Just days after I wrote a two-part blog series - - one link will get you to both - - going over segregationist and exclusionary state and regional policy histories that intentionally land-locked Milwaukee and kept its minority residents from job opportunities beyond the city's borders - - including light rail barriers and targeted bus line cancellations that barred or severed links between working people and jobs, another such bus line cancellation was announced Friday that will force more workers who want to keep their jobs to walk - - with winter approaching - - for up to an hour from the last bus stop to jobs sites to bring home a paycheck.
What kind of Wisconsin and America is this, in 2016?
It's hard to believe - - and it's especially infuriating - - because the bus line getting axed connecting central city Milwaukee bus riders with jobs in Menomonee Falls, in retrospect, was set up to fail by a well-intentioned but last-minute, court-ordered solution to state transportation spending discrimination by thoughtless bureaucrats in Madison - - discriminatory spending and 'planning' which began before the bus line was cobbled together as a last-ditch project addendum.
Yes, the cancellation decision was made by two Milwaukee grassroots organizations who were given some bus-line planning power in the court-orderd settlement, but these organizations are not transportation planning agencies.
They stepped in to address a failure not of their making when the State of Wisconsin Department of Transportation approved the spending of $1.7 billion on Zoo Interchange reconstruction without adding any transit component, thus allocating that entire gigantic sum to serve motorists in the region - - often upper-income and predominantly white suburbanites in Waukesha County - - only without earmarking a penny for the thousands of lower-income residents and workers principally in minority-majority Milwaukee who are without access to cars.
WisDOT has had this planning insensitivity pointed out to it over the years.
As has the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, the suburban-and-exurban-dominated publicly-funded agency which wrote the regional freeway system reconstruction plan under a $1 million WisDOT contract and then recommended the plan's highway-building-and-expansion only segments without making sure WisDOT included equivalent or even mildly-equitable transit services.
The bigger failure is the state government's unwillingness to fully fund transit in Wisconsin, and certainly across the Milwaukee region where transit-dependent populations are the largest stateside, as a right, as a basic public service that is as fundamental as are motorists' rights to travel on roads and bridges.
People who do not drive by choice, or because of illness or disability and who pay state and local taxes make a contribution to roads and bridges, as should motorists and all others, just as we all pay for schools we don't attend or social services we don't access or specialized business assistance programs which are outside of our professions or roads and bridges beyond our neighborhoods which we may never use, but which we support because they are part of a system which needs to be complete.
A transportation plan that is intentionally light on transit and which intentionally disconnects bus riders from jobs or unfettered movement is a plan that is discriminatory, backward, disgraceful and in need of a full-fledged teardown and replacement with economic justice as its foundation.
This latest bus line cancellation is a public policy and public relations disgrace and needs to be corrected by the state picking the cost now, and then integrating it and other Milwaukee-and-worker-friendly transit services into fully-paid state programs with the regularity that old roads are repaired and new ones are constructed.
What kind of Wisconsin and America is this, in 2016?
It's hard to believe - - and it's especially infuriating - - because the bus line getting axed connecting central city Milwaukee bus riders with jobs in Menomonee Falls, in retrospect, was set up to fail by a well-intentioned but last-minute, court-ordered solution to state transportation spending discrimination by thoughtless bureaucrats in Madison - - discriminatory spending and 'planning' which began before the bus line was cobbled together as a last-ditch project addendum.
Yes, the cancellation decision was made by two Milwaukee grassroots organizations who were given some bus-line planning power in the court-orderd settlement, but these organizations are not transportation planning agencies.
They stepped in to address a failure not of their making when the State of Wisconsin Department of Transportation approved the spending of $1.7 billion on Zoo Interchange reconstruction without adding any transit component, thus allocating that entire gigantic sum to serve motorists in the region - - often upper-income and predominantly white suburbanites in Waukesha County - - only without earmarking a penny for the thousands of lower-income residents and workers principally in minority-majority Milwaukee who are without access to cars.
WisDOT has had this planning insensitivity pointed out to it over the years.
As has the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, the suburban-and-exurban-dominated publicly-funded agency which wrote the regional freeway system reconstruction plan under a $1 million WisDOT contract and then recommended the plan's highway-building-and-expansion only segments without making sure WisDOT included equivalent or even mildly-equitable transit services.
The bigger failure is the state government's unwillingness to fully fund transit in Wisconsin, and certainly across the Milwaukee region where transit-dependent populations are the largest stateside, as a right, as a basic public service that is as fundamental as are motorists' rights to travel on roads and bridges.
People who do not drive by choice, or because of illness or disability and who pay state and local taxes make a contribution to roads and bridges, as should motorists and all others, just as we all pay for schools we don't attend or social services we don't access or specialized business assistance programs which are outside of our professions or roads and bridges beyond our neighborhoods which we may never use, but which we support because they are part of a system which needs to be complete.
A transportation plan that is intentionally light on transit and which intentionally disconnects bus riders from jobs or unfettered movement is a plan that is discriminatory, backward, disgraceful and in need of a full-fledged teardown and replacement with economic justice as its foundation.
This latest bus line cancellation is a public policy and public relations disgrace and needs to be corrected by the state picking the cost now, and then integrating it and other Milwaukee-and-worker-friendly transit services into fully-paid state programs with the regularity that old roads are repaired and new ones are constructed.
