MKE Streetcar: Personal Blog
A Transportation Bill of Rights and Responsibilities
by John December / Updates/More Info: johndecember.com/mke
First Posted 2022-04-18; Multiple revisions; Last Revised 2025-09-03
Please see my caveats about my blog before reading this.
In my many years of using transit and walking as my mobility modes, I realized that one of the challenges in advocating for public transit is defending (and defining) the role of public transit itself.
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 participate fully, each person must have access to mobility. This mobility is made possible within the framework of a transportation infrastructure for the community. This infrastructure, historically, grew incrementally over time, but also involved constructing public infrastructure and services. Today, transportation involves the full spectrum of human movement from individual to group to mass, from public to private, and from vehicle-based to assistive or active (human-powered only).
Statement of Transportation Rights and Responsibilities
I. 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.
- Planners and agencies should offer many transportation options, including active transit (walking, assistive, 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.
- Affordable housing choices should be encouraged near active and public transit stops, stations, and along corridors so that people can find a place to live that connects them with a transit option they can use to access their essential human needs for food, education, jobs, medical care, recreation, enterprise, culture, community, and civic engagement.
- Transit riders deserve a safe and reliable experience with an accessible, clean, and respectful environment on board 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, equality, 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 transportation and land use process, organized as public service, encouraging private enterprise, and financed using a stable not-for-profit funding mechanism--a public market model. 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, equality, livability, and prosperity for all people.
II. RESPONSIBILITIES
People in a community have the responsibility to preserve mobility rights for others.
- People must use transit infrastructure for its intended purpose and not displace others who seek to use transit by blocking or degrading the transit platforms, shelters, stops, seats, vehicle interiors, operations, or environment as intended for use as transit.
- People using transit have an obligation to support its operation, funding, administration, maintenance, and care of the transit system and riders. Transit riders must obey valid transit rules of behavior and contribute in the form of payment or public support where applicable.
- People not using public transit in a community must recognize the role public transit plays in multimodal mobility for all people. Not all transportation modes serve all people--public transit plays a role, as well as non-public transit options. Mobility using many modes serves a community. Partisan attacks on public transit's existence or funding work against this responsibility.