Photo: Olympia’s Transit Center by Shayna Clayton
By Alice McIntyre
Bobby Carleton is an Evergreen student and Olympia resident that has been involved with various community organizing projects around housing justice, food justice, and reproductive rights and is currently focused on advocating for fare-free public transit. Given Intercity Transit’s recent decision to eliminate fares starting on Jan. 1, I was curious to pick Bobby’s brain about various social movements around transit issues in a regional and national context. Here are his thoughts.
There have recently been “fare strikes” in Portland and Seattle. Can you give me some background on what these actions involved and why they happened?
“A fare strike is a direct action-based method used by transit justice activists across the world. In essence, it’s a mass refusal by transit riders to pay fares. It’s a withdrawal of the collective economic power of transit riders who are seeking to win concessions from transit agencies. Most fare strikes are initiated in response to fare hikes or to poor service or service reductions. In some cases, though, fare strikes are utilized by drivers and transit operators who want to go on strike during a labor dispute, but don’t want to engage in a work stoppage that might have an adverse effect on riders.”
“The fare strikes in Portland and Seattle come from in some ways similar and in some ways different sources. The Seattle fare strike was organized as a result of the experience in Chile recently, in which hundreds of thousands of people have engaged in an anti-neoliberal revolt catalyzed by mass fare evasions on the Santiago metro. Those actions were effective in forcing the national government of Chile to rescind a fare hike they had previously imposed. The Seattle fare strike was really inspired by that. But there’s also been a lot of simmering working class resentment across the city due to rising cost of living in general, especially housing costs, but also fare hikes.”
“Portland was no doubt also inspired by Chile, but the context is a little more specific. In Portland, the transit agency is called TriMet. TriMet hired nine new fare enforcement officers a few months ago, and they use what’s called a ‘proof of payment’ system. On the MAX Light Rail in Portland and the Link Light Rail in Seattle you don’t pay at a fare gate, you just pay your fare and board the train physically uninhibited. But on the train, these fare inspectors can enter at any point and demand a receipt of your fare. There’s been a lot of studies into the practices of fare enforcement, and most of them indicate that there’s a really strong racist bias as well as a class bias, particularly against homeless people but also at anyone who’s less likely to be able to come up with $2.75. So that was the particular catalyzing factor in Portland. What was particularly egregious about it was that a judge in Oregon ruled these random fare inspections to be unconstitutional in 2018. TriMet has simply ignored that ruling. These fare strikes have also sourced inspiration from recent protests in New York City.”
Could you tell me a little more about what’s going on in New York?
“There has been a massive police crackdown on both fare evasion and other ‘quality of life crimes’ within the subway system. ‘Quality of life crimes’ refer to victimless petty crimes like street vending, loitering, sleeping on platforms or on trains, drug use, stuff like that. It has an overwhelmingly disproportionate effect on homeless people. The crackdown in New York has led to a lot of high profile cases of racist police violence against fare evaders. People getting punched by the cops, tasered by the cops, having guns pulled on them. There’s been massive protests in Brooklyn and Harlem and mass fare evasions have been a component of those.”
What are some specific instances of police brutality on the subways?
“There have been a number of recent incidents in the subways. There have been arrests of multiple churro vendors. A lot of working class immigrants in New York rely a lot on what’s called the informal economy, so a lot of them are unlicensed street vendors, and there’s been a crackdown on that.”
“There’s also the case of Adrian Napier. He was a 19-year-old Black youth from Brooklyn who evaded the fare and was stopped on a subway car by about a dozen police officers, who all drew their guns on him. This terrified him and the entire train car they held up for many minutes. There was a case in the Bronx in which two Latinx youth were tasered by police for fare evasion, and then police were videotaped punching teenagers who I think had been involved in breaking up a fight or something. I think it’s safe to assume there have been many more recent cases of violent police brutality on the subways, we just haven’t heard about them.”
“It’s all part of this ‘broken windows’ policing paradigm, which is this theory developed by the NYPD in the 90s that claims that by hyperfocusing on and criminalizing victimless petty crime like some of the things I mentioned earlier, then necessarily violent crimes will decrease. It’s bogus; it’s theory that hasn’t been really reflected in reality but has been used as a method of social control and a way to criminalize poor people and people of color.”
Earlier you mentioned the use of fare evasion by striking transit workers. Have there been efforts to involve transit workers in these protests, whether in NYC or the Pacific Northwest?
“In New York, the Transport Workers Union leadership actually supports the police crackdown, but that says nothing about the opinions of individual transit workers. Oftentimes in these big unions there’s quite a political discrepancy between the rank and file and the leadership.”
“I’m not sure if efforts have been made to reach out to transit workers in Portland. In Seattle, there are some efforts that are just getting off the ground at this point. I think that the key is to have conversations with individual workers, because the union leadership probably won’t be supportive. But there have been some interesting experiments in San Francisco and Chicago in the early 2000s, where organizers worked with both riders and bus drivers. Riders refused to pay fare and drivers refused to collect fare. What’s important to note is that there were not only fare hikes, but also service cuts and layoffs happening. Both riders and workers were suffering and had a very clear material interest in causing economic damage to transit authorities.”
What you’re talking about seems to hit some broader issues like gentrification, control of public space, class, and so on. Is there anything else, in writing or in action, that can help us link what might seem like disparate questions?
“I think a lot of our writing on the fare strikes in Seattle and Portland at least has focused on the demand for transit accessibility as a question of mobility rights for working class people in general. There are barriers to movement, to getting from point A to point B, to get to work and to school, and to buy necessities. Eliminating these barriers, demanding free transit, is a crucial anti-poverty measure to empower working class people generally. One way to look at eliminating fares is as a wage hike for the working class, putting a dent in the cost of living and making cities more accessible and livable in the here and now.”
“There’s also the important role that public transit plays in urban capitalist economies. From the standpoint of the capitalists themselves, particularly in major cities, they rely on the function of public transit for their workers to commute—where their labor is exploited and profits are then accrued. Capitalists know that, and the government knows that, so they can’t neglect public transit to the extent that it would disintegrate because that would have a negative economic impact. That’s why we’re seeing a kind of subtle neglect but not complete disintegration. But that still has real material effects on riders.”
In summation, what would you say are the key takeaways, particularly for, say, activist-minded Evergreen students who are interested in these sorts of issues?
“For me, I think that the concept of mobility justice and mobility rights is something that has been kind of neglected in left-wing political frameworks for a long time. I think that movement, physical movement, is something so fundamental to human survival and human society forever. I think emphasizing mobility justice should be crucial for anyone with an activist mindset and seen as a fundamental anti-poverty measure.”
“At Evergreen, there’s a tradition of environmental activism and climate justice, and that’s an issue we’ve been highlighting with free transit organizing. Eliminating barriers to transit is by definition a climate justice measure: About 20 percent of carbon emissions in the U.S. are from automobile usage. In urban areas, it’s an even higher percentage. So, if we’re concerned about reducing emissions, reducing traffic congestion, and so forth we have to incentivize transit use and the two ways to do that are eliminate fares to make it more economically accessible, and vastly improve service, making it more frequent and expanding geographic coverage.”
“Finally, I would say that a strategic method rooted in direct action is another takeaway. That, I think, has been fundamental to this organizing: this belief that working class and marginalized people have the ability through their economic participation in capitalism. They have the power to organize directly and exert power in a kind of dispersed but collective, horizontal way. There doesn’t need to be this reliance on politicians and NGOs and other kinds of formal advocacy organizations which are rooted in hierarchy. We have that power ourselves as transit riders, as people who pay fares. We can withdraw our participation and exert power through that means.”
