The real issue is simple that commuting by car is apparently faster than commuting by bus. Wow, if that surprises anyone you need a serious reality check. Busses are big, less maneuverable, accelerate and decelerate slower, and make a lot of stops along meandering routes rather than simple point-to-point driving in a private automobile.
The whole idea of public transportation is that it is, well, public. Anyone can take it, even those people in their cars zooming past the busses. Yes, it costs some money, yes it takes some amount of time. So why would people go to the extra expense, stress, and hassle of driving themselves? There must be some benefit(s) to it. Turns out there are benefits private transportation - that's why people go to the expense of owning a car.
Now, the typical lib lurker here is probably thinking "We could and should fix this, make it fair!" They'll decide to use our money (via taxes) to buy everyone a car so they can commute at the same speed. The ultimate result will be outrageous traffic, no parking, wasted fuel, and everyone sharing the misery of a slow commute. Or they'll outlaw private cars and commuting by car - again making everyone share the misery.
How about instead we make it truly fair and inject a little freedom of choice and liberty in there. Everyone gets to decide just how much their time is worth. If it is worth enough, they'll save up and buy a car, if not, they'll use public transportation. Maybe a car isn't an option due to financial reasons. Well, if it is important enough, they'll prioritize it over other things, maybe even work on bettering themselves, getting a better job, etc. so they can afford that car.
The fundamental lesson is you cannot give people anything you haven't first taken from someone else. You cannot impose fairness without being brutally unfair to someone. Freedom and liberty mean allowing people to make their own choices, even if they result in disparities, inequalities, and apparent unfairness. You can't "fix" any of that without fascism.
Actually, the article talked about how black bus riders have longer, slower commutes than white bus riders. It’s probably more of a function of living in congested areas further from places of employment than anything to do with the quality of the bus system.
I lived in Williansville, a suburb of Buffalo. I had a 20 minute drive downtown to work. I tried the 'Rapid Transit' system - 12 minutes to the station, 15 minute walk and wait for train, 30 minute ride. Took about an hour. There are only a few places in the US where public transportation makes sense.
“First, if you truly want to be race-blind....”
Your assumption is 180-degrees wrong.
Being “race-blind” is the LAST thing they “truly want”.
“The real issue is simple that commuting by car is apparently faster than commuting by bus.”
I think the real thrust of this article is that “minorities should be relocated to the suburban communities in which whites live, so they, too, can have shorter commutes.”
Next up will be subsidized cars in which to take the shorter drive to work....
You do realize that buses can travel in a straight line ~ they do that even in New York city! Yet, your typical bus route has meanders and side trips that cannot possibly be justified ~ there you are going down the road, slick as a whistle, and the driver then does a left into a side street, does a looptyloop, and crosses the main drag only to do another looptyloop ~ and nobody gets on or gets off!
It's always been that way. No will dare change it. And if you dig back through the history of the route changes the decision for each looptyloop was made by a big politician in the local government WHO IS NOW LONG DEAD!
They write books about the phenomenon ~ then you'll get a Willie Greene come along and he'll tell you how buses cannot ever haul as many people as well to as many stops as can a fixed route street trolly or highspeed rail!
Of course that's going to happen if you never try to properly route the buses, and tweak them from time to time to meet new needs and take advantage of road improvements.
The hapless folks who are stuck taking the buses from the inner city to suburban retail or highrise residential areas (where they work) can tell you about all of this, which I gather they did in that survey, but the political elites do instantly start thinking of 'fairness' ~ not fixing the stupid schedules and routes!
Several decades back I came up with a proposal to reroute all USPS rural routes (city routes having been taken care of at the time) so that we optimize the head-out office problem (how few post offices are needed to support rural carrier service nationwide) ~ the big benefit was we'd close 28,000 of them!
The postmasters, mostly women, at all of those small offices organized ~ so it was a big political question, but we'd ignore that and simply reroute the carriers to about 1500 main headout offices, and the carriers would deliver all the mail to everybody to street boxes in front of their homes!
You know how far I got with that idea. The postmistresses would rather you drive to their town and get the mail from a post office box at their offices than allow you to get rural delivery at home like a civilized person.
During the debate, somebody came up with the idea of attacking my proposal by looking at all the newspaper articles that'd ever been published about a post office closing. So, we did that ~ at some expense, but believe it or now in the US government you can do such things ~ get all the news articles (this was long before the internet BTW).
I took a look at a few dozen and decided we needed to divide the comments into what ordinary people said, what postmistresses said, and what politicians said.
As expected 100% of the ordinary people said "Great Idea, do it". The postmistresses all said it would hurt service (even though it was going to deliver the average mail piece to a rural customer a day and a half earlier).
The politicians, though, surprised me! They said "People will lose their identities" ~ literally their words! All of them. For the politicians it wasn't about improved service, lower cost, faster mail, or job protection ~ it was about what they perceived to be an "identity crisis" among the adults who would be affected by the changes in delivery service.
Look, politicians don't think like you and I, or even like union members (postmistresses are unionized). They are off on a different planet with different rules, where up is down, left is right, and adults have identity crises!