Members of PATHE march on Feb. 24Photo: Austin Sauerbrei
The People’s Alliance for Transit, Housing and Employment started two years ago, organizing around housing and tenants’ rights. Made up of renters, bus riders, people experiencing homelessness, transit employees, construction workers and other Nashville residents, the organization’s current issue of interest is whether the city’s proposed $9 billion transit plan is keeping in mind low-income Nashvillians.
Tamika Douglas is a member of PATHE and the bus riders’ group Music City Riders United. “We’re not against a transit plan,” she says. “We just want transit to be equitable. We don’t want this new transit plan to displace even more poor brown and black people, or people that have already been displaced because of the overdevelopment and continuous gentrification of neighborhoods and communities around Nashville.”
Douglas spoke with the Scene about PATHE’s concerns for the transit referendum that will be on the May 1 ballot.
What are your biggest issues with the plan as it stands?
Let me start by saying that what we stand for is the fact that housing, transit and employment all go together. We believe that if people don’t have homes and shelter first, it doesn’t matter if they ride the bus, walk, take a train to wherever they’ve got to go. One of the things that we are concerned about is that this whole transit plan is overshadowing all these other issues we have as a city. We believe we could be making huge improvements to the bus system as it stands now, in ways that would help the people who need it most.
What improvements do you think could be made right now?
We’ve been to the [Metro Transit Authority] board meetings. We’ve been to the Metro Council meetings, and one of the things that we consistently say is: “Let’s make our existing system better.” We could have more of the [bus rapid transit] routes — the fast bus routes. We could have better dedicated bus lanes, and we could do that for a tiny fraction of the amount of money they’re planning to spend on this transit plan. We definitely believe in transit. We support it. But we need better transit out in transit deserts. We’re seeing a lot of people that used to live in the urban core, they’ve been pushed out ot places like Antioch and Donelson where there’s not a lot of bus routes that run at times where people need them. We’ve got transit deserts on the outskirts of the city. We don’t [want to] wait on whether this transit plan passes. These are things that MTA and the city need to do for the citizens who ride the bus now.
I feel that [we need] more routes, extended service times and, I think, a reduction in fares, especially for paratransit like AccessRide. Their fares are like $3.44, and usually these are people who are disabled — to expect them to pay $3.44 is ludicrous. We need to subsidize the paratransit for these people. … We need to invest in better sidewalks and crosswalks. We see all the time that people are hit when they’re trying to cross the street. We need those to be well-lit. We need better bus stops. Some stops don’t even have a bench or any cover — you might just get a pole with a sign that says bus stop on it, if you even get that.
What barriers do you see to implementing some of these things like dedicated bus lanes or extended service?
Well, first of all, bus ridership is actually down. It has been dropping off the last 18 months. People are not riding the bus because of the fares or because they end up buying a car for convenience or they’re not at all interested in transit. So if we’re having bus ridership decline, who’s going to ride the train? You can’t make them ride the bus, or ride the train. You can’t force them. So for the people putting this plan together to say, “We’ve had our best minds putting this together” is a complete farce. It’s a joke. It makes no sense to build a tunnel, destroy underground infrastructure. … We need to go back to the table and look at another plan with everyone’s input — maybe look at what’s turning people off riding the bus in the first place.
If the transit plan passes, what’s PATHE’s next move?
If this plan passes, we’re asking for community benefits to be built into this transit referendum. We’re asking for the city to set aside a certain amount of money for the Community Land Trust Fund and for the Barnes Housing Trust Fund. We feel like if we’re going to pay for this, then community benefits need to be part of it before it even passes. We need to have a guarantee that we’re going to have dedicated funding for low-income housing. We’re going to need to have dedicated funding to make sure there’s housing where the people who work in this city can live — where it’s mandated.
Before the [anti-transit] Lee Beaman types and the NoTax4Tracks people came out, we’ve been pushing against this thing from the get-go. … We want equitable transit that doesn’t displace people, and we want to make sure that we’re also focused on housing. If you don’t have a place to stay or a home, who cares about a train versus a bus? We’ve got to get more housing in this city. We believe it’s a moral crisis in this town that there are people that continue to benefit, and then there are groups of people that get more burdened. We’ve been seeing inequities, and the gap just keep increasing. The people who have been in Nashville forever seem to be getting pushed out. … We need to look at the priorities in this city. We’re at a crossroads, and this decision is going to speak for generations.
