S.O.S.: Organizing for a better, more just transit system in DC
If you took one or more of the 179,693,126 metro and 123,675,724 metrobus trips in 2016, you probably spend a lot of time thinking about what the metro rail and bus system means to you.
If you’re like me, it’s your preferred topic of small talk conversation, and how you vet potential friendships (“What?! You can’t name all the buses that run up 16th St.?”). Or it may be that you can’t hear the words “Red Line” without groaning in dread.
Regardless of where you find yourself on the scale of public transit fandom, you should pay attention to current developments, which touch on issues of conflict and cooperation as old as the system.
With rising fares, service cuts and a $7.4 billion budget shortfall over the next 10 years, local activists are organizing for a fight that in many ways feels overdue. The organizers of the newly-launched Save Our System (SOS) campaign are fighting on behalf of the city’s most transit-dependent residents (low-income workers, people with disabilities, senior citizens and students) for common sense demands:
- Dedicated funding for WMATA
- Meaningful dedication to the safety of riders and workers
- An affordable flat fare with free transfers
Legacies of organizing for change
Our metro rail system was the largest to be built after WWII, and opened during the heyday of the automobile (creepy 60s car ads, anyone?). It received copious federal investment, and was heralded as a model for cities across the US, with members of Congress able to observe it just blocks from the Capitol. While design enthusiasts fawned over station architecture, other key decisions, like the decision to build a 2-track system, unlike New York and Chicago, which have four, mean that repairs can only take place by invoking the dreaded CURSE OF SINGLE TRACKING.
But Metro suffers from a bizarre funding mechanism, or more accurately, the lack of a funding mechanism. While other cities count on dedicated tax revenue stream (New York gets 35 percent of its funding this way, Boston 47 percent, and Chicago and Atlanta 56 percent), only 2% of WMATA’s budget is covered through dedicated revenue.
The entire transit system fully transitioned to public ownership in 1973 and the Metro rail system was inaugurated in 1976; these structural changes were accompanied by the rapid growth in the number of African Americans in the transit workforce. The period was characterized by both direct action and more traditional organizing: a metrobus strike in 1974 packed city streets with cars (one man reported spending 48 minutes driving from one side of Dupont Circle to the other). A week-long wildcat strike in 1978 captured the attention of city officials and labor leaders alike, followed by a negotiated union contract in 1980. One bus driver explained the mindset union employees during the period, “We changed in the 60s. This is a different generation. My father might have swallowed his pride and taken this petty stuff, but we say, ‘Hell no, let’s fight this thing.’ ”
Standing up for workers and riders
Several decades later, service has been reduced even as fares continue to rise, and serious safety incidents like the 2009 Fort Totten crash and L’Enfant fire have kept riders on edge. In 2015, frustrated riders formed the Metro Riders Union, a progressive and grassroots, if demographically unrepresentative group (majority under-40, white, middle-class) whose rise was heralded with excitement and whose fall solicited comparisons to the dysfunction of the transit system they were trying to change.
That was before SafeTrack, before this latest round of fare increases, before the election of Trump imperiled federal transit funding. Fueled by years of frustration that has found few directed outlets, riders are once again organizing themselves, this time with the support of Americans for Transit, a group sponsored by the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents over 9,000 WMATA workers.
Save Our System calls for those who benefit economically from metro — developers and owners of large venues and companies — to pay their fair share in improving the system. The campaign platform also includes a constellation of related demands, from an affordable flat fare with free transfers, to transparency in decision-making within WMATA and respect for the safety recommendations from workers who operate and maintain the system.
Like many campaigns, SOS is helping riders to pay attention and get involved when it matters most. In this case, that will mean speaking up at the September 28 board meeting, funneling public comments to the right places during the next round of budget negotiations at the end of 2017, and bringing riders together in visible ways. One major advantage of a grassroots campaign like this one is that it puts riders, their hopes and needs, back at the center of the conversation.
The abstractly high numbers associated with the promise (millions of riders!) and fragility (a $7.4 billion budget shortfall!) of WMATA can distract from the most meaningful scale of public transportation: one rider, one trip. That’s where this gets personal — the anticipation of seeing family for Sunday dinners that builds on the bus rides up 14th St. The still quality of the neighborhoods passing by on the above-ground orange line headed towards New Carrollton. The pleasure of seeing friends run into each other and chat quietly in Amharic on a late-night bus down 16th St.
As we mobilize to improve transit for all, it might do us well to ask, as one rider did in amid a past iteration of transit soul-searching in the mid-90s, “Can anyone in his or her right mind seriously maintain that Metro is not the single best thing that’s happened in the metropolitan area in the past three decades?”
