Street Spirit October 2004

Foundation Funds Fight for Transportation Justice

by Al Winslow

If you're poor in the Bay Area, your roundabout bus ride to work can take hours. Your neighborhood often is ringed with freeways that you can't afford a car to drive on, but that smother your street in carbon monoxide. Your children may well have asthma.

To get a child to a doctor's appointment by bus can take an entire day, according to a 2002 study of East Bay bus service by the Transportation and Land Use Coalition (TALC). In the poorest, most isolated neighborhoods - in Richmond, Bay Point and Pittsburg - only 33 percent of residents can get a bus to a doctor at all, the study said.

Sandy Kleffman reported in the Contra Costa Times: "Irene Moreno, who has been a licensed vocational nurse for 30 years, said she often saw the results of poor access while working at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Walnut Creek.

" 'Mothers who wanted to bring their children to the doctor couldn't take a 9 a.m. appointment because they would have to get their babies up at 4 a.m., then  make the three-hour trip,' she said.

" 'They couldn't take a 5 p.m. appointment because it would be past their child's bedtime before they got home,' she said. 'Some parents take their children out of school because they won't be home when they get out.' "

To give a voice to such riders in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Foundation this year donated $30,000 to three Bay Area advocacy groups - Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS), the largest and oldest homeless service provider in the East Bay; Lifetime, an organization of former welfare recipients who graduated from the University of California while on welfare; and the Community Development Institute, a 25-year-old research group based in Palo Alto.

"When we talk to transportation people, around that table are mostly advocates and policy people," said BOSS director boona cheema. "This grant is given to bring poor people who use public transportation to that table."

The grant resulted from a $100,000 settlement of a lawsuit filed against the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) in 2001 by EarthJustice, an environmental law firm.

"The MTC said in 1983 that it would increase ridership, but it hasn't done it," said Brian Smith, a spokesman for EarthJustice. The suit was filed under the Clean Air Act and argued that increasing ridership would reduce pollution, especially in poor neighborhoods.

"Over the past 20 years, the transit operators that have seen the most significant decline in ridership are San Francisco's MUNI and (the East Bay's) AC Transit," Smith wrote in a statement announcing the settlement. "Both... serve the dense urban core of the Bay Area that is home to a large portion of the Bay Area's transit-dependent and low-income population.

"By increasing funding for public participation in transportation planning, particularly in transit-dependent communities, this settlement aims to expand transit options for those who need it most."

The lawsuit was filed by Bayview Hunter's Point Community Advocates, Communities for a Better Environment, Latino Issues Forum, Our Children's Earth Foundation, the Sierra Club, the Transportation Solutions Defense and Education Fund, and Urban Habitat.

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