Transporting Urban Inequality through Public Transit Designs & Systems

Four large, and often overflowing, dumpsters are situated at one of the more than dozen bus stops at the Chicago Transit Authority's (CTA) Red Line 95th Street/Dan Ryan train station. This station is on the city's far south side and the ridership on the buses that board and disembark there and the train is predominantly minority. On a warm or hot day, the smell of bus engines and dumpster contents fill the waiting areas. One 28–year–old Black male passenger (BMP) noted, as he stood at one of the nearly one dozen (no seating available) bus stops at the station, “In the summer it's really horrible because of the smells, flies, and bees.” He also added that as far as he could remember “they've [the bus stop dumpsters] been here my whole life” (June 2012). His experience at the south end of this train line, which also has a majority minority ridership, is starkly different from the waiting experiences on the far north end of the same line, Howard Street, where the ridership is diverse (with a large white ridership). The north end station is surrounded by shops and restaurants, more open waiting spaces, and places to sit to wait for buses that travel through the adjoining bus depot. There are no bus stop benches at the south end station, even though there are over a dozen buses that use that station's depot.

Purifoye, Gwendolyn Y. “Transporting Urban Inequality through Public Transit Designs & Systems.” City & Community 16, no. 4 (December 2017): 364–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12266.