December 3, 2012 --
The Bullet (Socialist Project, Canada) -- Epochal crises allow us to see clearly the
irrationalities of capitalism, notably its systematic inability to
develop to the fullest human capacities and provide the basis for
sustainable and respectful relationships to the rest of nature. The
current world economic crisis has thrown to the dustbin of history the
aspirations and capacities of millions of human beings – those laid off,
driven off the land or relegated to permanent precariousness. At the
same time, the crisis has intensified the exploitation of those still
connected to gainful employment and driven up, at least temporarily, the
ecologically destructive extraction of ‘resources,’ particularly in the
global South and the peripheral areas of the global North.
The contradictory character of imperial capitalism can also be seen
by focusing on mobility and transportation. The aggressively neoliberal
and authoritarian responses ruling classes have pursued to respond to
the crisis have reinforced the degree to which many are confined, in a
contradictory way to a combination of forced mobility and immobility.
Globally, layoffs, land grabs, agricultural restructuring, and mining
exploration have pushed more people onto a path of forced migration to
other cities, regions and countries. In turn, grinding poverty and
ever-more punitive migration policies in the global North drastically
limit the capacity of many to move to places where the grass appears to
be greener.
During all of this, global transportation systems continue to be
restructured to maximise the capacity of goods, resources and the
‘winners’ of global capitalism to move around the world behind the
securitised perimeters of airports, pipelines and shipping ports.
Gentrified central city areas and gated communities
This interplay of mobility and enforced (im-)mobility is also at play
in the major urban regions today. Most blatantly in cities of North
America, Britain, South Africa, India, China and Brazil, the upward
redistribution machine that is imperial capitalism has meant that elites
and upper segments of the middle classes increasingly live in protected
financial districts, gentrified central city areas, office parks and
gated communities. They are connected to each other by means of
transportation that allow them to bypass the ‘squalor’ of shantytowns or
segregated districts: highway overpasses, regional commuter trains and
rapid inter-city links.
In turn, the working-class and insecure elements of the middle class
are divided. Those who are forced to work longer hours or depend on
several jobs have to spend more and more time commuting. Those
permanently excluded from employment, subject to systemic discrimination
or too poorly paid to afford accessible housing, child care or public transport
find themselves relegated to life in segregated neighbourhoods. What
some take for granted (the capacity to move about freely and based on
choice) is an unaffordable luxury for those who are forced to commute
against their will or those who cannot reach the places they need to
survive.
In this light, campaigns for free public tranport (such as the one undertaken by the
Greater Toronto Workers’ Assembly)
are promising. In the short term, making public transport free would provide
relief to some commuters even as it would improve the mobility of all
those who are least mobile or most public transport-dependent now: the young and
the old, women, people with disabilities, people of colour and the most
precarious fractions of the working class. Even if implemented gradually
(beginning with children, students, the elderly, low-income and
unemployed workers; or during off-peak hours and weekends), free public transport
would also lead to an increase in public transport use among existing and
some new users, thus making transportation patterns more favourable to
public transport. Finally, free public transport arguments bolster the public
sector. They are difficult to reconcile with neoliberal policies: free
transport is less attractive for public-private partnerships (P3s) and
cannot be properly implemented by decimating the public sector or
further commodifying public services.
In principle, free public transport advocacy can also be an element in a
broader vision to reorganise urban life and restructure the social order
along red (working class-based, working toward socialism) and green
(environmental) lines. This requires working through a host of open
questions that go far beyond lowering the cost of fares. These include:
- How can a free and expanded public transport system be financed?
- Can free transport be part and parcel of a green jobs strategy against austerity?
- Is free transport a potential weapon against global climate injustice?
- How can public transport workers and users become allies to push for free public transport?
- What additional measures might be necessary for free transport to
have a deep and lasting impact on our car-dominated transportation
system?
- How do we think of free public transport not simply as a more effective,
just and sustainable form of mobility, but an element in a way of life
where mobility is not imposed but subject to democratic decision-making?
- Can we expand public transport without promoting real estate
speculation or making public transport-connected neighbourhoods off limits to
many?
- And finally, can we organise free public transport networks as generous
public spaces that do not exclude and discriminate on the basis of race,
class, gender or sexuality?
Before we get to these issues, a few more observations about transportation in its broader context are necessary.
Starting points
Transportation is never just about transportation
Historically, transportation has always been much more than a
technology of moving goods and people from point A to point B. In the
modern world, it has been central in the development of imperial
capitalism and the transformation of social relations. The sail ships of
the 17th and 18th century, the steamships of the 19th century and the
cargo planes and container ships in the late 20th century were essential
means of ‘shrinking the globe’ to minimise the circulation time of
capital while entrenching a deeply unequal and racialised international
division of labour. The slave ships, the railways and the car
represented key points of experimenting with new labour processes and
energy sources while providing the strategic sectors in the first three
industrial revolutions. Today, production and circulation are based on
existing transportation technologies that are intensified and
selectively globalised. Auto-centred transportation has been transformed
into “hyperautomobility” (Martin) in the global North while taking off
in select parts of the global South. As the case of computerised
container shipping indicates, transportation technologies have also been
integrated with electronic means of communication.
Mass transportation has also been central to the process through
which the world has become urbanised over the last two centuries. It has
helped build networks between cities and hinterlands while shaping
spatial relations in metropolitan areas. In the 19th century, the rise
of the modern metropolis was unthinkable without the global network of
steam ships and railways that sustained the transfer of surplus under
imperialism. Equally important was mass transportation (streetcars and
suburban trains, then subways). Mass transport made it possible for social
relations to be stretched between work and residence, facilitating (not
causing) the segregation of social groups along lines of race and
class, and sustaining the sexual division of labour. In the 20th
century, car transportation allowed planners to treat cities as machines
of consumption, production and circulation to sustain post-war
capitalism. It laid the foundation for the suburbanisation of urban life
in Euro-America while building the basis for urban sprawl, which we now
recognise as a crucial element of global climate injustice – the
imperial aspect of planetary ecological degradation.
Restructuring transportation is thus never just a matter of adjusting
the technologies of transportation. Up to a point, this is now widely
acknowledged by most progressive urban planners and politicians.
Advocates of “smart growth,” “new urbanism,” “new regionalism” or
“transit-centred development,” many of whom sit on city councils,
populate planning offices or write on urban affairs in cities like
Toronto, recognise that to promote more effective and ecologically
sustainable forms of transportation requires linking public transport to a
form of city building that promotes higher population densities and a
greater ‘mix’ of urban activities (jobs, apartments, public spaces).
But mass transportation is intimately tied not only to the physical
form of cities, towns and suburbs. It is profoundly shaped by the deeper
social structures of imperial capitalism. Making public transport free and
transforming it in the process is impossible without transforming the
social relations amongst humans and with nature that are embedded in
transportation as we know it.
How ‘public’ is public transport?
In our age of privatisation, it is easy to forget that public transport was built on the ruins of
private
transportation networks. Between the late 19th and the middle of the
20th century, it became clear that “the market” was incapable of
organising effective forms of mass transportation. As a result,
transportation was organised publicly: private rail, subway and trolley
lines were taken over and transformed into transport agencies and railway
corporations. Labour and popular movements often played an important
role in this process, as was the case in Toronto where the labour
council began advocating for a municipal streetcar system decades before
the
TTC
was created in 1921. However, in the capitalist world, this sectoral
socialisation of transportation did not lead to a wider
decommodification of land and labour. public transport did not always
serve primarily public purposes.
Public transport was an important part in the construction of the ‘red’
[in this case, Social Democratic] cities of the inter- and postwar
period – Vienna, Frankfurt, Zurich, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm –
where public land ownership, public services and social housing were
pillars of early modernist planning. In contrast to the early Soviet
experiments, these efforts did not of course challenge private property
per se and the world of exploitation in the workplace. Indeed, in
capitalist contexts, public transportation has typically represented a
collective infrastructure to sustain expanded and primary accumulation.
Most egregiously in the colonies – and white settler colonies like
Canada – public transport companies and railway corporations helped
dispossess indigenous peoples, plunder ‘resources,’ further real-estate
speculation and promote boosterist urban development. One reason for the
eventual creation of the TTC (in 1921) was that private streetcar
companies were unwilling to expand their routes sufficiently to support
private real estate development.
Since the middle of 20th century, public transport in the advanced
capitalist world was increasingly relegated to secondary status. Despite
big comparative differences between, say, New York City and Houston, or
Naples and Vienna, nowhere did public transportation manage to stem the
tide of mass ‘automobilisation’ and cargo trucking from the 1920s (in
the U.S.) to the 1960s (Western Europe). Indeed, it was not uncommon for
Socialist and Communist parties to support car-led development as a
‘working-class proposition.’
Since the oil crisis of the 1970s, only some resurgent public transport
initiatives were designed to counter automobility. Long-range suburban
commuter transport, which is typically supported by business-centred
growth coalitions, often facilitate automobilised sprawl. Similarly, the
European case shows that high-speed train systems (now typically
semi-privatised initiatives) can come at the expense of the density of
inter-regional rail transportation.
Demanding free public transport can represent a refreshing argument against
the reprivatisation of transport – and the profoundly unfree character of
our car- and road-dominated society. But given that various forms of
public transport have functioned in less-than-public and progressive ways,
arguing for free public transport today is also insufficient. Free public transport
advocates are thus forced to think not only about how to pay for
existing transportation routes but also about
what kind of transportation system we want.
While public transport is always preferable to privatised transportation
(car-led or otherwise), only some forms of public transport are amenable
to red-green – socialist, sustainable, internationalist – ways of
reorganising urban life and the social order.
Dilemmas
“The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury
object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical
devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The
myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass
transportation were widespread, its superiority would be striking.”
(André Gorz, 70)
Shifting to public transport
Free public transport will likely lead to an increase in ridership
among existing and some new users. This increase will not be enough to
bring about a radical shift away from cars toward public transport, however. For
such a shift, two initial steps are necessary: a) expanding public transport
capacities and b) actively restricting automobile transportation.
Increasing public transport ridership will require increasing services on
existing systems. And for free transport to have a wider effect, it will
require an expansion and intensification of public transport where most people
cannot currently switch to public transport (most newer suburbs and pockets in
postwar suburbs) and where commuting flows escape existing routes (between suburbs and exurbs).
In addition, research has demonstrated that public transport expansion does
not suffice to seriously shrink hyperautomobility in ‘advanced’
capitalism. Next to some steps discussed further below, measures to
restrict car traffic will be necessary. Among these: phasing out
car-related subsidies; severely restricting parking; stopping greenfield
road expansion; giving public transport, cyclists and pedestrians systematic
priorities on existing roads; make planning approvals for all
development contingent upon public transport access; and levy employer taxes for
public transport use.
A red-green approach will have to be careful to propose restrictions
on car traffic without imposing regressive taxation, adding to
gentrification pressures or penalising all those car-dependent
working-class fractions for whom switching to alternate modes of
transportation is not an immediate option today.
Financing public transport
Financing free public transport will be difficult within existing budget
envelopes. In the here and now, free public transport will increase public
expenditures to substitute ridership revenues with tax subsidies and
increase system capacities to accommodate new ridership. In the Toronto
region, where local transport is still mostly financed by municipalities,
years after the Mike Harris government downloaded it onto them, this
will be difficult to accomplish with existing city budgets only. In the
case of the TTC, which relies approximately 70 per cent on fares to
cover its operating expenditures, free public transport would cost many hundreds
of millions of dollars a year. The demand for free public transport thus would
have to be linked to a restructuring of transportation and public
finance. This could include a combination of new revenue sources (gas
taxes, carbon taxes, tolls, congestion taxes, luxury taxes), a
significant reduction in car-related expenditures by transportation
departments, and reorientation of federal and provincial transportation
policies.
To finance free and expanded public transport will require a challenge to the
many ways in which the state represents a multi-pronged subsidy machine
for privatised transportation and land development. The car and
road-centred bias of the state apparatus is linked to a range of social
interests rooted in the construction, development, finance, media and
car industries. Financing free public transport will thus have to shift the costs
of transportation onto those private interests, as well as car drivers.
“From a macro-economic and social
efficiency point of view, public transportation is far less expensive
than the existing privatised system. In this way, financing free and
expanded transit represents a fiscal benefit rather than a cost.”
In Canada and Ontario, where the state apparatus’ deep hostility to
public transport has been reinforced with cutbacks and downloading at
federal and provincial levels, arguments for such a shift can be
developed, however. First, the overall budgetary cost of public transport budget
expansion can be measured against the typically much higher cost of
underwriting car-dominated transportation (road and infrastructure
budgets and tax policies which subsidise them). Second, from a
macro-economic and social efficiency point of view, public
transportation is far less expensive than the existing privatised
system. In this way, financing free and expanded public transport represents a
fiscal
benefit rather than a cost. On average, this is also
true for households. For most, switching to public transport, if available, would
provide a big relief from the burden of car-related expenditures.
Global climate justice
Public mass transportation produces five to 10 per cent of the
greenhouse gases emitted by automobile transportation. The latter is
responsible for about a quarter of global carbon emissions. In addition,
public transport consumes a fraction of the land used by individualised
car transportation (roads and parking space consume a third or more of
the land in North American urban regions). Not even counting other
negative effects of automobilisation (congestion, pollution, accidents,
road kill, cancer, asthma, obesity, and so on), shifting to public transport will
markedly reduce the social costs of economic and urban development. It
would also make a substantial contribution toward global climate
justice.
The complex of forces sustaining car-led metropolitan expansion (from
the oil industry to real-estate development) represents a primary
driving force of global climate injustice (or what some have called
ecological imperialism: the way in which imperial divisions of labour
distribute the cost of environmental degradation unequally). This is
particularly the case for European, Japanese, and, above all, North
American cities, which are the most environmentally destructive on the
planet and which have played a disproportionate role narrowing the
options open to people in the global South. Of course, restructuring the
transportation system is not a substitute for a social and political
challenge to empire. However, once combined with public transport expansion and
reduced mobility needs, free public transport could help lay the socio-ecological
foundation necessary to restructure the global division of labour.
Green jobs and ecological-economic reconstruction
The current global slump represents an opportunity to propose a
strategy of ecological and economic reconstruction, to borrow a term
from the 1986 programme of the then left-wing German Greens. Public transport is
an ideal component of such a strategy. The investment necessary to shift to a free system constitutes a major
opportunity to promote socially and ecologically effective development
(instead of bailing out banks, socialising private debt and instituting
austerity regimes).
[1]
Indeed, public transport investment could reconstruct the public sector as the
strategic linchpin linking the development of urban infrastructure to
the creation of green jobs and an industrial strategy centred on
retrofitting ailing manufacturing plants and developing compact,
non-profit housing on land assembled by governments, land trusts or
cooperatives.
Of course, such a strategy has to confront the power bloc which has
historically sustained the current model of privatised and automobilised
growth: developers, banks, the construction industry, auto companies,
the media, municipal and provincial transportation departments, among
others. This is no small challenge, particularly in urban regions like
Toronto, where industrial retrofitting to build trams, buses and trains
face the still considerable weight of the car industry. Ruling-class
voices for a more ‘rational’ regional public transport system, who have had to
face the historic weakness of the Canadian state as well, now
see it as a way to expand the role of the private sector in
transportation. In contrast, a left green economic development strategy
centred on labour, communities and the public sector can build on the
arguments made often by workers and environmentalists fighting against
plant closures (including those promoted in the early 1990s by Toronto's
own Green Work Alliance). It can also build on proposals, recently made
again in the United States, to redesign mass-produced suburbs along
public and communal lines to save these ecologically destructive,
socially isolating and debt-ridden districts from foreclosure and
bankruptcy.
Scale
In the 20th century, the transport systems that declined least due to
automobilisation were those that managed to retain strong links between
local, regional and national scales of transportation and
rail-based shipping. In turn, mass rail transport is weakest where
national rail systems were destroyed and where metropolitan transport
systems pit long-range commuter railways against local systems (most
egregiously in North America). The narrow debate between streetcar/LRT
and subway proponents in Toronto is a good example of how public transport
advocates have been forced to engage in ‘either/or’ arguments because of
the state's systematic hostility. In this context, free public transport
advocates best argue for a virtuous cycle between neighbourhood and
commuter transport that strengthens at all scales.
Today, multi-polar urban regions feature inter-suburban and
intra-suburban commuting flows that are difficult to capture with
existing transport systems. Also, long-range regional transportation (the
GO Transit
system, for example) typically does not reduce short-distance car
trips. Sometimes, it actually underwrites automobilised sprawl and
undercuts public transport densities where they now exist. In this context,
reintegrating the remnants of Canada's national system – the railway
corridors – into a fine-grained web of local and regional public transport is
crucial to strengthen local and regional services. Equally important to
seriously reduce short-distance car trips are links between commuter
transport and local pedestrian and cycling infrastructure. Using an
approach which provides for different levels of scale and different
modes of transportation, transport justice can be conceived also in
geographical terms. U.S. advocates of ‘regional equity,’ for
example, insist that investment in regional public transport not crowd out
improvements for existing users in central cities and
older suburbs. These arguments are highly pertinent in Toronto, where
the province and regional transit agency Metrolinx are pushing to absorb
the only integrated transport system in the region – that of the Toronto
Transit Commission – into their plans for public transport in the sprawling
Toronto region.
Mobility and time
Free public transport strategies may negotiate between two possibly
contradictory goals: (1) replacing existing car-led effects of forced
immobility (which make it difficult or impossible for people to go where
they want or need to) with a public and just alternative form of mass
transportation; and (2) transforming how we understand mobility today.
The first goal tries to supplant or complement existing private systems
without necessarily questioning the goal of transportation borrowed from
the modern capitalist city: to maximise the capacity to move people to
meet the imperatives of production and reproduction.
The second argument follows red-green logics. It sees public transport as an
element in a form of urban life that minimises the need for mobility and
maximises people's capacities to live, work and make political
decisions with or without travel. In a vision for a post-capitalist
world, a combination of the first goal – ‘the right to mobility’ – with
the second – the ‘right to stay put’ – may converge in a ‘right to
choose democratically among different mobilities.’
Such a combination of perspectives may be needed to counter the
current realities of forced immobility. To realise this goal will
require not only a capacity to plan the spatial relationship between
employment, community and residential space, making it possible for
workers and inhabitants to get where they need or want to go without
spending hours to get there. It will also require a transformation of
time and a reorganisation of daily working schedules.
Today, the daily grind leaves less and less breathing room not only
because of the time spent on the road or in transit; daily routines are
also driven by the twin tyrannies of capitalist work-time and
patriarchal social reproduction (where women often have to juggle
household tasks and a number of precarious jobs). Today, some work
longer and longer hours (either at the job or at home) while others are
structurally underemployed. In this situation, ending both forced
immobility and forced mobility requires a reduction and redistribution
of working time, a reorganisation of the gender division of labour, and a
simultaneous reduction of precarious working arrangements based on
unwanted part-time, contract and temporary work. In this way, free
public transport and freely chosen mobility can be part of a vision for
“slow city” that is based on much less stressful working lives and
shorter but well-remunerated and fairly distributed working hours.
Compact city building
‘Transit-oriented development’ (TOD) has become the new mantra
promoted by planners and urban progressives. The notion rightly insists
that a shift toward more ecologically sustainable transportation needs
to go hand in hand with residential intensification and the promotion of
walkable, street-oriented, mixed-use built environments. To foster
public transport against sprawl thus means reorienting city building to produce
the public transport densities necessary for mass transport. In this model,
‘intensification’ and ‘development’ appear socially neutral. In effect,
however, they are often code words for urban design approaches driven by
privatised real-estate development. In Toronto, the North American
‘capital’ of residential high-rise development, ‘intensification’
typically means ‘condo tower’ (or ‘stacked dollar bills,’ as we could
also call them).
Privatised intensification creates a contradiction: dependent on
increasing land rents, intensification threatens less profitable land
uses – lower-rent apartments, cheap shops, functional industrial spaces –
with the likelihood of displacement or redevelopment. By pushing
working-class jobs and residences to the outer suburbs or beyond, it
thus recreates the very centrifugal pressures that keep sprawl alive. At the same time, the ‘intensification-as-condo’
development model is structurally unable to link working-class residents
to
their jobs in order to reduce commuting. In contrast, a
socialist approach to building compact, land-saving and energy-efficient
urban environments needs to return to a founding assumption that was
common even among reformist planners a century ago: public land
ownership and social housing are essential to develop forms of regional
planning that can create compact urban forms without centrifugal side
effects. Free public transport can thus lead to arguments for the socialisation
of land and a new era of social housing.
Public sector and democratic administration
Insofar as it proposes to decommodify transportation, free public transport is
necessarily an argument in defense of the public sector: the private
sector is unlikely to be interested in bidding for ‘free-transit
partnerships.’ In the short term, however, mass transport companies (and, in
some case also transport unions) are likely to see free public transport as a
threat to the financial basis of their operations (or livelihoods).
Indeed, such organisational resistance may be read by some as another
example of the rigidity of public sector bureaucracies, an argument that
continues to be exploited with great effect to support marketisation,
privatisation and public-private partnerships. Politically, it will thus
be essential to build alliances between organised public transport users,
public transport advocates and transport workers.
As experiences in Toronto, Los Angeles and New York City have shown,
building such alliances is as politically difficult as it is in other
cases where public services and jobs are threatened. Still, it is easy
to see how public transport workers could be among the prime beneficiaries
of free public transport. The expansion required by an effective free
system would boost the number and prestige of public transport workers.
Eliminating the fare would free workers from the stressful task
of policing fare collection while eliminating another source of tension
between workers and riders: the resentment of having to pay ever higher
fares for stagnating service. In fact, establishing a community of
interest could prefigure arguments for a new, more genuinely public form
of public sector, one that is co-determined by workers and the users of
public services, not state managers and the ruling class. Free public transport
advocacy can link up to arguments for a new, democratised state.
Public space
Formally, public transport networks are among the most important public
spaces in our privately dominated cities. However, socially segmented
and regulated public transport use has meant that public transport has always been
less-than-public in practice. Indeed, public transport has become even
less public over the last generation, and not only because of cutbacks
and rising fares, as in Toronto. Across Euro-America, new segments of
mass transit – long-range commuter networks, rapid airport links,
high-speed trains – have been developed to cater to the ‘winners’ of the
new capitalism. Well-known examples include the new Los Angeles subway
and the even newer Delhi Metro Rail, both of which serve to link growing
bubbles of middle- and upper-class residential and employment zones.
Frequently, these new initiatives have been developed through
public-private partnerships and come at the expense of the less
profitable components of public transportation (local buses, crowded
suburban trains used by toilers, inter-regional trains).
Also, in order to serve the professional middle class, cities have
‘cleaned up’ existing public transport systems. They have pushed away
panhandlers, informal street vendors, and unemployed youth with heavy
security, ‘bum-proof’ equipment, surveillance cameras, automated ticket
machines and driver-less trains. Sometimes justified by racist media
campaigns about urban crime, these initiatives have contributed heavily
to the securitisation of public space. In the Toronto area, the VIVA
buses in York Region, a P3 on the most profitable routes in the York
Region Transit system, were promoted as shinier, more secure and
comfortable alternative to the ‘shabbier’ buses that run on the
secondary routes and retain the YRT label. In this case, rampant class
bias against public transport provided the subtext for a (slightly different)
form! Arguments for free public transport are a refreshing
counterpoint to sanitised transit. Free public transport promises genuine public
space – accessible, intense, and sometimes messy. Whenever one runs into
impromptu banter among riders and drivers on a bus or a subway, one can
see glimpses of such genuine public space.
Desegregation
Like urban planning generally, transportation has often been a
“technique of separation” (Guy Debord). This is most systematically true
for car transportation – but not only. The role of public
transportation in facilitating social segregation is one reason why
public transport has been unevenly public in everyday use. Global transport
history is full of examples: suburban trains serving class and
race-segregated residential suburbs, trolleys and trains bypassing
neighbourhoods of workers and people of colour, or railtracks being used
to separate social groups from each other. Today policing can
make public transport inhospitable for youth of colour and the homeless while
threatening to turn public transport workers into the long arm of the punitive
state.
Yet, public transport has also brought people together en route,
in train stations and at bus stops. In various parts of the world,
public transport served as an unintended communication network for organising
drives, protests and uprisings. Remember, for example, the crucial role
Rosa Parks or the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters played in the history of North American anti-racist and civil rights movements.
Today, some continue to see public transport as a tool for desegregation:
opening up elite, White residential ghettos (‘inclusionary zoning’) or
making distant employment zones accessible to public transport-dependent workers
in segregated neighbourhoods (‘reverse commuting’ is practiced in a
marginal way on the TTC routes that reach into York region). Laudable in
principle, desegregation-by-transport can also have a negative side,
however. In Paris, new public transport links to underserved suburbs often help
plans to demolish, redesign or gentrify racialised housing estates,
which have long served as bases of rebellion, solidarity and anti-racist
organising. In Toronto, the now partly resurrected
Transit City
initiative may improve transit access in the most segregated – and
racially demonised – parts of the inner suburbs. However, it may also
serve to bring ‘intensification’ – potentially gentrifying development –
to the arterial roads upon which it will be built. While a ‘natural’
way of reducing the segregating role of transport systems, free public transport will be
free in name only if it is used to forcibly desegregate stigmatised
neighbourhoods through gentrification.
Living differently: Public transport and urban life
Public transport-based urban futures without forced mobility requires more
than shifting the political economy of transportation. To win out
against the real, if contradictory pleasures of our car culture, public transport
has to offer an exciting way of experiencing urban life. The beast so
central to capitalism as we know it, “homo automotivis” (Mugyenyi and
Engler), will only die out with a renewed transport culture: being
together with others in anonymity and encountering fellow inhabitants
not simply through kinship and self-selected sub-cultures but through
the unexpected encounters of urban living. Fostering such an exuberant –
curious, open, and generous – public culture of being “in solitude
without isolation” (Augé) will require that many of us relearn the
capacity to live outside privatised, atomised and sanitised
environments. This is not impossible.
A recent
survey by the Pembina Institute
reveals that most GTA residents would happily trade their cars and
bungalows for walking, public transport and denser living arrangements if they
could afford it. After decades of worsening congestion and ‘world-class’
commuting delays, Torontonians seem to have become more intolerant of
car-led sprawl and more receptive to more open and public forms of urban
life. This makes it possible to think of a public transport culture beyond the
central city spaces where public transport is already a fact of life for the
majority of inhabitants. If not from personal experience, we know
promising elements of living in large cities from movies, literature,
and music: the syncopated rhythms of street life and mass transport, the
promise of independence from domestic life, the excitement of bustling
crowds, the bouts of unexpected camaraderie among strangers.
Free public transport in Toronto: The right to the city?
How does a free public transport campaign ‘fit’ into Toronto politics?
In the late 1960s, French Marxist Henri Lefebvre coined the term
‘right to the city.’ He did so to rethink revolutionary theory in
explicitly urban terms. For him, contours of the ‘right to the city’
could be seen in the
Paris Commune of 1871 and the
May events in 1968.
The ‘right to the city’ is thus much more than a mere legal right to
particular public services (housing, recreation...) or specific physical
spaces (downtown...). The term captures how revolutionary demands to
the social surplus as a whole are expressed by a multiplicity of
movements which transform urban life by challenging boundaries of
segregation and converging in their respective mobilisation (mass
protests, strikes, barricades...).
In Toronto, a whiff of the right to the city could be smelled during the
Days of Action
in October 1996. Then, a political strike against the Harris
government connected a variety of strike actions and helped shut down
the central city for a day. A sectoral campaign is a more modest
and focused undertaking. But if understood in its wider implications, a
demand for free public transport can anticipate various elements of the ‘right
to the city’: a demand to the surplus produced by society (which is
necessary to reorganise public finance and economic development), a new
form of city building (based on use-values and democracy, not profit and
private property), and genuinely public spaces (that can bring together
instead of segregating people of colour and segmenting the
working-class).
In today's Toronto, a free public transport campaign can be contrasted to the
two dominant positions, both of which are opposites of the
right to the city. The first one of these is – Mayor Rob Ford's – keeps
to a long tradition of car boosters which only accept public transport if it does
not interfere with road traffic. His attempt to depict street-car users
and cyclists as obstacles for car drivers is a typical right-wing
populist attempt to build a reactionary social base. This position has
the advantage of capitalising on the anti-public transport bias of the Canadian
state and the marginal status public transport plays in the everyday life of many
Torontonians, particularly suburban and exurban residents. The second
perspective sees ‘transit-centred’ development as a way to rationalise
and ‘green’ capitalist Toronto; it is championed by progressivist and
centrist politicians, some planners and transportation specialists,
urban professionals and gentrifiers, disillusioned suburban drivers, the
Toronto Board of Trade and select fractions of development capital.
Both positions emerge from the inevitable contradictions of
automobilisation: congestion, pollution, forced mobility, spiralling
commuting times, ecologically wasteful, land-devouring and debt-ridden
infrastructure. Neither of the two camps can address the sources of
these contradictions, however. The former is too blinkered to realise
that the best way to choke ‘free’ car traffic is the car itself. The
second sees the merits of public transport to accelerate the circulation of goods
and people. As a result, some disagreement over transportation
priorities has emerged within ruling circles in Toronto and Ontario.
However, this pro- position does not challenge car society. It
accepts the deeper conditions that reproduce auto-dependency in the
region: land-rent driven and private property-oriented urban development
and a hollowed out public sector which depends on such development to
raise property taxes. Indeed, through Metrolinx, this position now using
regional transport as a Trojan horse to absorb the TTC and privatise what
is left of the state's public transport planning capacity. Like the
radical pro-car position, it is silent on the social relations of
domination and exploitation that are woven into existing transportation
practices.
Arguments for free public transport may lead to a third, red-green,
eco-socialist perspective on transportation. Right now, the argument for
free public transport naturally complements the efforts of other
transportation activists (including pedestrian and cycling advocates)
who see the links between the social and ecological benefits of public
transport and understand that privatised transportation (auto-based or
otherwise) cannot deliver these benefits.
[2]
Within existing advocacy and union circles, the call
for free public transport may yet help stop an emerging consensus among
neoliberals and progressives in Toronto for public-private
partnerships.
Short-term initiatives and long-term perspectives
The advantage of a free public transport campaign lies in its initial
simplicity and concreteness. It may also open up perspectives for a
different kind of city, one that harbours the possibility of a life
beyond imperial capitalism. The links between a free public transport campaign
and the ‘right to the city’ lie here, in the connection between
short-term and long-term strategies for social and ecological
transformation. Short-term initiatives and long-term perspectives may be
bridged, for example, by ecosocialist desires to counter the social and
ecological ravages of capitalism with struggles for a “new
civilisation” (Löwy): modes of life governed by genuine democracy,
global solidarity, generous conviviality, environmental responsibility,
and deep egalitarianism along lines of class, race and gender.
To develop a longer-term vision will require working through dilemmas
and open questions with activists and organisers, workers, riders and
inhabitants. For a red-green perspective on transport to be part of a
broader dynamic for the right to the city, it cannot be fleshed out in
the abstract. It has to be the result of an open-ended process of
dialogue and movement building.
For this purpose, we will be able to learn a great deal from others
elsewhere. Among these are not only the cities and regions that are
usually mentioned by those arguing for comprehensive transport reform
strategies: the Curitibas, Amsterdams, Bogotàs and Stockholms of the
world. It is equally important to learn from the contradictory
experiences with integrated urban and economic planning in the defunct
or dying state-socialist world (from East Berlin to Havana) and gather
the most important lessons from informal transport practices (cycling,
rickshaws) across the global South, which can supplement free public transport
initiatives with a minimum of infrastructure. And most importantly, it
will be essential to learn from radical transport movements the world
over, from strikers in Mumbai to bus rider unionists in Los
Angeles. •
[Stefan Kipfer teaches at the Faculty of Environmental
Studies, York University. Thanks to members of the GTWA transit
committee as well
as Karen Wirsig, Thorben Wieditz, Parastou Saberi, Kanishka
Goonewardena, and Ian MacDonald for critique and insight.]
Notes
1.
Recently, the new Socialist government in France has decided to proceed
with a 20-30 billion Euro project to build a 200 km-long ring-shaped
subway with 75 stations around central Paris. Seen by some as a
Keynesian supplement to austerity, the project is designed to promote
the competitiveness of Paris’ suburban export clusters, facilitate
private real estate development, and support ongoing efforts to
deconstruct and redevelop housing estates. However, it would not be
inconceivable to reorient the project into a socio-ecological direction:
intensifying public transport between working-class suburbs, link public transport to
non-profit housing on public land, and retrofit the Paris-region car
plants which are awaiting shutdowns.
2.
Recent examples include: Scarborough Transit Action, Rexdale Youth TTC
Challenge, TTC Riders, Sistering's Fair Fare Coalition, Clean Train
Coalition, and DAMN 2025.
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Article by Stefan Kipfer, published in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. 3 Dec 2012
