The Atlantic wonders if transit is failing white people

[marmar]

from the Human Transit blog:



the atlantic wonders if transit is failing white people


How do you react when you read the following sentence?

In Los Angeles, 92 percent of bus riders are people of color.

This supposedly shocking fact is the starting point for Amanda Hess's confused and aggravating piece in the Atlantic today, which argues that somehow transit is failing because it's not attracting enough white people. "As minority ridership rises, the racial stigma against (buses) compounds," Hess writes. Sounds alarming! But who exactly is feeling this "stigma," apart from Ms. Hess, and how many of those people are there?

Read it again:

In Los Angeles, 92 percent of bus riders are people of color.

Now, how does your reaction change when I point out that in the 2010 census, just under 28% of the population of Los Angeles County is "non-Hispanic white," so over 70% can be called "people of color." Now what if I tell you that as always, transit is most concentrated in the denser parts of the county, where the demand and ridership are higher, and these areas happen to be even less "non-Hispanic white" than the county at large? (Exact figures can't be cited as this area corresponds to no government boundary.) So the bus system, weighted by where the service is concentrated, serves a population of whom much, much more than 70% could be described as "people of color".

Please don't treat these figures as too precise. The claim that "92% of Los Angeles bus riders are people of color" is impossible to fact-check because two of its key terms are ambiguous.

* Does "Los Angeles" mean the City of Los Angeles or Los Angeles County? They're both big but very different, but both are over 70% "people of color."
* Likewise there are many definitions of "Los Angeles bus rider" depending on which transit agencies you include. I suspect Hess got her figure by looking just at LA Metro, rather than the many suburban operators who are also part of the total Los Angeles bus network, but it's hard to know.
* And by the way, I'm assuming that "people of color" include what the Census calls "Hispanic whites," as it has every time I've heard the term. (To the Census, anyone of European ancestry, including from Spain centuries ago, is "white.&quot

So to the extent we can track Hess's statistics here's what they say: Los Angeles bus ridership is mostly people of color because Los Angeles is mostly people of color. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.humantransit.org/2012/07/the-atlantic-wonders-if-transit-is-failing-white-people.html

[xchrom]

1. She's an idiot.

Now she's created a 'controversy' where there is none.

[Igel]

2. There are two standards for identifying discrimination.

You can look at the raw numbers. 92% of the ridership is non-white. A woman makes 76% of what a man makes. The uninsured in Texas are disproportionately Latino. A disproportionate number of high school dropouts are African-American so the public school system is racist.

This is getting at the harebrained "disproportionate impact" standard--makes proving racism easy, because you don't need to. The presumed guilty need to prove their innocence--why, exactly, is disproportionate impact not due to racism? Where "racism" is a set of beliefs about a person's fitness or abilities based on skin color or ethnicity, or actions taken based on animus against (or favoritism) for those of unlike (like) skin color or ethnicity.

The response to "disproportionate impact" is to unpack the numbers and do the defenders' work for them. I.e., understand the numbers and actually question your own claims. Or you can unpack the accuser's numbers.

In this case, you do a fairly good job, but the problem still stands (although less dramatic): If we look at 92% versus a bit over 70%, then you still have about a 30% bias towards non-whites. The gap is in need and profitability: I suspect many more whites live in areas that have a population density making bus service difficult (I can't image it where I live in Houston), and that most of those find driving to be economically advantageous.

But your discussion also shows why, exactly, the "disproportionate impact" standard is harebrained. The same kind of "dissect the numbers" undermines the "public school system is racist" idea, the sexism argument, or the uninsured-in-Texas numbers' usefulness.