In Santa Cruz, pedestrians concentrate along the Pacific Avenue retail corridor (Map 4.10). Early in the morn- ing, before the shops open at 10 am, homeless people make up a significant percentage of the few people walking on the avenue’s wide sidewalks. After the shops open, homeless pedestrians dissolve in the crowds and it is the homeless panhandlers sitting at the edge of the sidewalk that are most visible. Homeless people walking outside of the Pacific Avenue business corridor blend with other pedestrians. They move south along the San Lorenzo River bike paths from shelters in the north to socialize with friends at the pedestrian bridge or on the Benchlands. North of the Mission Highway, however, there are few pedestrians who are not home- less. In a similar pattern in Sacramento’s Richards Boulevard neighborhood, the light industrial neighborhood around the Homeless Service Center does not have pedestrian amenities or many reasons for people to walk there.
While walking is the predominant observed mode of transport for homeless people in both cities (Figure 4.10), some homeless people cannot walk due to a physical or mental disability. Most notable on the streets of Sacramento are those in motorized or push wheelchairs. They wait at bus stops, at intersections for the light to change. Powered by a motor, their arms, or a friend or family member, it was difficult to distinguish whether they were experiencing homeless or not, since both domiciled and homeless people in wheelchairs appear to carry significant belongings with them. However, I observed the largest number of wheelchairs in the immediate vicinity of Loaves and Fishes and the Union Gospel Mission. For those disabled homeless people without some type of mechanized movement, walking slows down. It takes one woman with ‘bad legs’ ten minutes to walk from Mary’s House to Friendship Park, a distance of less than a block, using a walker. Another woman with a leg that did not bend, thus creating a kind of shuffling gait, took 30 minutes to walk seven blocks from Friendship Park to the light rail stop at Alkali Flats.
The closed system of the bus
An older man with blue jeans and a long, black coat ambles over to the bus stop where I sit. He kicks a small plastic bottle of chocolate milk away from his planned seat on the curb and it rolls over to me. “Sorry about that.” He sits down slowly, creakily on the curb about 10 feet away. He wears baggy American flag shorts over his jeans and his feet are clad in thick brown sandals with black socks. Mumbling as he sits down, he is still somewhat disturbed by the other man’s argument [previously].
I ask him where he is headed. He turns to me and I see he has one eye that wanders. He is headed over to Loaves and Fishes for lunch. It starts at 11:30. After that he needs to get some soda. Someone gave him five dollars, so after lunch he’s going to go over to Dollar Tree on 15th Street to buy some. They close at 8 pm
so he should have plenty of time to get there… depending on light rail and the buses. I must have looked confused (it was difficult to understand his toothless mumble) so he repeated the Dollar Tree story.
It is difficult to get back to his [homeless] shelter by 10 pm. You have to be in by 10 pm and he has a class somewhere up in del Paso. And these guys [the shelter] are a Christian organization! Even if he leaves his class by 9:30, what with the bus and light rail, it is very difficult to make it back to the … [shelter].
He pauses and looks around.
Then he sighs and says: “I need to get off the #*@* streets before winter comes.” I grunt in assent. Yea, it is very difficult being out here with his ailments. He’s had surgery on his knee. And he’s had an infection on his little finger. “An infection is no joke.”
The #33 bus pulls up and people get off. He stands upright slowly and moves to his cart. He tells me maybe he’ll see me up at the meal. And then he pushes his cart in front of the back door of the bus. A black, male driver in a clean, light blue shirt gets off the bus, opens the back doors from the outside and pushes a button that starts the disabled platform to descend. As it descends, the bus driver turns to the few of us at the bus stop and tells us we have five minutes.
The older man gets on to the platform with his cart and is lifted up into the back of the bus. The bus driver turns to us and repeats what he said about five minutes. An older, black man with a cane approaches the front door and the bus driver announces they can wait inside if they want [Field notes].
In Sacramento, buses and light rail are used frequently and visibly by homeless people. The cost of entry for both modes is lower than that of a car. Both systems serve a diverse range of socio-economic classes, are run by the same agency, Sacramento Regional Transit (SacRT), and charge the same price for ridership. In an interview with the chief of police for the SacRT, she described the bus system as a “closed” system, based on the presence of a driver who monitors and controls access to bus ridership depending on fare payment. The light rail system is therefore an “open” system, as people enter and exit at each stop at will; there is no gatekeeper. From a security standpoint, this is a key distinction. But it also works well from a socio-relational view to help in understanding the experience of riding the bus and light rail for homeless people. Because of
this closed system, bus access relies on social relations. This potentially could mean a passenger is greeted and affirmed. It also means a passenger can be rejected. (I have observed two bus drivers refuse someone en- trance to a Yolo County bus moving through West Sacramento because the potential passenger did not meet driver expectations of conduct before the opportunity to pay for their fare. Both potential passengers were young black males).
While 86% of all Sacramento residents have access to bus service, the average Sacramentan used bus service just 0.6 days of the week, compared to 5.5 days using the car (S. Handy & Heckathorn, 2017). The number of bus riders is declining in Sacramento. In 2005, 18 million passenger trips occurred on the bus in Sacramento; in 2013, the number was 14 million (Figure 4.11). In 2009, during an economic recession, Sacramento Region- al Transit reduced the number of bus routes significantly. According to SacRT planners, they chose routes to be eliminated solely based on ridership, ranking all bus routes by the number of riders and lopping off routes with the fewest. A few routes have been restored since 2010.
Figure 4.11 Sacramento public transit service consumption: unlinked passenger trips per fiscal year (Sac- ramento Regional Transit, 2015)
dropping people off near Loaves and Fishes. The farthest north it extends is Richards Boulevard. The route appears to be too short to attract much ridership, but the several times I have ridden the bus, it has been more than half full of elderly and homeless people unable to walk over to Loaves and Fishes or Richards Blvd. Disabled people get half price monthly bus passes if they can show medical proof of disability. According to SacRT planners, route #33 is in the top half of ridership. Route #15 traverses an alternative Sacramento, a city both aware of its underpinnings in the railyards/industrial/military workings and its central positions in the striving progression of a California city. The route moves from downtown, through Richards Boulevard, north on Highway 160, crosses Arden Way, then heads north on Norwood Avenue through several low-in- come neighborhoods. The bus route provides access to Sacramento’s affordable housing for many residents, as well as transportation for homeless people to connect with friends or family in the area.
In Santa Cruz, the contemporary history of their Metro bus lines mimics that of SacRT’s, with cuts in service in 2010 during the recession (Figure 4.12). In the County of Santa Cruz, 2.8% of daily trips occur using transit (Dykar, 2010), while in the city itself, that number increases to 6% (City of Santa Cruz, 2017). In 2016, Santa Cruz Metro again reduced existing routes and service by 10% in order to bring their operations budget more in line with their revenue. Unlike SacRT, Santa Cruz Metro did not reduce the routes with the lowest ridership, arguing that rural routes would always have the lowest ridership and recommitting to a goal of pro- viding services throughout the County (Santa Cruz Metro, 2016).