The Atlantic wonders if transit is failing white people [View all]

from the Human Transit blog:



the atlantic wonders if transit is failing white people


How do you react when you read the following sentence?



This supposedly shocking fact is the starting point for Amanda Hess's confused and aggravating piece in the Atlantic today, which argues that somehow transit is failing because it's not attracting enough white people. "As minority ridership rises, the racial stigma against (buses) compounds," Hess writes. Sounds alarming! But who exactly is feeling this "stigma," apart from Ms. Hess, and how many of those people are there?

Read it again:



Now, how does your reaction change when I point out that in the 2010 census, just under 28% of the population of Los Angeles County is "non-Hispanic white," so over 70% can be called "people of color." Now what if I tell you that as always, transit is most concentrated in the denser parts of the county, where the demand and ridership are higher, and these areas happen to be even less "non-Hispanic white" than the county at large? (Exact figures can't be cited as this area corresponds to no government boundary.) So the bus system, weighted by where the service is concentrated, serves a population of whom much, much more than 70% could be described as "people of color".

Please don't treat these figures as too precise. The claim that "92% of Los Angeles bus riders are people of color" is impossible to fact-check because two of its key terms are ambiguous.



So to the extent we can track Hess's statistics here's what they say: Los Angeles bus ridership is mostly people of color because Los Angeles is mostly people of color. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.humantransit.org/2012/07/the-atlantic-wonders-if-transit-is-failing-white-people.html