A Transit Strike In Philly Could Lower Turnout, Especially Among Black And Poor Voters
Source: 538
While commentators digest the latest announcement from FBI Director James Comey, a story with the potential to have more of an impact on the election is playing out with little notice in Philadelphia. Last Tuesday workers for the city division of the regional transportation authority, SEPTA, began a strike over a new contract. The strike has shut down the city’s buses, subways and trolleys, and snarled the city’s roads since then.
Last Friday, a Philadelphia judge declined to issue an injunction ending or suspending the strike, but she scheduled a hearing for 9:30 a.m. Monday to take up the strike’s potential impact on the election. The evidence on the effects of prior transit strikes is limited, but given what we know about Election Day in Philadelphia, the people who rely on the city’s public transit network, and about voting in general, the potential impact on residents’ ability to vote could be substantial. And that impact is likely to be concentrated on residents of color, as well as on Philadelphia’s poorer residents.
The nation’s fifth-largest city, Philadelphia is the largest city in any swing state. There is also no city as populous as Philadelphia with a larger share of residents in poverty. It is not surprising, then, that Philadelphia relies heavily on its public transit network. As it is elsewhere, that reliance is particularly heavy in poorer communities and communities of color. Below, for instance, data from the 2014 American Community Survey shows the relationship between the share of census tract residents who are black and who ride public transit to work in Philadelphia. The relationship is substantial: If we go from a census tract with no black residents to one that is entirely black, we should expect the share of people using public transit to get to work to rise by 27 percentage points.
Or consider how the percent riding public transit correlates with a census tract’s median household income (the panel on the right). Here, the correlation is strongly negative: As census tracts become wealthier, they become less dependent on public transit. Imagine moving from Philadelphia’s first-quartile census tract (with a median household income of $25,600) to its third-quartile Census tract (where median household income is $52,270) — public transit ridership should drop by 9.6 percentage points. This relationship is likely to make sense to people familiar with the city’s demographics, as some of the wealthiest neighborhoods are in and around the city’s commercial center. The effects of any Election Day disruption to transportation are likely to be felt disproportionately in the city’s outlying neighborhoods.
Read more: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-transit-strike-in-philly-could-lower-turnout-among-black-and-poor-voters/
This maybe one of the few times to use the president's ability to force strikers back to work (at least for a day).
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