That a union and a municipality would allow buses and ferries to be off the road for more than the biblical 40 days and 40 nights indicates some pretty wrong-headed ideas about public transit.
In HRM, the assumption seems to be that public transit is provided to a certain group of people who, for whatever reason, don’t or can’t drive. Broadly speaking, this group includes the poor, the infirm, students, minimum-wage workers and the elderly.
Because they are not the mainstream middle class paying the bulk of the property and commercial taxes, transit users are marginalized. They become "Them" in this dramatic opera of rights, egos and brinksmanship.
"We," on the other hand, are the union, management, people who drive cars and don’t rely on the bus to get back and forth to work. For us the greatest inconvenience is snarled traffic due to the lack of public transit.
That is why We could afford protracted wrangling over negotiations. We could stomp away from the table in an indignant huff. We could make unfortunate public statements that the union comes first and the public second, as Ken Wilson, president of Local 508 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, did about a month into the strike.
We could also decide that public transit is not essential enough to us to be declared so by those who had the power to do so. I’m looking at you, Premier Darrell Dexter. (DAVID KNOWLES)Your absence was noted.
For Us it’s about contracts, money, overtime, rostering, bargaining, showmanship and ego. It’s about our legal right to form a union, stop work and suspend a public service. These rights were fought for and won by the labour movement.
For Them, it’s about getting to childcare, the food bank, a doctor’s appointment or home from a minimum-wage job. There is no union for them, no rights or protection. Public transit is essential to Them but they have no rights.
The idea that transit is something We provide to Them makes it a form of social welfare.
That’s why We could suspend the service for as long as we did. That’s our right, not theirs.
It’s time to abandon the idea of public transit as social welfare for Them and start making it about all of us.
This isn’t a new or revolutionary idea. Just look at other cities where transit is an essential part of life for everyone, not just the poor and the marginalized.
It would be unthinkable for most commuters of London, England, to drive into the city centre each day.
Bank executives, retail workers, accountants and nurses sit side by side on buses and the subway.
If Halifax Regional Municipality wants to grow and take advantage of opportunities like the Irving shipbuilding contract, it must fashion a transit system that is effective, efficient and essential for commuting workers and the economy.
This means investing in more and better transit. In the short term, it means implementing more park-and-ride express services, changing bus routes and schedules to suit a wider swath of transit uses and making sure buses run on time.
In the longer term, city hall must stop spending money on expensive road-widening projects that direct cars onto a finite peninsula that lacks parking space.
Use that money instead to carve out bus-only lanes from the present road infrastructure. Develop light rail transit that is used the world over to move people in an efficient and environmentally friend manner.
This is not rocket science. HRM needs to grow up and start taking public transit seriously.
And the province should declare public transit essential and make sure a strike like this never happens again.
( glethbridge@herald.ca)
Public transit is an essential service, dammit | The Chronicle Herald
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