Figuring out the safest, quickest, most reliable ways to get to and from work, school, doctor’s appointments, or even just taking a trip to the beach or the park are still rooted in a history of discrimination and inequity for plenty of people.
According to research from groups that include the Environmental Health Coalition, the University of San Diego’s The Nonprofit Institute, City Heights Community Development Corporation and other organizations, an overwhelming majority of low-income residents don’t have access to reliable public transit and transportation is connected to environmental issues like climate and air quality. The local work to address the inequities in transportation continues with programs like the Urban Collaborative Project’s annual Transportation Justice Expo from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at Gompers Preparatory Academy in San Diego.
“San Diego’s underserved communities have long been separated by past urban planning decisions, leaving out the voice of Black and Brown communities that are often the most affected. These decisions have prioritized convenience over equity and unity,” Brian “Barry” Pollard, founder and CEO of the Urban Collaborative Project, said in a statement. “While our communities share the same struggles, we often work in silos. The annual Transportation Justice Expo symbolizes our communities working together to build power, share knowledge, and demand solutions that reflect our region’s collective needs.” The expo will include community bike rides, electric vehicle test rides, roller skating, a resource fair on transit and climate action, health resources, and other activities and ission is free.
To talk about some of the history of disinvestment in specific neighborhoods leading to transit inequities, and what transportation justice would ideally look like locally, are Jesse Ramirez and Kyle Heiskala. Ramirez, the director of urban planning at City Heights Community Development Corporation, will also participate in a discussion on microtransit at the expo; and Heiskala is a policy co-director for regional and state policy at Environmental Health Coalition. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: When you think about the issue of transportation justice locally, what comes to mind for you?
Heiskala: The first thing that comes to mind when I think about transportation justice is access to affordable, reliable mass transit to connect people from where they live to where they need to go, whether it’s to work or to school or to health care. There’s a lot of people who live in San Diego who can’t afford the high cost of living, whether it’s the cost of rent or food or electricity, rates are extremely high. So, transportation justice looks like serving communities where there’s a lack of transportation services, creating options for those people to get to where they need to go.
Ramirez: Honestly, a lot of things come to my mind. One, folks who don’t have a car. I know a lot of folks, the majority of folks, drive a car and that’s because our transportation system, as a whole, is set up as car-centric; it’s set up for folks to use cars, you really don’t have other options, realistically. So, I think of that and how expensive it is. With that, there’s a significant amount of folks who are not able to afford the cost of owning a car and they have to turn to our public transportation system. Even though our public transportation system has grown and makes strides, folks still have to wait a long time for transit. For example, if they want to go to the beach, they can go to the beach in 15 to 20 minutes using a car; but if they want to take the bus, it could take up to two hours. So, there’s that inequity. Also, some families depend on transit because they can’t afford a car.
What we’re going to be talking about in the at the transportation expo is that we have our transit system, but our transit system doesn’t necessarily work for all. Sometimes there’s gaps – some folks might have mobility issues, or it might be hard for them to get to a transit stop. So, when I think about transportation, those are some of the things that come to mind, like our whole car-centric culture and how expensive it is to own a car, and how that leads to some of our population being dependent on our transit system, and our transit system not being the most efficient.
The public transportation gaps within our transportation system, there’s also disproportionate traffic violence. If you look at the data, in communities like City Heights, we have the freeways built in our community, busy streets like El Cajon (Boulevard) or University (Avenue), so we have more traffic accidents, more cars crashing, more people getting ran over. Those are the things that come to mind when I think about transportation justice and the issues that we have to address to really be able to make transportation justice a reality, not just a vision.
Q: What are some issues/areas of people’s lives that are affected by an access to transportation?
Heiskala: One of the biggest things that comes to mind is employment. I think we all have experience with looking for a place to live and trying to figure out how you can get to your job. Another factor is education — if you’re a family and you have kids, how are you going to get your kids to school? Or, if you’re a student, how are you going to get from where you live to class? If you’re commuting across the city, do you have to purchase a car, or are there reliable transit options? Then, of course, healthcare; for a lot of folks, driving is not an option. As much as 30% of our population does not drive, or cannot drive, and those people need to get to their doctor’s office, or if there’s an emergency health situation, they have to get to a clinic (93% of low-income residents in San Diego don’t have access to fast and frequent public transportation, according to information from the Environmental Health Coalition). That is a critical need, if you’re not feeling well, or if you’re experiencing a health crisis, figuring out how to drive or get to your healthcare provider is critical. You don’t want to have to think about that. You want to be able to hop on a very easy, reliable service to go to your doctor or urgent care.
Ramirez: I think about some of the workers here in City Heights. Some of our workers, they do not work the typical 9-to-5 job, so they sometimes need to take transit at certain times of the day and the service is not there. So, our folks either have to wake up super early, or come home super late because the service is only available at certain times of the day; they have to accommodate the service, rather than the service being able to meet their needs. That’s one thing that comes to mind, the folks whose daily lives are being impacted by transportation.
Q: Can you talk a bit about this history of disinvestment in specific San Diego County municipalities and neighborhoods, and how that continues to show up today?
Heiskala: Environmental Health Coalition has a history of measuring environmental justice using a tool that is called CalEnviroScreen, and it’s put together through the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment through California’s Environmental Protection Agency. So, it’s a state tool that measures environmental factors and overlays them with social vulnerabilities. These neighborhoods are where you see a high concentration of polluting industries or toxic waste sites, a lot of freeways, and they’re the same neighborhoods that in the 1920s and ’30s were redlined by financial institutions based on the demographics of those neighborhoods being higher proportions of people of color. So, those neighborhoods were designated using the term “redlining” as less desirable places to live, and that’s where industry came in to set up shop. These neighborhoods have, for generations, carried a heavier burden of pollution and lack of access to opportunity, as well as lower investments in infrastructure. They’re the same neighborhoods that have been cut through with freeways. Using the examples in CalEnviroScreen, there’s heavier concentrations of particulate matter and other sources of industry, like warehouses and auto body shops, that are located in these neighborhoods as a result of discriminatory land use policies that were set up not just in San Diego, but in cities across the nation in the early- to mid-1900s.
The redlined communities typically line up with what we see in CalEnviroScreen-communities that are south of the (Interstate) 8, south of the (State Route) 94. So, City Heights and southeastern San Diego, Sherman Heights, Logan Heights, Barrio Logan, Southcrest; these are the same communities that are still trying to recover from generations of a lack of investment and opportunity.
Ramirez: City Heights is a great example for that. Before the 1980s, we didn’t have the (Interstate) 15 bisecting, going through the middle of our community here in City Heights. Now, that’s something that we have to deal with because the freeway literally separated our community, physically. We have to deal with the consequences of the air pollution. If you go to University Avenue at 5 p.m., you see all the brake lights, the traffic, and that has an effect. If you look at the COVID screening data, our community suffers from disproportionate health outcomes – higher cancer rates, higher respiratory illnesses because of the way our transportation system was set up with City Heights having to carry the burden of having the freeway go through our community, so that’s one of the impacts.
Q: What has been the environmental impact of these kinds of transportation investment decisions to these communities?
Heiskala: (Historically) the example of Interstate 5 bisects the Logan community and displaced thousands of residents when it was constructed. The pollution impacts from that are immeasurable over generations. Barrio Logan suffers from a childhood emergency room visit rate for asthma that is five times higher than the community of La Jolla. (According to a 2014 report by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, Barrio Logan has higher amounts of diesel particulate matter than 80 percent of Californian cities. The same report states that Barrio Logan’s rate of asthma-related hospital visits was higher than 92.9% of all of California, according to a 2024 report titled, “Barrio Logan Case Study: Modern Environmental Justice.”)
(The impact of future investments for transportation) justice looks like clean electric buses and light rail that is also electric, servicing communities that have not been connected to the region through transit that is reliable and gets you to employment centers or to healthcare centers, education. So, those new investments are a lifeline for folks to thrive in San Diego – bus service at a 10-minute frequency or less, 24-hour service, creating new light rail lines that connect to communities of San Ysidro and National City and Chula Vista all the way through City Heights up to the health care facilities of Children’s Hospital on the (Interstate) 805 corridor. The lifeline allowing people to thrive is critical, but we also have to keep in mind that if there are future investments in transportation, there has to be strong prevention mechanisms or policies that slow or stop displacement of long-term residents, so that new transportation investments do not lead to further gentrification or rising rents where families that have existed in neighborhoods for generations are forced to relocate because the neighborhood that has a new transit service is more desirable to live in for more affluent families.
Q: What are some examples of how local advocacy has succeeded in dismantling some of these systemic barriers to equitable transportation?
Heiskala: There is a group of organizations that have formed a transportation equity working group and a project that came out of that group was in partnership with Environmental Health Coalition and City Heights Community Development Corporation, along with Mid-City CAN, San Diego 350, and others have been recently added, including Casa Familiar. The equity working group developed a project called the 10 Transit Lifelines, which called for increased frequency emergency response transit, 24-hour service, a purple (trolley) line, the trolley’s blue line to have an express service. Over the years, there have been multiple successes, including the Youth Opportunity pilot program, which offers no-cost transit es to youth, and that is a huge success, which enables kids living in all parts of the city to access their school in transit. I’ve personally ridden the trolley where I see students going to the Preuss School in La Jolla, taking the blue line downtown and transferring to another bus so that they can head home to wherever they live, but they’re able to go to school on transit at no cost. That’s one of the examples where we can create a culture of transit ridership, and for the people in our community who can’t drive, like the youth or the elderly, getting them access to move around.
Ramirez: I think a great example would be Teralta Park. When I mentioned the expansion of Interstate 15, the residents of City Heights got together and proposed an alternative to the freeway expansion – eight blocks of a freeway-covered park. Long story short, in various conversations and negotiations, ultimately, they settled on one block of a freeway-covered park, and this provides access to the City Heights Transit Plaza and the (El Cajon) Boulevard Transit Plaza. These are two transit plazas that are located on El Cajon (Boulevard) and on University Avenue. These plazas provide rapid bus service, so they have their own dedicated bus-only lane that can by traffic, and folks can get to downtown, a major job destination center in San Diego, in under 15 minutes. So, that’s an example.
Another great example was 11 years ago, when aunts, mothers and grandmothers of City Heights got together because they saw transportation being a barrier to the youth in City Heights. Owning a car is expensive, paying for bus es is also expensive; if you have to pay $30 and you’re struggling to put food on the table and you have four kids, that’s $120 in bus es a month. So, this group of mothers and aunts and grandmothers advocated for free bus service for youth 18 and under. Two years ago, the Youth Opportunity program became a reality. This is a pilot project that has provided free transit throughout the entire San Diego County for youth 18 and under. In just those two years, we have seen youth ridership triple because of the Youth Opportunity , so this is another great example of how community-based advocacy has led to community-identified needs, community-identified solutions, and to the implementation of projects that are now a reality and working to meet the needs of community .
Q: Jesse, you’re part of a discussion at the expo on microtransit. First, what is microtransit, exactly?
Ramirez: When you think about the transit system as a whole, you think about a bus, a trolley that connects folks to different destinations, gets people to job centers, major streets, major businesses; that’s at a macro level. The reality is that, for some folks, it’s very hard to get to a bus stop. They might live up a hill they have to climb, they might have mobility issues, they might be an elderly person, so there’s a bunch of reasons why folks might be having issues assessing transit. What microtransit is, is providing a transportation service that isn’t necessarily catered to take folks to long distances, it’s more catered toward filling in the gaps over transit systems, going where there’s a lack of public transportation and connecting those households through major transit stops, so that they can have access to our regional transit system.
Q: How is it different from rideshare services?
Ramirez: I think the reason why folks think it’s very similar is because of the interface that folks use to access the service. Usually, when you request an Uber or Lyft ride, you have to an app, you request a ride, and the driver comes and picks you up. Nowadays, microtransit is operated in a similar way. For example, City Heights CDC, we’re operating Mid-City GO, which is a microtransit service. In order for folks to get that service, we have two options: one, they can the Via San Diego app, and it essentially works like a rideshare app, or they can call the call center. The difference is that microtransit has set parameters, meaning it has a set route that the service cannot go beyond. For example, for the Mid-City GO service, it goes as far east as 54th Street, so that means anything beyond that, you wouldn’t be able to get a ride there using Mid-City GO, which is a micro transit service, as opposed to using an Uber or Lyft, which you order and it could essentially take you wherever you want to go.
Q: How does microtransit increase equity in underserved neighborhoods?
Ramirez: There’s different communities, like City Heights or southeastern San Diego, that, for decades, haven’t received the infrastructure investments that they deserve, meaning that there’s a lack of proper sidewalks, proper lighting, folks might not feel safe walking because a lot of people have gotten run over here on University Avenue. So, microtransit is a way to fill in those gaps. If folks don’t necessarily feel safe with the infrastructure, or think it’s too far, or have mobility issues, they could access microtransit service, and the microtransit service will take them to a regional bus stop that will provide them with access to our entire regional public transportation system. With that, you are increasing access to our public transportation system that folks in communities like City Heights and southeastern San Diego wouldn’t necessarily have because of those lack of investments that have been done to the communities.
Q: How do you respond to criticisms of microtransit – that it being on-demand makes it more expensive to access than fixed-route services, it has inflexible routing, or that it doesn’t significantly reduce emissions compared to other forms of transit?
Ramirez: I think when folks think about microtransit and public transportation in general, or transportation that is not driving a car, they kind of create little categories or buckets where these types of services are placed in, and we think about it through the lens of, ‘Oh, this is how much it costs to do microtransit or public transportation.’ The reality is that we have to look at our transportation system as a whole. We’re spending billions of dollars in freeway maintenance. Society as a whole spends so much money maintaining their cars, and that’s not even taking into the environmental cost of driving a car, all the pollution that is spit out to our atmosphere. So, I would encourage folks to think about transportation costs as a whole and to look at our transportation system as a whole.
Q: Ideally, what are some elements of what a just transportation system would like in San Diego? What are some things that would be on your wish list?
Heiskala: No-cost services for youth and veterans and seniors, but also an expanded service that is competitive with cars. By competitive, I mean if you were to estimate how long it would take to get you from one place to the other, if you have to go to work or you have to go to the grocery store, it’s comparable and driving isn’t always going to be the fastest option, so that is competitive with cars.
You also have it being electric and clean, it reaches much more areas of the city, and there’s much more reliable, frequent service. You only have to wait two, or maybe six minutes for your next train or bus.
High on the wish list is a light rail transit line that connects the communities living along the I-805 corridor that would be going through City Heights. It’s been long promised for 40 years and continues to be pushed out due to lack of government funding to build the project, but we saw a blue line extension (of the MTS trolley service) to UCSD long before we saw a purple line extension (proposed by the San Diego Association of Governments) that connects City Heights and San Ysidro and Chula Vista to a light rail system through the 805 corridor.
Ramirez: I think it would be providing a wide range of transportation methods for residents because the reality is that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here in San Diego. We have a traffic problem, but you can’t build bike lanes everywhere and expect everybody to ride their bike to work. You can’t create a million new bus routes and expect everybody to ride the bus. So, for me, what transportation justice would look like is something real and implementable. It would be providing a wide range of transportation options – safer streets for folks who drive; safer streets for folks to walk on without having to be worried that they’re going to get ran over; bike lanes for the folks that do want to, and can, use their bike to get around. Also, making investments in public transportation. For the folks that public transportation works for them, they can use it. For me, when I go downtown, I take transit because it works well for me. I don’t have to deal with parking, or to pay parking costs. So, I think it would make more investments so more folks will be inclined to do trips like that; not necessarily completely leaving their car, but making a transition where, for some places that they go to, they take public transportation. So, for me, transportation justice is providing a wide range of transportation options to increase accessibility for everyone.
