Public transportation and the idiocy of urban life

Abstract

This paper asserts urban transportation’s centrality to debates on ‘the public,’ the ‘right to the city’ and political mobilisation in cities. The paper begins with a re-reading of Marx and Engels’ oft-cited line in the Communist Manifesto on the ‘idiocy of rural life’. Drawing on the work of Hal Draper, who has argued that Marx and Engels used the term ‘idiocy’ as a synonym for ‘privatised isolation’, this paper pulls from two empirical studies on urban transportation to define what I conversely call ‘the idiocy of urban life’. The first case study looks at two transportation programs in Syracuse New York aimed at helping to get welfare recipients to work. The paper argues that such programs not only marked a sharp departure from the public alternative, but that they were programs that enforced the very idiocy and privatised isolation that so worried Marx and Engels. The second case study looks at the East Bay’s transportation justice movement. The paper argues that one of the organising principles of this movement is a rejection of ‘the idiocy of urban life’. The paper concludes by linking debates over ‘the public’, and struggles against urban idiocy to ongoing debates around the right to the city.

Keywords

idiocy Marxism political mobilisation public transportation the public

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns, it has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared to the rural, and thus has rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. (Marx and Engels, 1998 [1848]: 55)

In 2001, a small independent publishing house – Avocado Press – released a short book entitled, To Ride the Public’s Buses: The Fight that Built a Movement. Edited by Mary Johnson and Barrett Shaw (2001), the book traces the decade-long fight to put wheelchair lifts on all public buses.¹ In the book, Johnson and Shaw argue, rather convincingly, that the struggle for wheelchair lifts played a significant role in catalysing the broader disability rights movement – a movement that culminated with the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. Apart from providing a social history of a now ubiquitous technology, one of the most interesting aspects of To Ride the Public’s Buses is its attention to the question of why wheelchair lifts mattered. Of course, for activists involved in groups like America’s Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation (ADAPT) the answer was clear. Securing wheelchair lifts meant securing a civil right. It meant securing equality. For just as many, however – be they from cash strapped municipalities, or from the ranks of the disabled themselves – the answer was a bit murkier (Johnson and Shaw, 2001: 20). Where disabled residents had access to paratransit service – which was the reality in most cities following the passage of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act – the argument for wheelchair lifts seemed a rather weak one. Paratransit, as many argued, was already sufficient. Indeed, compared with the plodding pace of regular public buses, paratransit’s door-to door service seemed something of a luxury. Why trade curbside service for a crowded bus? For ADAPT and others, of course, such questions missed the point. The demand for wheelchair lifts was a demand for dignity. Moreover, it was a demand that recognised the profound differences between paratransit and public transportation. Paratransit required that disabled clients book trips well ahead of time (sometimes weeks in advance), that they reveal their destination and that they forego any sense of anonymity or spontaneity. In many communities, paratransit was a subscription service that required doctor’s approval or the approval of the system operator. As Johnson and Shaw noted: ‘in some communities, paratransit operators will refuse to ride “clients” who cancel frequently or who use it to go to things the service operator disapproves of (such as transportation organising meetings)’ (2001: 16). For disabled patrons who wished to go on a romantic date, to explore the city on a whim or to organise politically, paratransit was a poor substitute for a public bus. Given this context, ADAPT’s argument for wheelchair lifts was a straightforward one. Wheelchair lifts were important not only for allowing the disabled to access the city on their own terms, but for allowing them to be part of the public itself.

Taking ADAPT’s argument as a prompt, this paper examines the relationship between urban transportation and ‘the public’. In making sense of this relationship, the paper begins in a rather unlikely place – namely, in the middle of Marx and Engels’ (1998 [1848]: 55) most famous collective work: The Communist Manifesto. Reworking the Manifesto’s oft cited line on the ‘idiocy of rural life’, the paper highlights urban transportation’s role in producing what I call ‘the idiocy of urban life’. I argue that this notion of idiocy not only deepens our understanding of groups like ADAPT, but it forces us to see struggles over urban transportation as struggles over the political possibilities of cities themselves – possibilities that Marx and Engels were clear to note. The paper’s organisation is fairly straightforward. After spending a moment on the Manifesto and the meaning of ‘rural idiocy’, the essay quickly shifts to two case studies – one from Syracuse, NY and the other from California’s East Bay. Drawing on these case studies, the paper pivots to focus on the idea of ‘the public’ itself, as well as its mobilisation within the literature on the right to the city – a literature that has not only placed cities at the centre of understanding capitalist urbanisation, but has aimed at bringing critical attention to the privatisation of public space, the criminalisation of dissent and urban policies that otherwise close off possibilities for progressive political mobilisation (Attoh, 2011; Dikec, 2002; Harvey, 2008; Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]; Marcuse, 2009; Mayer, 2009; Mitchell, 2003; Mitchell and Heynen, 2009; Mitchell and Villanueva, 2010; Purcell, 2003; VanDeusen, 2002). Public transportation, the paper concludes, not only matters for who is part of the public, but for securing a right to the city and – in so doing – rescuing a considerable amount of the population from the idiocy of urban life.

The idiocy of rural life

As with many parts of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels’ reference to ‘the idiocy of rural life’ has not gone unremarked. Most interpretations, however, generally follow the lead of writers like Henry Fairlie. In his 1987 New Republic piece, ‘The idiocy of urban life: Or the cow’s revenge’, Fairlie dedicates himself to defending rural society against the reproach of urbanites. Contra Marx and Engels, it is city-dwellers, Fairlie argues, that are fools and who ‘have the insolence to disdain and mock the useful and rewarding life of country people who support them’ (Fairlie, 1987: 23).² As will become clear, Fairlie’s remarks emerge from a misreading. According to the writer Hal Draper (2004), it was never Marx and Engels’ intention to disparage rural people as idiots or fools. Instead their intention was to cast aspersions on the alleged isolation, apartness and political apathy of rural life. In his monumental text The Adventures in the Communist Manifesto, Draper suggests that Marx and Engels employed the German word idiotismus (translated as idiocy) in the classical sense (from the Greek word idiotai) to mean: ‘a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of “isolation from the larger community”’ (Draper, 2004: 220). Indeed, the words idiosyncratic, idiolect and idiographic all retain elements of the same Greek word, idiotes.³ In his own published translation of the Manifesto, Draper (2004: 123) therefore substitutes ‘idiocy’ for what he argues is a more apt synonym: ‘privatised isolation’.⁴ Draper’s interpretation is an important one. Not only is it important for refuting writers like Fairlie, but it is important for clarifying Marx and Engels’ own view of cities. For Marx and Engels’, cities were important not because rural life was stupid, but because cities – along with industrial capitalism – promised to do away with those isolating and apolitical qualities of rural life that, they argued, threatened to forestall global revolution.

Draper’s rather esoteric reading of the Manifesto is not without support. Indeed, in his 1844 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels makes references to rural idiocy on similar terms. In the book, Engels complains of rural weavers who ‘lived only for their petty, private interests, for their looms and gardens’ and who otherwise ‘remained sunk in apathetic indifference to the universal interests of mankind’ (Engels, 1936 [1844]: 3–4).⁵ In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx was no less disparaging of the French peasant class. Their mode of production, Marx (1969 [1852]: 123) observed, ‘isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse’. In such conditions, Marx added, ‘their interests beget no community, no national bond, and no political organisation, they do not form a class’ (1969 [1852]: 124).⁶ For both Marx and Engels, rural life was inimical to class formation. Rural idiocy, in fact, made proletarianisation impossible. It made the formation of a ‘class for itself’ not only unfeasible but unimaginable. Contra the isolation of rural life, the industrial city of the mid-19th century seemed to promise just the opposite – ‘revolutionary combination’ (Marx and Engels, 1998 [1848]: 65).⁷ What then emerges from the Manifesto is an implicit appreciation of cities as incubators of both new radical publics and new political movements. In ways that were qualitatively different, cities held out the possibility for new alliances and new coalitions. Precisely by bringing workers into greater proximity, cities allowed them, for the first time, to come face to face with their shared immiseration. In a quite provocative passage from The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels (1936 [1844]) makes his views on cities apparent:

If the centralisation of population stimulates and develops the property-holding class, it forces the development of the workers yet more rapidly. The workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole; they begin to perceive that, though feeble as individuals, they form a power united … the consciousness of oppression awakens, and the workers attain social and political importance. (1936 [1844]: 122)

For Engels, like Marx, it was in cities and not in rural areas that ‘workers first began to reflect upon their own condition, and to struggle against it’ (1936 [1844]: 122). To the extent that Marx and Engels opposed themselves to rural idiocy, this paper, in contrast, focuses on an idiocy of a different order – namely, the idiocy of urban life. Implicit, then, is the assumption that the very problems of isolation, apartness and political apathy that Marx and Engels associated with rural idiotism are no less a part of what we experience in cities. The case studies below not only make this point explicit, but they implicate transportation in the process of producing urban idiocy.

A brief comment on the case studies

Before going any further I should offer a brief word on the case studies themselves. Much of the material presented below stems from two projects that I carried out between 2006 and 2013. The first of these was based in Syracuse, NY and involved a dozen interviews with planners, transit officials and local politicians. The project sought to explore public transit in the context of what, I argued, had been a broad shift towards neoliberal forms of urban governance. While making several important points – especially with respect to the transportation implications of welfare reform – the project also prompted a set of new and yet broader questions. These were questions on what transit actually meant to people and its role – if any – in securing a more just and more democratic city. After concluding the study in Syracuse, I was hired as a research assistant for a project based in California’s East Bay. The assistantship was a fortuitous one. In the East Bay, debates over the provision of public transportation were impossible to ignore. Not only did one encounter a formidable array of organisations dedicated to the idea of transportation justice, but such organisations were eager to engage in broader debates over transit’s place in the city itself. Over the course of two years I conducted dozens of interviews with individuals, planners and politicians all variably involved in the region’s nascent transportation justice movement. In these interviews I asked many of the questions that I had asked in Syracuse. These were questions about public financing, federal retrenchment and transit dependency. I also asked many of the questions that I wish I had asked in Syracuse. These were questions on the moral and political dimensions of transit provision and the relationship between transit and people’s right to the city. This paper represents an effort to synthesise the findings from these two studies. More than that, it is an effort to use such findings to theorise public transportation’s place in the city. While there are obvious explanatory limits to case study research, there are also clear benefits. As Robert Yin (2003) has argued, case study research works best for studies that not only aim to retain the ‘meaningful characteristics of real life events’ but that aim to elicit new and novel research questions (Yin, 2003: 2). The studies that enliven this essay – to the degree that they raise important questions on transportation’s relationship to ‘the public’ and its role in securing a more democratic city – are, in many ways, aimed at doing just this.

Of idiotic transportation policies…

Like many cities in upstate New York, Syracuse has long struggled to meet the challenges of industrial decline, capital flight and suburban sprawl. As both people and jobs have left the city, the tax base and the public services that depend on it have suffered.⁸ Syracuse’s story is a familiar one and just as familiar are the story’s losers. Where employment opportunities have decamped to suburban tracts and as the city has struggled to maintain essential services with less tax revenue, it has been the city’s urban poor that have often born much of the pain. As the following case makes clear, the years following Federal Welfare Reform were especially notable in highlighting the plight of Syracuse’s urban poor – especially with respect to transportation. In February 2001, the Syracuse Metropolitan Transportation Council (SMTC) published a report on the transportation needs of the region’s welfare recipients (SMTC, 2001). As the report made clear, the passage of Welfare Reform in 1996 marked a dramatic change in the local allocation of social assistance. Signed into law by Bill Clinton and pushed heavily by a Republican-led congress, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act successfully transformed an entitlement program in place since 1935 (Aid for Families with Dependent Children) into a temporary assistance program with strict limitations (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). Apart from establishing a lifetime cap on benefits, Welfare Reform made cash assistance conditional on labour market participation. Individuals receiving assistance were required to start work as soon as they were job ready and no later than two years after entering the program (Wolch and Dinh, 2001). In Syracuse, as elsewhere, such radical changes raised any number of concerns – key among them: transportation. As social service providers in Syracuse quickly learned, many of the very people now required to work as a condition of assistance lacked the transportation necessary to either find or keep a job. In 1999 roughly 5% of Syracuse’s welfare recipients had access to a car (Mulder, 1999). To the degree that Welfare Reform revealed the plight of the carless, it also revealed public transit as an ineffective alternative. Public transit in Syracuse was still a system designed to bring suburban workers to downtown jobs on the traditional nine to five schedule. For many welfare recipients asked to work on weekends or on nights – the very types of jobs for which they were most qualified – transit proved to be wholly insufficient (SMTC, 2001). Indeed, many entry level jobs – particularly in the home healthcare field – were completely off the map and timetable of public transit (Mulder, 1998). In this context, and starting as early 1998, Syracuse began developing a series of more individualised programs aimed at transporting welfare recipients to work. Two of the most prominent of these programs were the Rides for Work and Wheels for Work programs.

Implemented in 2001, Syracuse’s Rides for Work program was developed to provide eligible clients free curb to curb transportation to and from work. Drawing on both federal and local grants to broker trips to local livery and taxi agencies, Rides for Work services were available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and on weekends. All trips were arranged by dispatchers based at Syracuse’s Mobility Management Centre. In determining client eligibility, Rides for Work relied on a number of criteria. Individuals were eligible if they were currently receiving or had recently received social assistance. The program was eligible to carless adults from households at or below 200% of the poverty line as well as to carless single adults at 150% of the poverty line (Director of Rides for Work, personal communication, 4 September 2007). Most importantly, clients had to demonstrate that they could not otherwise use public transit for the requested work trip – either because public transit did not serve the worksite or because their shift began or ended at such a time as to make public transit impossible. Where many buses in Syracuse stopped service at 8.00 pm, this was a common problem. One source of frustration for program administrators hinged on the issue of children. Due to the liability concerns of the contracted livery cabs, children were not allowed on Rides for Work trips – whether alone or accompanied by their parents. Since many Rides for Work clients were parents this was, of course, more than a trivial problem. Even with such limitations, the goals of the program were, no doubt, laudable and important. Serving as an adjunct to local public transit, the Rides for Work program offered a much need transit alternative to low-income workers with non-traditional schedules (Director of Rides for Work, personal communication, 4 September 2007). In many ways, Syracuse’s Wheels for Work program emerged with the same objectives and in response to the same challenge – getting welfare recipients to work where public transit was insufficient.

Implemented in 1999, Syracuse’s Wheels for Work program was designed to provide low interest car loans to local residents receiving social service benefits. As an initiative of Syracuse’s JobsPlus centre – a partnership between the Onondaga County Department of Social Services and Onondaga Community College – the Wheels for Work program started from the premise that an individual with access to a personal vehicle was more likely to keep employment, seek out better employment or increase hours worked. Given the nature of the program, the eligibility requirements were quite stringent. Limited to Onondaga County residents (Syracuse is the largest city in Onondaga County), the Wheels for Work program was restricted to applicants who were either: active recipients of social assistance, clients who had recently closed their account, healthcare workers making under 200% of the federal poverty level or carless individuals currently receiving food stamps (Director of Wheels for Work, personal communication, 6 December 2007). In addition to meeting at least one of these conditions, applicants were limited to: individuals with children, individuals working an average of 30 hours per week, individuals who were insurable and individuals with a valid driver’s licence. All applicants were evaluated by a seven-member selection committee who reviewed their motor vehicle history, employment history and recommendation submitted by either the client’s employers or their jobs coach. Loans were only given to clients after the committee was confident in the applicant’s ability to make car payments, increase work hours or potentially leave social assistance. In the words of the programs director, the Wheels for Work program was a ‘reward for working more than six months’, exhibiting ‘good behaviour’ and keeping up with the bills (Director of Wheels for Work, personal communication, 6 December 2007).

While Welfare Reform demanded that applicants work as a condition of receiving social assistance, it quickly became clear that for many recipients, finding and keeping employment would be impossible without a car. Initiatives like Syracuse’s Rides for Work and Wheels for Work programs aimed at meeting this challenge head on – offering, as it were, a pragmatic response to both the cruel ironies of Welfare Reform and the vagaries of a substandard public transit system. To the degree that such programs filled a gap in transportation services, they also had clear limitations. The Rides for Work program offered trips to work sites, but it did not support equally essential trips to grocery stores, to schools, to churches or, most troubling, to pick up children. Similarly, while the Wheels for Work program provided low interest car loans to eligible welfare recipients, it did so only as a reward for ‘good behaviour’ and ‘increasing work hours’. There is little doubt that both the Rides for Work and Wheels for Work programs provided a tremendous service to any number of individuals attempting to leave social assistance. It is also equally clear that while such programs provided recipients with broader access to work and the wider city, they did so on wholly restrictive terms and in ways that were markedly different from the public transit system for which they had been designed as adjuncts or replacements (Attoh, 2012). To the degree that such programs provided an essential service, they also seemingly raised many of the same issues that had emerged in the 1980s around wheelchair lifts and the limitations of paratransit.

According to groups like ADAPT, the problem with paratransit was not merely that it required advanced planning or a doctor’s note, but that it prevented people with disabilities from being part of the public. In 1983, the editors of the Disability Rag wrote as much:

Paratransit is special service. It is not equal service. It is certainly not public …. Public transit makes no distinction among riders: it doesn’t care where you go, when you go there or how long you stay. It is simply a service. Fixed routes. The choices are up to you. Not so with paratransit. It is a subscription service. Its riders have to meet certain criteria. Their ‘trips’ must be approved by the system operator, (Johnson and Shaw, 2001: 15).

ADAPT’s refusal to accept paratransit as a viable alternative to public transit was based on what it saw as a clear difference between a subscription service and a public service. In many ways, ADAPT’s critique of paratransit is applicable to the Rides for Work and Wheels for Work programs. Even if designed as adjuncts to Syracuse’s public transit system, the Rides for Work and Wheels for Work programs were hardly public in the same sense. Unlike public transit, such programs made service contingent on the narrow criteria of job readiness and the approval of program administrators, job coaches and employers. Public transit, of course, comes with no similar requirements. One does not need, for example, the permission of a ‘job coach’ to board a public bus, nor is one’s ‘good behaviour’ part of the fare. The sheer number of restrictions associated with the Rides for Work and Wheels for Work programs distinguished them from public transit. Just as distinguishing, however, was the type of service they offered. In sharp contrast to the ‘publicness’ of public transit, such programs were relatively private and highly individualised – offering welfare recipients private livery services or access to a private automobile of their own. They were programs that, for whatever their benefits, separated welfare recipients from the wider public. ADAPT’s refusal to endorse paratransit in the 1980s was based on an important argument about dignity. It was also an argument about the public itself. As the editors of the Disability Rag argued, accepting paratransit as public transit not only meant losing one’s independence, one’s dignity and the ability to be part of the public, it also meant losing the ‘chance to make the entire transportation system available to any member of the public, disabled or not, who cares to ride the public’s buses’ (Johnson and Shaw, 2001: 20). In Syracuse, accepting the Rides for Work and Wheels for Work program meant losing the same opportunity – namely, the chance to fight to make public transit more available to all members of the public, whether on social assistance or not. In the years following welfare reform, the need to fight for better public transit in Syracuse and elsewhere had never been clearer. Between 1994 and 1996 the US Congress halved federal transit operating aid to local transit agencies. As a result, in 1995, 40% of cities across the country cut or reduced services (Rivera, 1996; Shioya, 1995). In Syracuse, such federal cuts meant both a reduction in suburban service and a greater reliance on more piecemeal funding sources – including a mortgage recording tax (Emmons, 1996). In many ways, the passage of Welfare Reform in 1996 revealed a brutal irony – for welfare recipients attempting to meet new work requirements, federal cuts to mass transit made sure that public transit remained an inadequate option. Syracuse’s answer to this brutal irony was to offer a set of alternatives to public transit that were hardly public in the same sense. As had been true of paratransit, Syracuse’s response to the transportation needs of welfare recipients was an idiotic one. In comparison to public transit, such programs enforced privatised isolation. Moreover, they transformed a potential fight over public transit to one over the precise functioning of a specialised service for individuals receiving public assistance but otherwise not part of the public itself.

Against idiotic urban transportation …

I must admit that I meet a lot of friends on the buses. A lot of people I know ride the buses, so it is a social thing. I don’t know if I think of the bus as being a thing I go to for sociality only – it’s a way of getting places – but effectively it turns out that there is a lot of social interactions that occur. I notice that fellow riders tend to be good to each other. When you are on the bus, they know you are a fellow bus rider, they know you are in the same class …. I think [transit] encourages people to cooperate and get along and share something. (Steven Geller, personal communication, 5 October 2010)

The above quote comes from Steve Geller, a long time Berkeley resident, a bus rider and a former member of the East Bay based transit justice group, the Alliance for AC Transit. For Steve Geller and for many members of the Alliance, public transit’s significance extended beyond its utility as a form of transportation. Public transit also had a social utility. The history of the Alliance for AC Transit is an interesting one. Founded in 1995, and drawing inspiration from the success of the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, the Alliance emerged in the wake of large scale federal disinvestment in public transit and its local effects – specifically its impact on service from the Alameda and Contra Costa Transit district (AC Transit) – a medium sized system serving the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond Hayward and Freemont (J Katz, personal communication, 29 November 2010; Sandosham, 1996; Shioya, 1995). For many AC Transit riders, of whom a large proportion were low income, such cuts not only meant increased fares but fewer buses and slower service.

Between 1995 and 2006 (when it was disbanded), the Alliance for AC Transit dedicated a considerable amount of its time securing funding for AC Transit – an essential task given the drop in federal funds that occurred around the same time (J Katz, personal communication, 29 November 2010; Shioya, 1995). In 1998, the Alliance was a key part of a campaign that successfully lobbied the local Metropolitan Transportation Council to redirect US$375 million of highway funds to local transit services – this included US$51.5 million for AC Transit (Diaz, 1998). In 2000, the Alliance played an important part in the passage of the Measure B – a ballot measure that allocated an additional US$256 million in sales tax revenue to AC Transit (Tibbey, 2001). In 2002, and along similar lines, the Alliance helped pass yet another ballot measure aimed at shoring up AC Transit’s operating revenue – in this case through a US$24 parcel tax on all real property in Oakland (Holstege, 2002). While the Alliance directed much of its energy to putting AC Transit on firmer financial footing, it spent an equal if not greater proportion of its resources asserting the broad rights of bus riders and addressing the petty inconveniences that defined transit usage.

In 2000, the Alliance developed the region’s first Bus Rider Bill of Rights – a nine point charter outlining a set of entitlements owed to all AC Transit bus riders (Action Plan, 2000; Bus Riders Bill of Rights Endorsed, 2000). According to the charter, AC Transit riders had a right to: courteous treatment, a clean and well-functioning bus, buses that arrived and departed on time and a robust system for filing complaints. In 1998, and in one of its more notable campaigns, the Alliance helped block a proposal to relocate AC Transit’s main transfer station (Broadway Corridor Committee, 1997). Located in the heart of Oakland’s downtown, the transfer station had long been targeted for removal by a coalition of local businesses who saw the bus station as an impediment to reinvestment. For the Alliance, of course, the proposal was little more than an effort to push low income bus riders out of downtown and thus out of sight (Alliance Report, 1998; Roy, 1998). Through a sustained campaign involving letters and public demonstrations, the Alliance succeeded in pressuring the city council to keep the station downtown. More importantly, it successfully partnered with the city to win wider sidewalks and bus canopies at the same location. Taken together, the campaign for a Bus Riders’ Bill of Rights and the campaign to keep AC Transit’s transfer station downtown Oakland offered a clear encapsulation of the Alliance’s core beliefs. Bus riders not only had a right to timely and clean buses but they had a right to be a visible part of the city and to be part of the public. Bus riders were not to be shunted off to the periphery; they had a right to be in the heart of the city.

For many of those involved in the Alliance, there was an unmistakable social element to public transit. This sentiment was reflected most clearly in the Alliance’s monthly newsletter, Omnibus. Alongside articles on transit legislation, the Omnibus included movie reviews, poems and a section on ‘Rider voices’. In addition to informing riders of the latest campaigns, the Omnibus aimed at defining a political community of riders with shared interests. For riders like Steve Geller, the social component of transit extended even further. Urban transit had a more general social role to play. It encouraged ‘people to cooperate and get along and share something’ (Steven Geller, personal communication, 5 October 2010). Fran Hastlestiener, another former member of the Alliance, voiced much the same belief, describing transit in largely the same way, saying: ‘I love riding the bus, I like the sense of community, I like the whole thing. You are not shut off from the rest of the community when you ride the bus’ (Hastlestiener, personal communication, 10 October 2010). Such views, of course, extended beyond the Alliance. In 2010, and in the wake of a service cut, members of the East Bay Coalition for the Blind (EBCB) noted much the same thing. As one member mentioned during a focus group, without transit the city was virtually off limits.

If you can’t drive or people are not at your beck and call like people with kids … you are a prisoner of your house. If you aren’t available to walk very far or take buses or use paratransit. Your rights are taken away, the right to move about the city. Your right to participate is being taken away. (EBCB focus group, 9 November 2010)

Chris Mullen of Berkeley’s Centre for Independent Living (CIL) echoed much the same sentiment. As a mobility trainer, Mullen’s job was to teach both disabled and elderly clients how to use public transit. For him the importance of transit was obvious and not only paralleled the fears of the East Bay’s Blind Riders, but the work of ADAPT two decades earlier.

[Transit is] an instigator and a pusher for people with disabilities who feel limited. For seniors, it’s like a reintroduction into taking control over your life. The senior I will be working with this afternoon worked the polls last week and so one of the first trips we ever took was to her polling place, and again, she had tears in her face. (Mullen, personal communication, 2010)

For Steve Geller, Fran Hastlesteiner, Chris Mullen and members of the EBCB, the fight for better transit in the East Bay was an immensely important fight. Groups like the Alliance not only opposed the defunding of public transit, they rejected its broader consequences. In the East Bay, as in many cities, transit provided an economic lifeline to those without cars, allowing them to access employment centres, schools and shopping areas. Just as importantly, transit provided these same groups access to the wider public. For Geller, Hastlestiener, Mullen and members of the EBCB, not having transit meant being a prisoner in one’s own home and shut off from the rest of the community. To be without transit was not only to be trapped at home, but it was to suffer an even worse fate – it was to be rendered an idiot in the classical sense: to be isolated from the rest of the community, to be rendered a ‘non-participant in public affairs’ (Sparkes, 1988: 101).

The idiocy of urban life

For both Marx and Engels, the rise of ‘enormous cities’ presented conditions that were ripe for revolution. In contrast to the political apathy and ‘privatised isolation’ of rural life, cities offered something new. It was in cities, as Engels noted, that ‘workers begin to feel as a class, as a whole’ and that, for the first time, their ‘consciousness of oppression awakens’ (Engels, 1936 [1844]: 122). It was in cities, Engel’s maintained, that the ‘centralisation of population’ not only stimulated the development of a ‘property-holding class’ but worker consciousness as well (1936 [1844]: 122). The above cases suggest something of an addendum to this particular notion of cities. Rather than rescuing people from ‘privatised isolation’, the above cases suggest that, for many people, cities remain just as isolating. Where buses lack wheelchair lifts, or where transit service has been cut, ‘privatised isolation’ reigns. In such situations, not only is it difficult to come together in ‘revolutionary combination’, but simply reaching the grocery store becomes a monumental chore (Marx and Engels, 1998 [1848]: 65). Poor public transportation, it seems, can make idiots of us all – especially those of us condemned, by circumstance, to use it.⁹ While the above cases evince the isolating qualities of urban life, they also clearly refer to isolation of a particular sort. This is less the isolation or anomie of Georg Simmel (2002 [1903]) or Louis Wirth (1938) than that of people alienated from the public itself. More clearly still, the above examples speak to those material qualities of cities – namely buses and transportation systems – that can functionally dictate who is part of the public and who is not. For ADAPT, the problem with paratransit – and by extension the Rides for Work and Wheels for Work programs – was not that they were ineffective or inefficient, but that they seemed to prevent the disabled and the poor from being full members of society. For the Alliance for AC Transit and members of the EBCB, the problem with service cuts at AC Transit was no different. Such cuts not only threatened riders’ ability to get to work, they threated riders’ ability to share something in common and to be part of the city’s public life.

The public and the right to the city

What do I mean by the public? There is, of course, a long tradition of debate on the meaning and the importance of the public. More often than not, that debate hinges on some notion of the public sphere (Arendt, 1958: 52; Fraser, 1990; Habermas, 1989 [1962]; Robbins, 1993). In perhaps his most famous work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas (1989 [1962]), identifies the emergence, in the 18th century, of what he deems the ‘liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere’. Connecting it with the rise of the literary novel, political journalism, as well as the proliferation of coffee houses and salons, Habermas argues that the public sphere was a key site of political debate for an emergent bourgeois class (McCarthy, 1989 [1962]). More figurative than literal, the 18th century liberal public sphere was a space in which private individuals came together to engage in rational and free debate on matters of public concern. Before its decline at the end of the 19th century, it was the ‘domain of social life where such a thing as public opinion can be formed [where] citizens deal with matters of general interest without being subject to coercion … [to] express and publicize their views’ (Habermas, 1997: 105). Habermas’ historical account of the bourgeois public sphere has had its share of critics (Fraser, 1990). As critics have noted, Habermas’ account ignored the ‘significant exclusions’ upon which the early public sphere rested – particularly the exclusion of women and racialised minorities. No less troubling, his account said little about the diversity of ‘counterpublics’ that resulted from such exclusions. While accepting these critiques – as well as those critiques that warn against reifying the idea of ‘the public’ itself – this paper maintains that the public sphere and the idea of the public remain crucially important (Fraser, 1990; Habermas, 1989 [1962]: 208).¹⁰ They are important precisely because they force us to wrestle with the meaning of democracy itself and the degree to which substantive democracy can exist in cities with substandard public transit.¹¹ When groups like ADAPT argue that wheelchair lifts mean the difference between being part of the public or being excluded from it, we take them seriously precisely because we know what being part of the public means. It means being part of a democracy and it means having both the ability and the right to engage in debates with others over the common good. When we bemoan the impoverishment of democracy, we are invariably making an assessment of the quality of the public sphere. Who, we ask, is included or excluded from it? How far does it extend? Under what terms is access to it provided, monitored or secured? Who can participate fully in debates over the communal good, and who cannot?

Within geography and urban studies, the literature on the right to the city has raised a similar set of questions – and often with explicit references to notions of the public and democracy. Coined by the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the ‘right to the city’ was a ‘right to centrality’, a ‘right to be at the heart of urban life’ and a ‘right to places of encounter and exchange’ (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]: 179).¹² For Lefebvre, cities were oeuvres – works produced through the labour of urban residents. As such, the right to the city was a right not to be alienated from the oeuvre and the urban life that constituted it (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]; Mitchell and Villanueva, 2010). For many, Lefebvre’s work has been important precisely because it addresses questions of urban democracy and the public sphere. In his work on homelessness and free speech, Don Mitchell has drawn on Lefebvre’s notion of the right to city to not only address debates around urban democracy but to reframe debates over public space. As Mitchell (2003) argues, debates over public space are necessarily debates over who is part of the public, who has access to the public sphere and what type of politics are possible. For Mitchell, the privatisation of public space, its overt surveillance and its regulation not only limit the lives of the homeless – who have no private space to which to retreat – but they necessarily shape what types of publics are possible and who has a right to the city. Where the right to the city is understood as a right to centrality and a right to encounter and exchange, public space is essential.

As the cases above suggest, for groups like ADAPT and the Alliance for AC Transit, debates over public transit are little different. Namely, they are debates over who can be part of the public as well as who has a right to the city. Wheelchair lifts on public buses were important to ADAPT precisely because they allowed disabled people to be part of the public. They were also important because they spoke directly to many of the rights that Lefebvre argued constitute the right to the city. In ways that were impossible with paratransit, wheelchair lifts granted people with disabilities the right to spontaneity (rather than scheduling trips ahead of time), and the right to a space of exchange and encounter (the bus itself). When members of the Alliance for AC Transit demanded that AC Transit’s transfer station remain in downtown Oakland, their demand was for centrality and to be at the heart of the city rather than alienated from it.

To the degree that the above case studies speak to the literature on the right to the city, they also push that literature in new directions. Since Lefebvre (1996 [1968]), David Harvey (2008) has perhaps offered the most popular reinterpretation of the right to the city idea. Harvey’s notion of the right to the city dovetails with his decades-long analysis of capitalist urbanisation. Where cities are understood as central to the production and absorption of surplus value, Harvey has defined the right to the city as a right to the democratic control of that surplus. More polemically still, for Harvey the right to the city must be understood as ‘far more than the individual liberty right to access urban resource’, but more so the ‘right to change ourselves by changing the city’ (Harvey, 2008: 1). The above cases suggest an addendum to this notion. Namely they suggest that how we access those urban resources matters deeply. To the degree that access is defined on idiotic terms – be those the terms of paratransit or the welfare office’s job coach – there is little hope of changing the city, let alone changing ourselves. The above cases suggest that the right to the city must, before anything, be a right against idiocy.

Conclusion

Counter Marx and Engels, the above cases suggest that ‘privatised isolation’ is as much an urban phenomenon as it is a rural one. As seems clear, there is no regional monopoly on idiocy. While Marx and Engels once bemoaned the ‘privatised isolation’ of rural life – to use Draper’s translation – there are any number of residents in today’s cities who decry what seems to be its urban equivalent. The obvious question for the reader is thus twofold: what makes cities idiotic? And what does resistance look like? In some ways, I have already given an answer. To the first question, cities are made idiotic by idiotic transportation policies. Urban transportation is idiotic when it functionally prevents populations from being part of the public, when it enforces ‘privatised isolation’ and when cities respond to the deficits of public transportation with privatised alternatives. To the degree that the Rides for Work program or even paratransit were framed as answers to the limitations of public transit, they were hardly public in the same way. In lieu of improving public transit, such programs provided a set of relatively idiotic alternatives.¹³ Such alternatives had consequences for both who was part of the public as well as what type of publics were possible. In this context, what does resistance to urban idiocy look like? Across the paper I have given examples of both groups and individuals that have sought to fight against the ‘privatised isolation’ of urban life. These have ranged from groups like ADAPT and the Alliance for AC Transit to individuals like Steve Geller, Chris Mullen, Fran Hastlestiener and members of the EBCB.¹⁴ Groups like ADAPT and the Alliance for AC Transit have framed their fight for better transportation in ways that make clear the links between transportation, ‘the public’ and the idea of the right to the city. I have argued throughout that their fights have also been against the ‘idiocy of urban life’. The idea of the ‘idiocy of urban life’ is, I argue, an important contribution to debates on the right to the city, to debates on ‘the public’ and to debates on urban democracy more generally – all of which are debates over particular ideals. As a concept, it is important not only because it gives a name to the very thing that threatens such ideals, but because it refocuses attention on what still seems the radical potential inherent in cities – a potential of which Marx and Engels were keenly aware.¹⁵ Of course, in realising the radical potential of the modern city, urban transportation is just one piece. Where capitalist urbanisation has created ever more enormous cities, the task of rescuing a considerable portion of the population from the ‘idiocy of urban life’ will obviously require more than public transit. And yet, it is equally clear that if cities are ever to live up to their promise as incubators for radical publics – proletarian or otherwise – public transportation will matter deeply.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

In addition to the remarks of two very helpful reviewers, I am especially grateful to the friends and colleagues who were gracious enough to read and comment on various iterations of the above text. I am especially indebted to: Angela DeFelice, Sandra Greene, Don Mitchell, Joaquin Villanueva, Chris Grove, Katie Wells, Andy Inch and Joe Nevins. I believe their collective wisdom greatly improved the manuscript.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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