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Friday, March 29, 2024

Building a Better Transit Board – Streetsblog USA

This week on Podcast, we returned to last fall’s virtual Railvolution conference. Former BART Director Grace Crunican Moderates a panel that discusses the role of board members in transportation agencies with a former MBTA board member Monica Tibits-Nat And former Houston board member Christoph Spiller. They talk about how to deal with board members with opposite ideas, how to help agency employees, and using the budget as a policy document.

For those of you who receive the news through your eyes rather than your ears, there is a transcript edited under the audio player. If you want full and unedited transcript (with some typos!), Click here. If you want to listen, here you go:

Grace Chronicle: Whether you force the collection of money at the front of the bus or at the beginning of the end of the ride, you have a stop, you have automatic gates [and other infrastructure]. Everyone has a problem of homeless people at stations, under infrastructure, in cars, on the bus itself. As a member of the Transitional Council, what recommendations do you have for how to approach it? What recommendations are you [have for] Transport agencies, or what steps should they take to try to bring this discussion to the table and come up with some solutions?

Monica Tibits-Nat: I think [we need to be] The discussion is independent of safety. Safety is incredibly important. We had several times where to run [and] The station staff had interactions, especially with people who had drug use problems or struggled with mental health issues, physical confrontations with the front crew, physical confrontations with passengers. This is, for the most part, really what I see in a lot of different areas in different agencies. Therein lies the debate about homelessness. It’s about where he lives or when you talk about, in the winter, what stations will allow homeless people to enter. We have really nasty weather here.

So it’s playing a lot here. But as for any discussions on how we can better serve the populations, how can we work with the homeless community to provide better services? How can we work with social workers around providing additional transportation services to the same population, these discussions were not. I think as long as we continue to conduct these discussions only on this safety aspect and really safe, not for the homeless population, but only safety for the rest, we will not be able to address any of these issues. We play a huge part in this because every social issue is in our transportation systems and it is increased in our transportation systems, but I do not see our industry getting homeless at all.

Christoph Spiller: I think basically the people most affected by homelessness are homeless and basically the solution to homelessness is housing, which means we have a problem here that is beyond what transit agents can do. Again, this concerns the members of the Board of Directors in one thing tin Do, that she is involved in these larger policy discussions. I think, secondly, your emphasis on this safety issue, it’s almost as if there are two types of safety discussions we have in transition. One is legitimate safety discussions, and there are legitimate safety issues in the aisle. We were in really good discussions about sexual harassment in the aisles. I know this is a very real thing and something that transit agencies need to take much more seriously than they were before.

But sometimes the safety discussions we have are what Dr. Destiny Thomas would actually call “white comfort” discussions. Is it a real safety discussion or is it a question of people not feeling comfortable being on the same train as people who don’t look like them, or are they on the same buses with People who do not look like them? To be honest, often, it’s when we have a safety hearing, that’s what it is. We’m not talking about a real crime. We’m not talking about real assaults. Like everyone else.and they have the right to be on the bus like everyone else.What I really appreciated is the agencies that went beyond the police in response to homelessness.

Transition boards can be a very productive part of this discussion or transition committees can play a narrative of “this is a crime problem.” And I think there members of the board should be really careful in which of these discussions they want to conduct.

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