>"Yes, but poor people use public transportation to come from bad neighborhoods to good neighborhoods to rob us! We must ban all expansion of public transportation!"
This is why the (Boston) red line doesn't extend to Arlington.
This is why the (Boston) red line doesn't extend to Arlington.
When I lived in Atlanta a suburban city official explained that "we all know the sort of people who hang around bus stops" while killing plans to expand bus service.
Here's a quote from 1971
Wilson gave to the media at the time, which said, “People fear that rapid transit would give Negroes greater mobility and consider the $0.15 fare as a gift to ‘a certain segment of the population.’”
If you read up on the history of public transportation in the US, you will be gobsmacked by the racism at play.
To wit: in NYC, the highway to the beach was explicitly designed with overpasses too low to accommodate buses, to keep blacks from the beaches and the white suburbs that surrounded them: http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/politics/216905-the-l...
Please don't assume racism where none has been proven to exist.
I absolutely refuse to cease challenging unsubstantiated statements because of this conceptual boogeyman, and so should you.
If this were an attributed quote, you could go look up the source and argue context. It isn't.
http://www.mdjonline.com/news/marta-s-expansion-remains-cont...
Arlington is indeed not such a bad area. But folks in Arlington and Lexington (the planned terminus for the red line) were the ones that objected to the expansion. They didn't want increased traffic (all the people trying to park to take the train would make their towns less quaint and all), and they didn't want the urbans/poors/etc to be able to easily visit.