The workers and transit riders of Kansas City, MO, have won a major victory: soon, all public transportation there will be free. In 2016, the city started a streetcar that was free to all riders. Now, bus rides and other forms of public transit will no longer cost workers $1.50 per ride. Kansas City is now the first major U.S. city to offer a fare-free system. Meanwhile, the New Orleans RTA continues to underserve the working people of New Orleans with inadequate services for locals and unnecessary lines for tourists. The workers of Kansas City have proved that public transportation can serve the people, not the business community. We must organize in our cities to demand access to a free, efficient mass transit system. Our livelihoods as working people depend on it.
Workers Deserve Reliable Transportation Now
After a full day of work, I begin the trek through the rain to find a way to get home. It’s the Saturday before Mardi Gras day and I am shuffling through the aftermath of the city’s and tourist’s elaborate celebration. There is so much garbage in the streets, so many beads littering the sidewalks as water builds up in the poorly pumped streets, that it is hard to walk through the Quarter.
I join my fellow workers waiting at the S. Rampart and Canal bus stop and lean against the building wall in hopes to find shelter from the rain. I am waiting for about 10 minutes while no bus arrives before I see city workers putting barricades on Canal. A woman comes over and laughs at us for thinking there would be bus service for us workers, despite the fact that we had just worked long days serving up the food, drink, and entertainment expected of Mardi Gras weekend. She points us a couple blocks over and says that “some” buses are waiting over there.
Since paying for a taxi or a Lyft/Uber would cost my day’s wages, I start swiftly walking. Random buses are scattered throughout Elk Pl. and Basin St., and from a distance I can almost make out the number 88 on one of them. Although the RTA’s timetable said the next bus (the previous never came) wasn’t due to leave for another 5 minutes, before I can get to it, the bus takes off. I am left stranded in the rain with my entire day’s cash earnings in my back pocket.
Tired, wet, and stranded, I feel so much frustration that this is not the first time the RTA has failed workers who hold up the city’s economy. Random detours, service disruptions, and buses or street cars that just never come are common.
On a typical day I wait up to 40 minutes for a street car on the St. Charles line, multiple times every month the Canal streetcar line has unwarranted service disruptions. Almost every day the 5 bus is 10-20 minutes late, resulting in me being late to work.
The feeling of anxiety and stress I felt when my feet couldn’t carry me fast enough to make the 88 at an unpredictable time is one I and thousands of workers feel everyday. Many buses don’t come often enough and if they decide to leave early, people are left stranded for another hour or more. In that hour’s time, you could be fired from your job, miss a class or an appointment, miss valuable time with your child, or be late to get home to cook a meal or help with homework.
This is not to mention that there are almost no shelters to cover us from the elements, and that there are less than half the amount of routes than we had pre-Katrina. We walk far distances at all hours of the day and night to get to a bus that just might not ever come. During hurricane warnings and floods, we are still expected to show up to work on time, without reliable transportation.
Yet the RTA funds $75 million streetcar projects like the Rampart Line that actually decrease bus service and access to jobs. They spend $20,000 on a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tell the workers that they don’t have money for more buses.
Hospitality workers generate $7.5 billion for the city, yet we spend hours every single day taking inefficient transit. We spend most of our time being exploited at our jobs where many of us cater to tourists, just to take “public” transportation that is not meant to serve the public. We are pushed out of the downtown area due to rising rents, yet we have no means of reliable transportation to-and-from our jobs. The workers of this city deserve free transportation. The time has come to organize and demand that the RTA serves the workers that hold up New Orleans.