By Richard Marcantonio

Sylvia Darensburg is one of the millions of Americans for whom public transit is a necessity. In 2005, when we brought a federal class action lawsuit on her behalf against the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), Sylvia lived in East Oakland. She was transit-dependent, meaning that she relied on the bus to get everywhere she had to go — to work, college classes, health care appointments, church, and the grocery store.

Sylvia’s opportunities to work as a medical assistant were limited to jobs she could reach by public transit. When she found a good job in the suburbs, the stress of a six-hour round trip commute on three different transit systems forced her to give it up. And when she found a job that she could get to more directly by transit, the unreliability of transit service was a big problem. She would give herself an hour and a half for a trip that should only have taken 20-30 minutes. Even so, if the transfers didn’t line up, she was late for work. Continue reading. . .