[Noisebridge-discuss] late night BART: not so much

[Wladyslaw Zbikowski]

For the benefit of my literal-minded readership: this is a critique,
not an endorsement, of BART's attempt to evade its responsibilities by
engaging in bogus racial profiling. Read the survey yourself:

- there is a relatively weak correlation between late-night /
early-morning ridership and race
- there is an even weaker correlation to income
- there is a far stronger correlation to age (under 35 / over 35)

Yet their conclusion on the first page makes no mention of age-ism, or
even the relative number of passengers affected. It says only that
changing their service would have "a disparate impact on Low Income,
Minority, and Limited English Proficiency riders".  Strange, isn't it,
how BART decides to pick just the metric which reinforces their
decision to do nothing, while simultaneously implying that any other
action would be racist?

Wise up, citizens. BART doesn't give a flying assfuck about race.
They're an entrenched bureaucracy with highly skilled PR people, who
know how to invoke taboos to stifle debate. Learn to recognize when
you are being bullshitted, and you too can hack reality.

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Wladyslaw Zbikowski
<embeddedlinuxguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Lee Sonko <lee at lee.org> wrote:
>> * The proposal to extend Friday night service by one hour while delaying the
>> start of Saturday morning  service by one hour would have a
>> disproportionately high and adverse impact on minority and low income rider
>
> Seems like the solution is obvious:
> - start the trains 1 hour early on Saturday (3am instead of 4am)
> - close the bars 1 hour later on Friday (3am instead of 2am)
>
> Satisfies everybody: privileged white alcoholics; old Chinese and
> Mexicans who do all the real work in this town; and unionized BART
> employees who get paid to piss around on the tracks 4 hours every
> night.
>