San Francisco Bike Blog

If you’ve been in the transit biz a while, this is more than obvious to you, but I still want to make the case - to help fix public transit, we need to end homelessness, and fix the healthcare problem.

Muni Diaries is one of those websites that likes to get off on making fun of homeless people, but it does serve as a constant reminder that even people who can be extraordinarily crude have reasons to want to end homelessness. Advocates should note this and make it work for our causes - improving public transit by ending homelessness and providing universal healthcare. I’m not claiming to be cruelty-free myself, either.

But it’s not just this ’selfish’ aspect of ending homelessness that is important in terms of selling public transportation, it’s the idea that while racism is very real, it can’t be blamed for the complete failure of public transit in most of the United States — as many folks want to do. There are plenty of reasons that people won’t use public transportation - racism is but one of them.

We should keep in mind that people will still not want to ride the bus - even if we paint it gold, but ending homelessness and providing health care to those in need, in general, will help get people out of their cars - and that’s good for us bicyclists and that’s good for transit folks, too. This is why homelessness and health care are issues that bicycle and transit advocates should pay attention to if they want to be taken seriously as…bicycle and/or transit advocates.

Any of us who has taken transit know that craziness abounds, too - people who are homeless often have one or more serious forms of mental illness. We can’t afford to treat them, we’re told, because HMO’s are busy taking our money. The cost of healthcare is easily affordable if we cut out the profit-taking. We spend, what, five times as much per-capita on health care than other industrialized nations and still have crap coverage? It’s ridiculous. And it hurts transit, keeping people in their cars, where they continue to hunt and haunt cyclists and pedestrians.

People who are all about promoting cycling and transit should get to know people who are all about ending homelessness and providing universal health care. Sometimes there exists near-perfect alignments between seemingly-dissimilar interest groups - this is one of those times. It doesn’t matter who calls who first - just get it done.

Thinking about the nature of the relationship between homelessness and low use of mass transit reminds me of Emily Oster’s TED Talk about AIDS in Africa and its causes. Oster took an ‘economics view’ towards the disease instead of the typical ‘policy view,’ suggesting that we needed to better understand how people reacted to the disease (e.g. did they change their sexual behavior once they knew they had AIDS?) before we continued to spend all our money on policies that we thought, possibly mistakenly, were fixing the problem. Often times our assumptions overpower logic, common sense, and data. Oster suggests that five major preconceptions we have about AIDS in Africa are straight up wrong — that’s no small claim. She also suggests that there could be non-conventional solutions to the epidemic, like investing resources towards the goal of decreasing infant mortality rates among all babies, including babies who are not born with AIDS — this would incentivize women to engage in less risky sexual behavior, thus lowering AIDS transmission rates.

What if it turned out that we were wrong about all the reasons people don’t bike or take transit? The Bicycle Scholar, John Pucher, has suggested this was exactly the case up until pretty recently in the U.S. We had spent a ton of money on bike infrastructure with just about nothing at all to show for it. Now he’s told the bicycle world exactly what it needs to do to increase cycling mode share, and towns that are now using the conclusions drawn from his research are seeing results. Are the transit folks listening to their researchers?

Do transit folks even have their own ‘Transit Scholar’ the way we have our ‘Bicycle Scholar’ (we actually have a bunch of them)? If they did, and they were listening, I don’t expect there would be so many transit ‘advocates’ talking about improving bus service as a way of getting people out of their cars. Can you say, BRT?

Stewards for Affordable Housing for the Future (SAHF) is a member of the Transportation For America Coalition. SAHF knows that transportation costs are often the second largest cost for many households. Many folks choose to keep either their car or their house, and may eventually end up losing both. Some will end up on MUNI buses and trains. This will keep other people driving their cars, where they can continue to destroy our cities and towns. As advocates, we always need to be thinking about ways we can work together to help each other achieve our respective goals.

Think about what it might be like to get attacked, possibly murdered, on your everyday morning commute. It’s a devastating act in itself, and completely predictable and avoidable — but think about what it does to folks who were contemplating taking transit. The idea of ‘improved transit service’ needs to start taking a more holistic view towards transit.

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