🚊 When The Train Never Comes
UnfairNation Is Now Among The Top 2% of All Active Podcasts In The World
All because of you :)
I started UnfairNation as a podcast in November 2019 with the help of some good friends from TechChange. We have never taken any advertising dollars, relying instead on paying UnfairNation Weekly subscribers to power our work.
Last month we became one of the most popular podcasts in the world ranking #52,003 out of 2,547,507 active podcasts, placing us well within the top 10% (and close to the top 2%) of all active podcasts worldwide. That's a remarkable feat with only 14 episodes and versus a crowded competitive marketplace of well-funded shows from Spotify and everyone else in the world starting a podcast ... hi Obama!
And it's all because of you (especially our weekly subscribers)! So thank you for listening and supporting the podcast and newsletter. Check out our newest episode with Arif Alikhan on police reform (scroll for the link below) and let me know what you think.
And let's see if we can hit that 1% mark ;)
What the end of the subway means for the city
On my last day in Washington D.C. I couldn't find a cup of coffee.
My home was empty, cleared out so thoroughly in preparation for my move to Los Angeles that even my coffeemaker hadn't survived the scouring. It was a few days before the inauguration. Recently, the capitol building had been the scene of an insurrection where four had died. A few weeks earlier, protestors had damaged property and stabbed D.C. residents. And as if this wasn't enough, for nearly the last year D.C had suffered business losses due to the pandemic. The city was tired and tensions high as the inauguration loomed. And so it was in this atmosphere, with the streets relatively empty, that I decided to take a morning walk to grab my last cup of coffee as a D.C. resident.
Forty-two minutes and four stops later ... there wasn't a drop to be found. I was baffled. This area had been my neighborhood for over a decade. A car-less step-count aficionado, I had walked these streets for nearly a decade. I knew them well. But astoundingly, none of the last four cafes I had visited were open. Two had gone out of business. One was boarded up. The other had decided to stop selling coffee.
This is how things have been in downtown D.C. recently and how things may be in many other American downtowns for years to come.
Downtown D.C. had long been known as a hub for lawmakers, lawyers and government officials to get together during and after the workday for meetings, but the last fifteen years have seen an amazing revitalization of the urban core of the city, transforming it from a drab, dangerous city center to a dynamic and attractive place to live and work.
But the pandemic and ensuing social and political instability have upended that trend. As of May, the vacancy rate in downtown D.C. stands at nearly 20 percent and is likely to drop even lower, even as the effects of the pandemic lessen. This is because COVID has accelerated the shift to remote work with a vengeance. Businesses that just spent thousands to move their employees to remote work are loathe to spend even more to move them back to the office.
Moreover, they've found that employees can do just fine without physical office space. In other cases, workers who have adjusted to life at home no longer want to return to an office. Many are choosing to remain jobless instead.
But how does this affect everyone else?
So what? White collar workers get to work from home and a few commercial landlords go without ... what's the big deal? The problem is that revitalized commercial downtowns like the one in downtown D.C. support a vast network of small businesses, shops and other vendors who have become increasingly reliant on a reliable stream of large businesses and, due to gentrification, even budding homeowners and city dwellers. All of these use the D.C. metro system - subways, trains and buses - to get around. When people stop riding mass transit, the system loses revenue, passengers, and purpose.
This trend is even more noticeable in D.C. because it is one of the most concentrated accumulations of power and wealth per square mile in the United States. Thus the impact of a declining commercial and residential downtown on the mass transit system is much greater in D.C. than any other American city, and the fallout more clearly visible.
Here's what's happening in D.C. and what may soon happen in other American cities if we don't rethink how we live and work in our downtowns:
Limited mobility for essential workers = no more downtown coffee.
White collar workers at the federal government, law firms and other downtown D.C. businesses effectively subsidize the city's mass transit system for everyone else.
To cope with the decline in metro traffic, mass transit systems nationwide have cut service leaving vulnerable workers stranded. Many "essential workers" have resorted to expensive ride-sharing services to get to work, others have quit to look for jobs closer to home. It is the reason why one of the coffee shops I visited wasn't open - the baristas could no longer afford the commute. And it's also one of the reasons for the service worker shortage in America.
Concentration of poverty in city schools
Declining ridership also affects young children. Only about a quarter of D.C. students attend their neighborhood school. The rest enroll at a D.C. Public Schools campus that is not their neighborhood school requiring many children to take WMATA buses or trains to reach campuses. For a number of reasons, cuts to DC Metro will dramatically lengthen commutes for public school students, especially for those in the city’s poorest neighborhoods such as Anacostia where residents own cars at lower rates than families who live elsewhere in the District.
Neighborhoods in D.C. and many other cities remain racially and economically segregated, and the loss of the metro is going to have implications for who students attend school with.
Loss of tourism and entertainment jobs
Without weekend Metro service, a Saturday performance of a favorite band at the Anthem now means choosing between hard-to-find parking or expensive ride-sharing services. Or else simply staying home - which is what many are choosing to do, leading to a record drop in revenue from D.C.'s stable tourism and events industry. The drop in revenue has resulted in record layoffs.
Indirect impact on free speech
Washington D.C. has long been the epicenter of speeches and protests about the most important issues confronting Americans, from Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech to the 2017 Women's March which was the second-busiest day in DC Metro's history with 1,001,616 total trips. And more recently, BLM protests mobilized a city known for its commitment to equity and justice. A speech in D.C. is uniquely resonant and is a way for marginalized groups to be heard. The loss of the primary way for large crowds to get to the city is already starting to have an impact on the size and nature of public protest.
Isolation of more Black neighborhoods
D.C. Metro has closed numerous stations, up to 19 of them up until recently. While many are near offices and tourist attractions others are in Black and brown majority neighborhoods that are transit-dependent. Once those stations shutdown, so does traffic to these neighborhoods.
Even though there are signs that DC Metro and others mass transit systems around the country are ramping up service, their budgets cannot support this wishful increase. Surveys indicate that ridership in 2022 will remain two-thirds less than pre-pandemic ridership.
In the next edition of the newsletter I'll share several ways we can rebuild and encourage a healthy mass transit system despite the challenges outlined above.
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You can have your cake and eat it too.
And yes, any story about cake must start out this way. Using an app that tracks CO2 emissions, the town of Lathi incentivizes judicious use of fossil fuels by offering residents free cake, bus tickets and other rewards for curbing their carbon output.
I must admit, I was born at an early age.