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The Toledo Area Transit Authority (TARTA) is the latest
entity to publicly abuse Toledo’s black and brown poor.
Without the benefit of community input, TARTA will
unilaterally impose drastic service cuts in the inner city,
effective August 24, 2014.
Service for the TARTA 28 and 30 bus routes will only be
provided every two hours rather than hourly, as is currently
the case. Transit on Erie Street between Newton and the
Anthony Wayne Trail will be completely eliminated as will
service on Indiana between Smead and Brown.
Also, the evening, weekend and holiday line up
transportation for Lincoln Avenue and the inbound access via
Indiana Avenue will be discontinued.
While no employee layoffs are expected, the labor man hours
will be shifted from the 28/30 inner city routes to the 27H
route which services the Central Avenue Wal-Mart, a move
which infuriates labor leaders. “Why send another bus to
Wal-Mart, which already has multiple service to their front
door while poor residents will have to walk from Dorr Street
to Nebraska Avenue to catch the bus,” asks frustrated
Amalgamated Transit Authority (ATU) president Carly Allen.
The policy changes appear to benefit the politically
conservative Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation with
annual revenues of $476 billion, on the backs of the
community’s most disadvantaged citizens.
Ninety percent of TARTA’s employees live in Toledo
neighborhoods where poverty is high and are thus sensitive
to the impact of the service reductions. According to Allen,
central city residents will have less opportunity to get to
work, school or doctor’s appointments and will have to walk
farther to catch a bus. Allen sees the cuts as a
management-initiated plan to reduce ridership, thus
providing the justification to eliminate service in those
areas completely.
While the unfairness of the service cuts resonates with
some, others also see TARTA’s service cuts as a not so
coincidental plan, one designed to empty the suburbs of poor
people of color.
Construction of Toledo’s I-75 construction system, which
began in the early 1960s, facilitated the segregation of
Toledo’s inner city and enabled white flight to the suburbs.
Most jobs are located in the suburbs but there is no TARTA
service to Perrysburg, Oregon, Holland or Monclova, which
keeps blacks, Latinos and the poor confined and under
constant surveillance by a heavy police presence in a form
of racialized control.
Still, for others, however, the service cuts are reflective
of managerial incompetence and a weak board of trustees. A
recent September 2004 report (republished June 2007) by the
Toledo Metropolitan Area Council of Governments (TMACOG) was
highly critical of current public transportation and
suggested that TARTA “does not provide a comprehensive
system that serves all the needs of the region.”
The Blade has also pointed out that only one-third of jobs
in the suburbs are accessible by transit. This further
disadvantages the nearly 14 percent of Toledo’s households
(disproportionately low-income and African American) who
don’t have cars.
What is needed to bring down the unfair, apartheid
transportation system?
“Well, we need public scrutiny. We need community action to
look at the system, top to bottom,” insisted one high level
public administrator. “Management has a bunker mentality.
There’s no transparency. There’s a lack of trust and at the
end of the day it doesn’t work. You need to wipe the slate
clean and start over. If anyone had to draw up a regional
public transportation system today, it would not be laid out
on the spoke and hub system that we currently have. Neither
would its funding or membership exist as is. No one would
draw this up,” he continued.
The ATU is calling for “an improved and fully-funded transit
system,” that services the entire metropolitan area. A
regional sales tax, the union says, is more equitable than
the current property tax mechanism and would shift the
burden away from suburban property owners and make way for
an effective unified system.
Lucas County asked to become a part of TARTA three years ago
but had the request denied by the TARTA board, which
requires a unanimous vote to join or to leave. It appears
that the County’s authority under the Ohio Revised Code to
provide a sales tax to fund the system may have intimidated
some of the suburban members. In any event, the motive for
not accepting equitable and sustainable funding seems to be
to keep Lucas County away from TARTA and the poor away from
the suburbs.
With the central city left exclusively to the disadvantaged,
suburbanites do not appear to have a strong stake in what
happens here. And while there seems to be little transit and
even less regionalism in the Toledo Area Regional Transit
Authority, the biggest problem is that “the community which
needs public transportation the most, has no traction.”
How can the community gain traction around the issue?
The challenge is that we have more than a few blacks who are
living in the suburbs, themselves beneficiaries of
integration provided by the civil rights movement. However,
the truth is that there are more black and brown people who
are poor in metro Toledo than there were during the
movement. There are currently more blacks who do not own
homes today than prior to the urban renewal of the 1960s and
1970s. Sadly, the gains made by empowered blacks ultimately
became the negotiated price for silence and indifference to
the condition of our contemporary black and brown poor.
However, the United States government recently began to
scrutinize transit agencies for civil rights compliance in
places like Minnesota, Oakland, California and elsewhere.
Certainly TARTA may be vulnerable to a challenge on the
grounds that it has violated the civil rights of Toledo’s
poor, black and brown citizens.
Nevertheless, a bus boycott and grassroots organizing
efforts are always in order, for such a time as this.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org |
