Recently I moved, and unfortunately moved away from BART, which means I’m joining the masses of disgruntled early morning commuters toe-tapping and scowling at the nextbus ticker delivering the less than desirable schedule.  Each morning I try and remind myself that people commute to work for hours, people sit in gridlocked traffic, and my half hour (when I’m lucky) commute is not that bad.

When on the bus a peppy man on the intercom delivers a canned message that I can find out about proposed MUNI fee hikes and service cuts at SFMTA.com.  It is again delivered in Spanish and Chinese.  The voice-over sounds almost excited about relaying this news.  As I have learned from St. Anthony Foundation’s advocacy coordinator these fee hikes, while certainly an inconvenience for me, for some are a matter of being able to use the transit system at all.

Currently a senior living on Social Security Income in San Francisco has a set income of $900 a month maximum. No picking up shifts, no swinging extra hours at the office.  That is their income, and that is it. We all know that with rent in our city, groceries, let alone medical bills and pharmacy costs that seniors often must shoulder, by the end of the expenses list, there is little if any room for fee hikes for basic services.

For seniors and people with disabilities these fee hikes are not a mere inconvenience, they are a matter of not making it to critical doctors appointments, or to food programs that sustain them.  That fee hike does not mean being late to an appointment; it means not being able to get to the appointment at all.

Collectively, we cannot sit as passive passengers while public transit becomes a luxury item.

Tags: disabilities, seniors

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 12:01 am and is filed under Advocacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.