Last spring, students in Matthew Crenson's course, Baltimore: Place and Race, created a short documentary video, Sick Transit, examining Baltimore's lack of adequate transportation and the effect it has on the population of Baltimore City. The piece gives a brief history of public transportation in Baltimore and directly and indirectly addresses the issues of suburbanization, urban poverty in Baltimore City, and examines the role that public transit plays in what kind of jobs are available to city residents.
Students in the class began the project through hands-on experience at understanding the difficulties of public transportation in Baltimore. Crenson assigned the students to break up into small groups and get to jobs in the suburbs from an assigned point in the city using only public transportation. Not surprisingly, some of the students encountered problems. Senior Lionel Foster, a student who worked on the video, said, "Some of the job sites were incredibly difficult to get to, which was the point of the exercise. There are jobs available, but, insidiously enough, those who need them the most, i.e. residents of inner city Baltimore, have a hard time getting to them. It's like dangling one big carrot in front of a few thousand very hungry people."
The students then broke into groups of scriptwriters and production teams to work on the video. Sick Transit focuses largely on the bus system which, the video points out, has been evaluated as being insufficient and underfunded. Senior Steve Goodman, a student from the class, points out, "One main issue with Baltimore transit is connections. Very rarely do buses run on a tight enough schedule for people to move seamlessly from one bus to another, without having to wait 30 minutes to catch the next bus." The interviews in the video reaffirm this point, as several city residents are shown describing their commutes to work, which often last an hour and a half or longer, due to public transportation schedules.
Sick Transit shows how public transportation, among other things, does not really benefit Baltimore City residents and addresses the role of suburban culture in this problem. Goodman gave a brief history of how transportation and labor have been linked in recent history in Baltimore: "The focal point of the class was that there are insufficient transportation solutions to workplaces for the urban poor, which explains a considerable amount of Baltimore's plight." When W.D. Schaeffer was mayor in the '80s, he spearheaded downtown redevelopment as the key to revitalizing Baltimore's economy. The idea was to create a large number of service sector jobs for unskilled labor in the tourist, service and retail industries. He pretty much accepted the fact that manufacturing was going to leave the city. However, redevelopment didn't create nearly as many jobs for urban poor outside the downtown area as expected. Hence, Baltimore created a situation for itself where millions of city dollars were poured in.
Sick Transit also discusses other forms of public transportation, such as rapid-rail transport. One large problem that the video points out is that the jobs for which many city residents qualify are very difficult to get to via public transportation, and many of the jobs they can get to, they do not qualify for. As the class dealt with race issues, as well, the video contains very telling statistics, such as the fact that 60 percent of Maryland residents living below the poverty line live in Baltimore City, and that two-thirds of Baltimore City residents are black. Goodman commented on the element of race, saying, "Race factors into the equation in that poverty is generally seen as a black problem, and like it or not, poor blacks are not given a fair shake at the level where decisions are being made.
