Is good public transit a civil rights issue?

Tapping out...this thread has officially become idiocy.

Why not keep this thread going with this:

http://www.narprail.org/cms/index.php/n ... il_rights/

Ocala Mike wrote:Why not keep this thread going with this:

http://www.narprail.org/cms/index.php/n ... il_rights/

Because it's silly.

jb9152 wrote:

Ocala Mike wrote:Why not keep this thread going with this:

http://www.narprail.org/cms/index.php/n ... il_rights/

Because it's silly.

No wonder NARP goes nowhere; it's a haven for extremists and has nothing to do with advocating for passenger rail.

What the study talks about is the inequity in Highway vs Public Transportaion. Public Transit includes rail. The problem that we run into is Inner City vs Suberban. Suberban voters support freeways while inner city support transit. The problem is that when decisians are made by county or regional political appointees on regional planning boards rather then core city planners that those appointees tend to be white and thus benifit white middle class who then value freeways and ignore transit needs of the working poor and disabled in the inner city core. The other issue is that USDOT had a policy that if a bus line has suffficant ridership then you could not build a new light rail line to replace and upgrade it. that the new light rail line had to bring in people who would have not rode mass transit otherwise such as taking people out of there cars who by the way were white middle class suberbanites.

The question you should ask youself here is- Why should the topic of civil rights make me feel uncomfortible? I love the history of trains as much as any railfan here, But you can not be objective without also studing the dark side such as how the railroads were involved with the Genocide of the Native American or how blacks were forced to sit in the back of buses and streetcars or how the railroad porters were treated poorly and how Asa Philip Randolph improved there working condition or how real estate developers in streetcar suberbs( which were owned by the streetcar comopanies in the 1920s put in Racial Coventants to prevent the sale of the property to blacks. The word that you use do derisivly "Liberal" means one who liberates and whats wrong with that?

The word escaped me until now- Social Justice. Can improvements in Public Transit correct the the Social Injustices of the past? Can a rail system lift the inner city poor out of poverty by giving them access to jobs in the suberbs? What can rail do that buses can not? Why do suberanites feel threatened by such a system? (Such as they did in Baltimore)

Ok as per mods request-

This year, Congress will consider the surface
transportation reauthorization bill, allocating a
significant investment of federal dollars to repair our
aging infrastructure and expand it to meet the needs
of our 21st-century economy. Budget limitations will
mean intense competition among projects—and the next
investment in transportation will have a profound impact
on every American.

(Truncated to fair-use quote by moderator, 8-3-11. See following post for link.)

http://www.protectcivilrights.org/pdf/d ... Equity.pdf is the rest of the text. Read carefully and make up your own mind here

More idiocy from ideologues.

jb9152 wrote:More idiocy from ideologues.

Seems more insidious than that. They're associated with the National Council of La Raza, among other radical groups.

From what I read so far National Council of La Raza sees to be the Hispanic version of the NAACP. The NAACP is pretty conservative these days
see this Vid on how what the Hispanics have to put up with everyday in Miami http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEmD0ZBz3oI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JTzeihAJxw she hits the point here on the nose

gearhead wrote:Ok as per mods request-

(truncated)

Moderator's Note: As far as I know, neither Jeff Smith nor I requested the full text of the protectcivilrights.org article. Our policy is to request a fair-use quote of a few paragraphs at most.

I'm going to talk to Jeff about this thread, based on a few reports.

gearhead wrote:From what I read so far National Council of La Raza sees to be the Hispanic version of the NAACP. The NAACP is pretty conservative these days
see this Vid on how what the Hispanics have to put up with everyday in Miami http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEmD0ZBz3oI

We're not here to talk those kind of politics, and if you think of those groups as "conservative", then WADR, you must be to the left of Stalin and Mao.