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By: Tom Sandborn
Every time a Canadian turns the ignition key in a private car, he or she is contributing to a breathtaking experience - one that contributes to an estimated 16,000 premature deaths a year caused by air pollution. Canada's cities are choking to death on automobile and truck exhaust, while our farm land is disappearing beneath concrete poured to serve vehicles, not people.
As a career transit driver here in BC, I take the issue very personally. Every year of the two decades I've driven, Vancouver traffic has grown more murderous, and the air I breathe has grown murkier. Every day I see more single occupant vehicles blasting through red lights, radio booming and cell phone fully deployed, as the world's most inefficient form of transportation pours yet more muck into Vancouver's already overcast sky.
Like many Canadians, I want this to change. I want a reduction in automobile dependency, increased good mass transit, and better infrastructure for bikes and pedestrians.
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Because of the Bus Riders' Union, poor people in LA will have better transit in the foreseeable future, and cleaner air buses serving lower-income communities will reduce the need for private car use |
Sadly, a public policy vacuum seems to be pulling Canadians in the opposite direction. According to the 1998 David Suzuki Foundation/Pembina Institute Report "Canadian Solutions", public transit usage north of the 49th parallel declined by 13 per cent since 1990, while Canada remains the only OECD nation where the federal government does not fund public transit, despite collecting $4 billion in fuel taxes annually. Provincial support is flagging as well: in Ontario, for instance, responsibility for transit funding has been downloaded to cash-strapped municipalities, which may have little choice but to cut back on bus and subway service.
Add this to vigorous auto industry promotion of gas guzzling SUVs and light trucks - which, according to Canadian Solutions, has led to an overall decline in vehicle fuel efficiency in Canada since the late 1980s - and the results are more greenhouse gasses and air pollution, and higher health costs.
But wait: there's a little good news from the south, where important lessons for Canadians who want transit and automobile sanity are waiting to break out.
Last year I paid a visit to the Los Angeles Labor Community Strategy Center, the parent organization of the Bus Riders' Union, which has succeeded in changing the face of transit in Los Angeles through an exciting blend of direct political action and legal challenge. Because of the Bus Riders' Union, poor people in Los Angeles will have better transit in the foreseeable future, and clean air buses serving lower-income communities will reduce the need for private car use.
The Wiltern building is an ornate jade green tower in LA's old city centre, for a while it was the tallest building in LA. Now the county is studded with much higher towers, and office space in what passes for a downtown core in LA is so cheap that even radical organizers operating on a shoe string can afford it.
When I visited with the Strategy Center in December 1998, its cheerfully cluttered office was electric with excitement. A few weeks before, the board of LA's Metro Transit Authority had finally, after years of street demonstrations, fare boycotts, and legal challenges, agreed to take action on a list of demands from the Bus Riders' Union, a mass membership group organized by the Strategy Center.
The MTA board had voted to buy 2095 buses over six years, an increase of almost 800 buses over previously announced plans. All the buses are to be clean air vehicles powered by natural gas, representing yet another win for the Bus Riders' Union, which has vigorously opposed the MTA board's suggestions to add only cheaper and higher polluting diesel busses to LA's decrepit fleet.
This decision to buy the new vehicles was also a symbolic milestone: it was the first major step by the MTA board to comply with a 1996 federal court order requiring it to remedy its underservicing of poor and minority districts, which the court had found to be in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Responding to a challenge from the Bus Riders Union (in partnership with the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People - NAACP, the Korean Immigrant Workers' Advocates and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) the court decreed that there had been clear racism in LA's transit policies. The court noted a consistent bias in transit decisions that favoured fancy subways serving white middle-class areas (the construction of which cost billions of dollars in the 80s and early 90s), but financially starved the bus system that non-white and poor riders rely on.
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