owning population in the suburban rings over the massive agglomeration of the immigrant and more urgently transit-dependent working poor in the inner core of the urban region.

By the time of the consent decree in 1996, the five-county Los Angeles urbanized area had become the densest in the United States, with more than five million predominantly immigrant and largely Latino/a workers packed into the teeming inner city and many more spilling out into the new cities forming in what had been classical suburbia. Some estimates claimed that 40 percent of the population was living at or below the poverty line, with a growing proportion consisting of women and children. A United Nations report published after the riots of 1992 claimed that the gap between rich and poor in Los Angeles and New York City was the widest in the developed world and was approaching that in Karachi, Bombay, and Mexico City.

Economic restructuring, increasing poverty and social polarization, and the rise of the so-called New Economy had worsened the problems of the transit-dependent poor and minority households concentrated in the inner city. Nearly every low-wage worker held multiple jobs, both sequentially and simultaneously, and in most cases these jobs, as domestics, gardeners, cleaners, nannies, home-care specialists, were multilocational, requiring travel to many different sites scattered around the city. The simple hub-and-spoke spatial structure of the proposed and partially built fixed-rail system could never serve the inner-city working poor as effectively as the dense mesh of a flexible bus network.

Other local factors entered into the court decision. After what some called the Justice Riots of 1992, confidence was shattered that local, state, or federal governments could deal with the magnitude of problems facing Los Angeles. While some progressive activists withdrew from politics, others recognized the necessity to foster new kinds of collective and connected social movements that would challenge neoliberal and neoconservative power. In the 1990s, many new campaigns and labor-community alliances were developed around Justice for Janitors, the need for a living wage, the differential effects of public investment, the availability of affordable housing, and what the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) called development with justice. The successful and committed organizing effort of the Strategy Center and its allies, however, stands out from the rest.

Building on deeper roots, going back to struggles against the closure of automobile assembly plants in an earlier period of deindustrialization (see in particular Eric Mann’s Taking On General Motors, published in 1987), the Labor/Community Strategy Center from its founding in 1989 was among the early leaders in the antiracist environmental justice movement in the United States and continues to be an important actor today. It played a key role in making connections between the attack on environmental racism and the struggles for transit equity and justice, with the Bus Riders Union as perhaps the most successful grassroots organization to grow out of these efforts.

In addition to the BRU and Strategy Center, there were many other actors involved in the court case. On the side of the accused was above all the MTA, a relatively new public authority formed in 1992 with the merger of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (LACTC) and the county Rapid Transit District (RTD). Although there were exceptions, on the whole the LACTC tended to be supportive of large-scale rail transport and countywide “regional” interests. One must remember that the City of Los Angeles is just one of nearly ninety municipalities interspersed with extensive unincorporated areas that make up the County of Los Angeles, reputed to be one of the largest local government units in the world. In 1990, the county had a population of more than eight million, less than half residing in the very oddly shaped City of Los Angeles.

Also countywide, the RTD controlled the huge but fractious bus sys­tem as well as several rail lines. The merger created a new organization that almost surely had a majority of decision makers that favored rail and conventional transportation planning practices, but there was also a minority that preferred the flexibility of bus transit and maintained serious concerns for issues of transit equity and justice. The MTA Board of Directors consisted of a mix of rail and bus advocates but also reflected a competitive division between what might be called the county regionalists and the city centrists, the former led by the five county supervisors, and the latter by the mayor and city council of the City of Los Angeles. The thirteen-member board consisted of the five supervisors, the L.A. mayor and three of his appointees, and four others from other parts of the county chosen by a county selection committee.

The opposing coalition led by the BRU and the Strategy Center also included the Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA), a nonprofit community services organization that played a key role in improving relations between African American and Korean communities after the conflicts of 1992 and in continuing struggles for immigrant and workers’ rights; the Southern Christian Leadership Council of Greater Los Angeles County, the national civil rights organization that supported Rosa Parks in her efforts to stop racial segregation in buses and other public facilities; and thousands of individual plaintiffs representing the “class” of transit-dependent bus riders. The chief attorneys for the case came from the Western Regional Office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), with some support also from the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Southern California and the Envi­ronmental Defense Fund.

The LDF is a public interest law firm that has played a major role in the national civil rights movement. Its most well-known success was the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education ending school segregation, a case that would eventually involve the political and symbolic importance of buses. The LDF has been specifically committed to building coalitions aimed at social and environmental justice and was active in earlier efforts to influence MTA policies in favor of the working poor. Its commitment to the plaintiffs was unquestionable, although the more radical BRU-L/CSC persistently and vigorously asserted its own priorities even when the LDF was not in total agreement. Despite some divergent viewpoints, it is hard to imagine a stronger team of advocates for the lawsuit that was formally initiated in 1994.

The interaction between opposing political and professional inter­ests during the lead-up to the final court decision and, one might add, after the consent decree was issued was unusually intense and controversial. Perhaps as significant as anything else in these debates was the exposure of the general public to the significant racial, class, and geographical biases that are embedded in all forms of public planning. It was almost as if the writings of critical geographers on the injustices that characterize the normal functioning of the modern metropolis were coming vividly into public awareness in Los Angeles.

The court case was characterized by a clash between two contrasting views of equity and justice. The MTA felt it was committed to transit justice, but its concept of equity was quite different from the BRU’s. As a county authority strongly influenced by the generally very conservative and predominantly white and suburban Board of Supervisors, it defined equity primarily in administrative and territorial terms. If every supervisorial district had equally efficient mass transit and served in some way the needs of the poor, then the system was considered to be equitable. This territorial district view of equity and transit justice was rooted in a “flat” geographical perspective and also ignored the markedly uneven geography of transit need. The importance of the downtown core of the county and region was always recognized, as were such key activity locations as the international airport of LAX and the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, but the boundaries that mattered most reflected above all the political interests of the Board of Supervisors and its associates.

A constitutional principle of nondiscrimination guaranteed some degree of transit justice, but as in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives this was assured mainly by not favoring one territorial district or constituency over another in the distribution of benefits (with the disguised exception of pork barrel allocations for the most influential politicians). This made it seem unconstitutional to pay special attention to certain areas and not others. Not every individual in the MTA thought this way, but simple district-to-district equity tended to dominate the overall political culture, and its logic was used in the court case to defend MTA policies and decisions against what were perceived as essentially incomprehensible and unwarranted charges of racial discrimination.

This form of thinking is deeply engrained in conventional planning practices. If policies, whether involving rail or bus, favored the City of Los Angeles over the rest of the county, this would be considered by many to be unacceptably discriminatory. Racial and ethnic minorities could be recognized as deserving special attention, but the MTA argued with mountains of data that every segment of its planned system of mass transit would carry large, if not majority, numbers of minorities and poor people. If a few segments, such as the light-rail Metrolink system that served the expansive San Fernando Valley or the Blue Line link to Pasadena, carried mainly white suburban passengers, this was only fair in this something-for-everyone logic of planning. How could there be claims of racial and spatial discrimination?

The coalition entered the battle with a very different strategic perspective. They argued, with abundant incriminating data, that there was a long historical record of discrimination through disproportional investments and attention to mass transit facilities that served the relatively wealthy, while those most transit-dependent in their everyday lives and densely clustered in what was defined as the inner city remained seriously and systematically underserved. At one point it was shown that each Metrolink rail trip was subsidized at a rate of more than $21 while the figure was a little over $1 per bus trip. It was made clear that when the needs of the transit-dependent poor are given priority, a very differ­ent view of justice and discrimination emerges, one that calls for significant changes in public policies and planning practices.

The court deliberations revealed the deeply embedded biases in urban transportation planning that shaped not just the actions of the MTA but practically every planning agency in the country. The bias was not just a matter of overemphasizing simplistic cost-benefit analyses but more so of intrinsically privileging the non-poor automobile driver, and because of this, actively discriminating against those residents who had little choice other than to use public transit for journeys to work, school, health services, shopping, and entertainment.

This car-centered ideology seemed highly rational to the majority of professional planners. Aiming to provide the best possible service for the population as a whole focused attention on the majority of riders and their needs, a seemingly admirable strategy. In all metropolitan regions of the world that, like Los Angeles, are not served with existing and well-used metro rail/subway systems, the majority of travel trips are done by automobile. This usually means that the private (and highly individualized) transit sector outweighs the public or mass transit sector in levels of investment both in absolute and per capita terms, especially when all public costs for street and freeway construction and maintenance as well as automobile prices, insurance, and so on are measured in.

When well-intentioned transportation planners approach mass tran­sit issues on these terms, especially when making the choice between rail and bus, the bus will lose out almost every time. Even if fixed-rail sys­tems such as BART or any of the more recently built systems never reach the overly optimistic goals of their promoters with regard to substituting for private automobile trips, there will always be thousands of car trips avoided. Buses can also take riders out of their cars but will continue to keep street traffic gridlocked and contribute more pollutants to the air unless extraordinary investments are made. When the majority rides in cars, or when this is perceived to be the case by transportation planners, rail investment will tend to be more attractive than improving bus tran­sit. And for the most part, the urge to become more like New York, or London, or Paris will intensify this bias and add to the pressure to make rail investment appear both efficient and equitable.

Once the specific and immediate needs of the transit-dependent poor are clearly recognized, however, everything changes. Los Angeles, once considered the most suburban of cities, provided an especially visible expression of transit injustice in the 1990s, with its massive agglomeration of the immigrant working poor in the dense corona surrounding the downtown business district. With many of the transit dependent hold­ing multiple jobs and with each form of employment typically requiring movement between multiple locations, flexible, multinodal, and densely meshed bus networks will nearly always be preferable, and urgently so, to fixed-rail systems, whether light or heavy, above- or underground.

As was shown for Los Angeles and can probably be demonstrated in almost every U.S. city, transit discrimination or transit injustice has prevailed as normal practice, almost entirely unconstrained and unquestioned, for at least the past eighty years, or since the beginning of the age of Fordism. Maintaining these automobile-driven discriminatory practices does not require evil people intentionally making racially biased decisions, just well-trained experts following conventional procedures to make decisions and plans that will almost always favor the wealthier and more powerful segments of urban society. That this ideology-bound system of transit discrimination was successfully challenged and judged to require enormous and immediate remedial action was among the most extraordinary accomplishments of the case of Labor/Community Strategy Center et al. v. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority. The significance of the decision would not go unnoticed.

Aftermath and Implications

For all its local roots, the BRU victory had implications that extended well beyond the Los Angeles region. If allowed to expand to its potential limits as a legal precedent, it could have led to radical changes in urban life throughout the country. Imagine the possibilities. Any plan by any public authority, whether for public transit or health policy or for the location of schools and fire stations, could be subjected to a “justice test” to determine whether the distributional pattern proposed was fair and equitable for all areas and communities affected, with fairness based on the different needs of the rich and the poor as well as majority and minority populations. Similar legal tests could potentially be applied to tax policies, electoral districting, hospital closures, school building programs, the health effects of air and water pollution, the siting of toxic facilities, practically every planning and policy decision influencing urban life.

Not surprisingly, the consent decree triggered vigorous reactions. The MTA and other major planning authorities, reinforced by more con­servative as well as some liberal political voices, mobilized in a determined effort to reverse or sabotage the decision. Legal appeals were made (and rejected). Hints of a “red scare” similar to that which destroyed public housing efforts in Los Angeles in the 1950s were floated in the local media. When these fears did not take hold, there were more direct per­sonal attacks on the BRU leaders.

Reactions were not confined to Los Angeles. The radical potential of the BRU decision and consent decree was not lost in Washington and in the Bush administration, especially in the wake of the Bush-Cheney regime’s infusion of presidential power into the judicial System. The fed­eral effort to prevent the potential spread of the BRU legal precedent came to a head in 2001. In the case of Alexander v. Sandoval, based on a challenge to the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) raised in Alabama over driving license exams being given only in English, the U.S. Supreme Court in effect blocked further legal application of the BRU precedent. In a five to four decision, it not only ruled that intent to discriminate had to be proved, drawing on earlier decisions that seriously weakened the entire civil rights movement, but also went further to state that private parties cannot sue the DOT or any other federal agency based on disparate action claims, that is, on the basis of alleged discriminatory practices. There were other efforts to limit the impact of cases such as the BRU based on the need to show intent, but none went as far as Alexander v. Sandoval in protecting public authorities against all antidiscrimination lawsuits.

The Sandoval decision built a legal barrier around attempts to extend the BRU victory beyond its immediate local impact, although efforts continue to encourage the spread of the BRU organizing and strategic model to other cities. The local impact, however, has been impressive. According to the BRU Web site, more than $2,5 billion were redistributed to serve bus riders in the ten-year period 1996-2006. The largest clean-fuel fleet in the country was created, replacing more than 1,800 diesel buses. At least a million annual bus service hours were added, more than eight hundred “green” and unionized jobs were created, bus ridership increased by 12 percent, and many rapid bus lanes were added to major surface streets. There are probably no other metropolitan areas in the country where bus services have improved more significantly over the past fifteen years.

On May 1, 2006, the BRU and L/CSC helped organize the “Great American Boycott,” or in Spanish, El Gran Paro Estadounidense (the Great American Strike), when perhaps as many as two million people marched peacefully for immigrant rights and against the rising national tide of anti-immigrant feeling. Even after the consent decree came to an end on October 29, 2006, the strategic coalition has, if anything, broadened and intensified its efforts in protesting against environmental racism, police mistreatment of minorities, all new plans for rail construction, proposed bus fare increases, and larger issues such as the war in Iraq. As indicated on its current Web page, the Strategy Center and its allied groups have been promoting extensions of the BRU model to other cities, such as Atlanta, protesting vigorously against recent regres­sive shifts in MTA policy, and expanding their publication and multi­media programs. In 2009, the Strategy Center published a map-rich Clean Air Economic justice Plan, presenting a new bus-centered model for urban transportation, environmental justice, and economic development that would build on federal funds arising from the Obama government’s economic stimulus package.

There is a great deal to learn from the accomplishments of the strategic coalition behind the BRU decision and its continuing struggles. For social movement activists and progressive scholars everywhere, it stands out as an exemplary model of successful urban insurgency in the search for racial, environmental, and spatial justice. With some degree of strategic optimism, one can see the possibility that the BRU along with the other resurgent coalitions that have been developing in Los Angeles over the past two decades can become effective springboards for a much larger movement seeking to erase injustices wherever they may be found. Ali that follows in Seeking Spatial Justice is aimed at encouraging this possibility.

Edward Soja

Tratto da Edward W. Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010