As California lawmakers talk about the longer term and funding wants of the Bay Space’s 27 transit companies, they appear to be overlooking one: the San Joaquin Joint Powers Authority and its unparalleled neighborhood abuses.
The San Joaquin JPAwhich oversees passenger prepare service from Oakland to Stockton and Bakersfield, is essentially unchecked by California lawmakers though its community helps transfer over 700,000 individuals annually. Tens of hundreds use the station in downtown Antioch, inserting its ridership throughout the mid-range in comparison with different stops. In its 2022 marketing strategythe authority praised the station’s so-called transit oriented improvement, or TOD, potential, in addition to its collaboration with town, highlighting personal developments that might deliver extra residents downtown to stroll to the station and use the San Joaquins.
However only a few months after the plan got here out, the JPA board voted to close down service to the Pittsburg and Antioch communities. Contemplating the general public engagement course of required to deliver transit to a neighborhood — or change a constructing in an historic district — it’s surprising that the San Joaquin authority felt it was proper to close down service with little to no notification to the individuals who use the prepare to get to work, household, providers and for folk all through the area who use it to go to Antioch.
Sadly, the shortage of state oversight and wider media consideration has emboldened the authority to behave unilaterally, with out neighborhood engagement or warning, and vote to close down profitable service to the Antioch-Pittsburg station. On the time, the Antioch mayor stated he was blindsided by the transfer.
The company’s disrespect has provoked protests within the streetsa metropolis decision condemning its actionsand a public rebuke from Rep. John Garamendione California’s strongest transit champions in Congress.
In a latest letterGaramendi wrote that “to date, I am deeply unsatisfied with the explanations offered by the Joint Powers Authority on its rationale for closing the Antioch-Pittsburg Amtrak station.” He referred to as on the authority to postpone closure of the Antioch-Pittsburg station, echoing the outcry from neighborhood members who’ve been organizing with the Alliance of Californians for Group Empowerment Antioch and others to protest this closure.
If this company doesn’t course right, and as an alternative follows by means of with its risk to eradicate transit service to 2 cities comprised of tons of of hundreds, largely working-class Californians of coloration, then the legislature and legal professional normal should step up and make things better.
In the end the choice raises some necessary questions that the congressmember, Antioch mayor and neighborhood have been asking: Why would a transit company shut down a profitable station and open one other station in a smaller, suburban space? The traditionally Black communities of Antioch and Pittsburg dropping a station whereas the smaller, richer, whiter neighborhood of Oakley is gaining one — why doesn’t the company serve each stations?
The San Joaquin JPA’s unprecedented determination to close down the Antioch-Pittsburg Amtrak station calls for fast authorized scrutiny from the legal professional normal. This can be a harmful precedent for all communities, particularly transit-dependent, low-income communities of coloration. Till that is challenged, the Antioch and Pittsburg communities bear the burden, left at a standstill of their each day lives because of this unwarranted closure.
