Suit Alleges Bay Area Transit Agency Runs Seperate & Unequal' System Favoring White Suburban Commuters
- Originally published in the LA Times on April 20, 2005 [here]
By Lee Romney
Times Staff Writer
April 20, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO — Minority bus riders and community groups from
Alameda and Contra Costa counties filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday
accusing the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission of
maintaining a "separate and unequal transit system" that favors white
suburban commuters.
The lawsuit is modeled on a 1994 Los Angeles case filed against
the Metropolitan Transportation Authority by the Bus Riders Union. The
settlement in that case resulted in a federal consent decree mandating
improved services for urban riders.
The Bay Area lawsuit alleges that the commission has
disproportionately funded Caltrain and BART — rail services used
predominantly by white suburbanites with relatively high incomes —
while under-funding the East Bay's AC Transit bus system, used mainly
by low-income minority city dwellers.
According to the lawsuit — filed on behalf of three minority
riders from East Oakland and Richmond, the nonprofit Communities for a
Better Environment, and Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 192 — the
commission has channeled a per-person public subsidy of $2.78 to AC
Transit riders, $6.14 to BART riders, and $13.79 to Caltrain riders.
"The numbers add up to racial discrimination in violation of the
[U.S.] Constitution," said Bill Lann Lee, a lead attorney on the case,
who as a Los Angeles civil rights attorney in the 1990s helped press
the case against the MTA.
Commission spokesman Joe Curley declined to comment Tuesday on
the lawsuit, saying the legal staff had not yet been served with a copy
and commissioners had yet to discuss the matter.
The lawsuit seeks a "fair and equitable share" of funding "to
accord inner-city riders equal dignity with white suburban riders,"
said Lee, who served as assistant attorney general for civil rights in
the Clinton administration. Attorneys for the plaintiffs are seeking to
pursue the case — filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco — as a
class-action lawsuit.
Commission ridership surveys over the years indicate it
intentionally discriminated against minorities in violation of the U.S.
Constitution, the suit alleges. However, even if the discrimination was
not intentional, the suit maintains, it resulted in disparate delivery
of services along racial and ethnic lines — also a federal law
violation.
A similar approach was taken in the Los Angeles case, which has
prompted the MTA to add 1.6 million annual bus-service hours. Last
week, the special master overseeing the consent decree ordered the MTA
to add 134 more buses to its Metro Rapid fleet.
Sylvia Darensburg, an African American divorced mother of three
who lives in East Oakland, said cuts in funding to AC Transit have led
to inferior bus routes and cost increases that strain her family
budget. The 45-year-old medical administrator works in downtown Oakland
and also attends Chabot College in Hayward with her eldest teenager.
She spends five hours a day on the bus at times, and could see
her monthly transit costs increase from $150 to $230 if bus passes are
eliminated as proposed.
"It's nice to see in paper what I see every day riding AC
Transit," Darensburg, one of the three plaintiffs, said of the lawsuit.