Do any of you want to write a political opinion email that a public officer has to read? - sudo-discuss

8 Jun 2013

http://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2013/news20130605.aspx

The federal transportation administration released new, slightly different
guidelines for public transportation providers. Basically what they say is
that the civil rights office of each Public Transit Agency has to make up
some criteria to test whether proposed route changes or fare increases
disproportionally affect minority riders. For instance, if a transit agency
were to cancel a bus line (and replace it with nothing) where 35% of the
riders were black, but the overall ridership of the transit system was 12%
black, then that service change would be have a disproportionate impact on
black riders by 35-12=23% NOW, if the public wanted to sue the agency to
stop the discontinuation of the bus line, but the agency's guidelines said
the disproportionate impact had to be greater than, say, 25%, then the
lawsuit would fail. The FTA mandates the creation of some guidelines, but
doesn't say what should be in them.

Another example would be fare increases. If a transit agency increases
regular fare by 10%, but senior fares by 50%, and 21% of seniors are some
certain race, as opposed to 6% of the general population being that race,
that would be a disproportionate impact of 15%.

The FTA notes that low-income people are not a protected class for the
federal civil rights laws, but, (progressively) it encourages Transit
Agencies to include low-income populations as a protected class in their
guidelines because minorities are generally over represented in the lower
incomes.

In the fare raising example above therefore, if seniors are not
disproportionately some particular race, but if they are disproportionally
poor, a transit agency could create guidelines that would recognize that.

So if 13% of the general transit population earns 200% or less of the
national poverty level, but 20% of the senior population earns that or
less, than that would be a disproportionate impact of 7%.

If the transit agency prohibited disparate impacts of more than 5% (for
instance) that change would be a no go.

So, maybe stupidly, I submitted the following comment to
officeofcivilrights(a)bart.gov and copied boardofdirectors(a)bart.gov:

First of all, the policy needs more examples of how to find disparate
impacts, like the example on pg 45 of FTA C 4702.1B, or the examples in
appendix K. Second of all, the BART DIDB Policy should explicitly take into
account the relative nature of the price of a fare (relative, that is, to
the rider's overall income) and therefore the relative nature of a fare
increase.

For instance, if you earn $10/ hour, then a dollar is equivalent to 6
minutes. If you earn $30/ hour, than a dollar is 2 minutes. That means if
fares increase by, say, $10/ month, (5% of a monthly BART bill of $200) and
you earn $10/ hour, then your fare increase is equivalent to an hour of
your time. If you earn $30/ hour, the fare increase is 20 minutes. Measured
in dollars, the increases appear to be the same for the two riders, but
measured in man-hours, the poorer rider is facing an increase that is 300%
bigger than the fare increase for the less poor rider. That is a disparate
impact, so the policy should reflect that.

Thanks for your attn in this matter.

The number of people submitting comments on this policy will be very small.
Like under 30, maybe 10 people. There will be a couple of legal services
attys, some law students, some BART staff members ... basically no one. So
every letter will be read. If there is anyone in the organization that has
the opinion you have, they will cite your letter many times in trying to
get their (and your) opinion heard. That is why I write letters like this,
just in case there is some staff member who has my same thought. :/