MKE Streetcar: Personal Blog
A Transit Bill of Rights
by John December / Updates/More Info: johndecember.com/mke
Please see my caveats about my blog before reading this.
In forming my conclusions after two years of using transit and walking as my sole mobility modes, I realized that one of the challenges in advocating for public transit is defending the role of public transit itself. Some people are ideologically opposed to public transit.
However, considering the history of cities and the role transportation plays, I see transit as a right. This right emanates from the process of community formation. Forming a community requires cooperation to share space, negotiate community goals, and establish the personal freedom for each person to choose among a range of living situations. For all community members to be able to fully participate, each person must be able to gain access to mobility, either personal or by a public vehicle or other conveyance. This mobility is built within the framework of a transit infrastructure for the community.
Statement of Transit Rights
People living in a community of sufficient size and extent have the right to gain a place to live and attain the mobility to meet their primary needs.
- Affordable housing choices should be encouraged near active and public transit corridors so that people can find a place to live that connects them, with a mobility option they can use, to their essential human needs for food, education, jobs, medical care, recreation, enterprise, culture, community, and civic engagement.
- Planners and agencies should offer many transportation options, including active mobility (walking, assistive mobility, and bicycling) and public transit. These transportation options should connect people to sites for their basic needs along safe pathways, sidewalks, trails, transitways, or complete streets.
- Transit riders deserve a safe and reliable experience with an accessible, clean, and respectful environment onboard transit vehicles and at transit stops. Using transit should support the enjoyment of scenery, social visiting, or quiet media use so that stress reduction and exercise for health goals in traveling to and from transit stops can be possible.
- The advancement of community goals for health, equity, livability, and prosperity in land use and transportation implementation should show measurable results for meeting community goals and outcomes for public and market-driven enterprises.
- Decision makers must establish and support a comprehensive, integrated transit and land use process, organized as public service, encouraging private enterprise, and financed using a stable not-for-profit funding mechanism. This process must be free of discrimination, free of automobile-centric bias, completely cooperative among area transit and other agencies, multimodal, intermodal, multiscale, and innovative, using best-method means for applicable transit and land use procedures and technology. This process should use planning, analysis, design, implementation, and operating procedures that coordinate transit and land use among public and market-driven enterprises to pursue citizen satisfaction and community goals for health, equity, livability, and prosperity for all people.
Revised 2024-04-18