Essential Riders: Detroit People's Platform

Charles Brown:
One night in 2014, Renard Monczunski was stranded at a transit center in downtown Detroit. It took three hours for a bus to come. He was angry, but the experience got him thinking.

Renard Monczunski:
So I was thinking if I’m stranded at a transit center in downtown Detroit, what about thousands of other people across the city of Detroit that been waiting and waiting for hours? I’m really worried about other folks that had to wait that long that are mothers waiting to get their children home, people getting off of work.

Charles Brown:
In a city that built the American automobile industry, 80% of transit riders are Black, and nearly one in three households has no car at all. The public transit they rely on is often unreliable, and the exposure to the elements can be dangerous for riders who have to wait. Some riders have developed frostbite while waiting in the cold. Renard decided to do something about it. He built a team of transit riders that have learned to wield power by refusing to stay invisible. It’s been years of difficult, often unglamorous work, but today, he’s affected real change by making sure that city officials can’t ignore the importance of transit justice in Detroit.

My name is Charles T. Brown, and this is Arrested Mobility. Before he became a transit advocate, Renard was already volunteering with Detroit People’s Platform.

Renard Monczunski:
We are a community-based racial justice organizing group and we center majority Black Detroit because we are the people most impacted by the recent bankruptcy emergency management and policies from our city government. And what we do is organize on the following platforms of transit justice, housing, family resources, good governance, and good jobs. We door knock and we raise issues of importance in Detroit so we’re not a partisan organization. We are literally a Black-led organization dedicated to preserving our majority Black Detroit status and keeping people here that have stayed in Detroit through its most challenging days and ensuring that we have a right to live in our city.

But when I started with Detroit People’s Platform in 2014, I did some volunteer work, and eventually they said, “Hey, we like what you’re doing,” and they brought me on as a community organizer. So I was learning how to organize, how to build power, and how I got into transit is I used the bus as my primary or sole means of getting around the city of Detroit.

And one night, I was stranded for over three hours and I couldn’t get home. This was after me doing a volunteer meeting with Detroit People’s Platform. This was around 2014, ’15, around that era. And I talked to my mentor, Linda Campbell, who is the leader of our organization, and she said, “Well, how long have you been riding the bus, Renard?”

And I said, “Since high school,” and it’s just gotten worse over the years. I got back from Michigan, University of Michigan, and I just noticed the city completely changed. It was gone, gutted. Services weren’t working. Notably, transit wasn’t reliable. So she encouraged me. “This is your fight, Renard.”

I was able to meet with the Director of the Detroit Department of Transportation and telling him and my experiences about me being stranded for several hours. And from then, I’ve done research on transit agencies, how they work. I’ve really built our base from the ground up with our first survey about the conditions of transit and also we were able to do our first campaign in restoring our main bus route, which was called the Woodward Bus, from being permanently displaced due to the construction of the QLINE, which only goes 3.3 miles through the most affluent area of Detroit.

We were able to restore our bus back with the director allowing for some sort of pilot or trial on terms of the route, and then he restored it the next year in February, providing access to downtown Detroit for many of the workers that are people that work in the bars, restaurants, city government, who use social services downtown, or congregate meal sites, had many of the churches downtown Detroit. That campaign built our base of over 500 bus riders, or as we call them, essential riders. Those that use the bus as their primary or sole means of transportation like myself.

Transit is a unmet, an underserved, under resourced, and under invested commons in our city. When I mean commons, these are common resources or common public departments that we all rely on. When we talk about transit being a commons, it belongs to the people. It serves the people like libraries, clean air, clean water, access to our city. And real issue is that Detroit, as one of my volunteers said it, we experienced transit apartheid. There’s spatial discrimination in terms of where we can go, what time of the day we can access our city in the suburban area region to where we can get work because the bus operates as a filter to filter certain people for jobs. If you say that your bus is your only way of getting around, you’re not going to get employment.

The lack of public transit holds back Detroit, and all of us, including myself, are directly impacted by it. When transit doesn’t work in your community and public transit, your city seems bigger, things seem further away. You’re further away from resources. Your time is less than what someone has in the automobile. And it’s really no coincidence that us being 80% African American and the ridership being 80% African American that we’re under resourced. I think just this attitude of Black austerity that our Black communities have to have less. It’s all part of this transit used to work in our city. It was funded well under previous administrations, but when Detroit finances were in trouble in bankruptcy, they’ve cut a lot of public services, including the Detroit Department of Transportation. We have to fight every single year during budget season through rallying, through public comments, through demonstrations to show that bus riders are important.

I remember using the Grand River bus when I was getting to high school. McKinsey High, I can catch the Grand River every 10 minutes. If I missed one, big deal. There’s another one. We don’t have that level of service for our neighborhoods. So even today, if you live on a main corridor, you’re going to get better bus service or other conveyances. But if you live on a deep east or west sides of the city, the neighborhoods where Blanco, the families are, your once an hour bus route is your only way to get around or every 30 minutes.

Your access to everything, groceries, medical care, all of this stuff in Detroit is a barrier for many people that use transit because of the sheer time it takes to get around our own city, and our environment is not built for bus riders. Less than 5% of the stops have bus stops and shelters, so it’s not safe or it’s not accessible to catch. It’s a lot of different barriers, and I also want to highlight the disability community as well. They’ve experienced barriers with paratransit. We organized to fix that in the city of Detroit, but the city in just my experience does not value public transit the way that other cities do, and I think that’s egregious.

Charles Brown:
What kind of challenges have you faced in advancing the cause of transit equity in Detroit?

Renard Monczunski:
Year over year, we’ve been increasing our ability to have increased funding. That was a challenge for the longest time, so we recently had a victory in getting the city to value and increase its investment into public transit. But the barriers that we have is the fact that our drivers are not paid the same rate as the rival bus system, which is called the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transit or SMART. They’re paid higher. Pay disparity is one issue where we’re losing drivers to SMART, to school bus companies that are conveying kids to and from school, freight companies, and to other rival transit departments that pay more, so we’re losing personnel.

We’ve had a revolving door of leadership for many years. Under this current administration, we probably had about five directors for transit. And these perennial issues as of lack of nighttime, reliable service, weeknight and weekend night and then lack of weekend service really creates barriers for people to get around.

Our paratransit system used to be absolutely terrible where people were dropped off or stranded in wrong areas, they were disrespected, and there was no actual grievance. That was fixed through a lot of organizing with the disability justice community.

The barriers that still remain is the lack of driver equity, and the lack of reliable service when people need it the most: early morning, in the evening hours, weekend hours when people have free time from work, depending on your work schedule, of course.

And the other thing is for people that can afford it were paying more with Lyft and Uber to make up for the shortfall of our transportation so it becomes fiscally prohibitive to get around the city.

And then to add on top of that, we have the highest auto insurance rates, and then we have around 20 to 30% of households without a car, myself included. So I would say the lack of reliable service, and I just think that there’s a lack of will from our city officials to really go the extra mile.

We have a new plan called DDOT to reimagine that’s supposed to restore service to pre-COVID levels to increase neighborhood frequency. But the funding that the city provides for it is so parsimonious or small that it can’t accomplish many of the things that it want. And even recently in our budget campaign for DDOT, that’s what was called Detroit Department of Transportation funding, the director turns down 16 million extra in funding because they said they don’t have a plan on how to spend it. So there is some sort of culture or some reticence within city government to really expand transit to where it needs to go. So I would say one of the big overarching barriers is this austerity mindset that we have in Detroit post-bankruptcy.

We have to be careful how much we spend on transit because it’ll take away from other departments without understanding that investing in public transit actually grows your city, keeps people here, and attracts people here as well too. So the lack of transit itself is a barrier to sustaining long-term residents and families. People are just leaving, and when your time is disrespected all the time, you can’t get to work, your job is in jeopardy, you’re incurring fees for medical bills and stuff because you can’t get to your medical appointments on time, it’s a real struggle for Detroiters. And I don’t want to just talk about just the barriers. We’ve done so much to increase funding. We’ve united with the union on this as well, so it’s hard.

Charles Brown:
Tell me about some of your biggest wins when advocating for transit equity.

Renard Monczunski:
Absolutely. So just myself as an organizer, but I participate at regional transit groups and at a table where we are coordinating our campaigns. We coordinated the budget campaign for DDOT and did get some increases. We were able to elicit 20 million from the mayor, and this was due to us picketing the evening mayoral required meetings by the charter. So it’ll be district by district. We will just follow him. We’ll go from church to church wherever the mayor is speaking at for his community evening meetings and we’ll picket for an hour raising attention. Then we’ll go in with recruited bus riders and other leaders to speak to the need of increasing the budget, but not just we need more money, but why. We want to keep drivers. We want to keep good staff. We want to make sure our dispatching is reliable, that buses are able to be purchased to replace the fleet.

So what we do is organize. We use media, good old-fashioned phone banking, social media, emails and texts to mobilize people, make people aware of the issue through our popular education. That’s through our social media posts on transit situations that are relevant at the moment. We’re also, we have a base of people that we call upon to speak and use their voice and public comment. That’s really the space where we get to use our power lot. Public comment, believe it or not, has a huge impact on the decision-making that our city officials are doing. Hearing those voices, and it’s the persistence of it too.

We are persistent. So at every evening city council meeting or mayor meeting, we show up, we sign up for extra time for community concerns. So instead of getting your standard two minutes to speak, we’re getting four minutes. We write letters to our council, we produce literature, we go on the buses. We have our own newspaper and our flyers where we’re speaking about current transit, operational or service issues. Not to get into the minutiae of that.

And then also for policy and telling people, “Hey, your voice is very powerful.” That is our message with our volunteers and our organizers that using your voice and showing up is power in itself. And it does work because there are times where, especially during budget season where our narratives have reached the media, so we also engage with media to talk about transit injustice as well too. What we were able to do and was create transit as a policy of concern, and transit riders through our organizing work are now a constituency of concern. What we were able to do was even shift the narrative about transit.

The narrative was, “Oh, we feel sorry for you. A car will improve your life.” And that was exemplified through that story of the walking man who had to walk so many miles to get to and from work. His dedication and his persistence was admired, but what was unspoken about was the fact that our bus system is disconnected, doesn’t work, it’s not coordinated, and that’s why this man had to walk all those miles. But the end is happy story is that he gets a car. And we were offended by that, the way to prevent other walking mans because that was not the only gentleman. There’s men and women, there’s children that walk all these miles to get to where they’re from because the bus system doesn’t work. It’s early ending. We were able to shift the media and how they talk about bus, to talk about why it’s necessary to have a reliable public transit system. We were able to get people in front of camera onto radio, podcasts like this one as well, not just myself but my volunteers to really raise the issue that transit and we are transit riders.

Our charter gives us the right to affordable, safe, and reliable transit, so we’re really our agitating our city and organizing to live up to its standard as well. But I’m amazed at the work that the transit justice team, our allies at Warriors and Wheels, and there’s an independent activist, his name is Brother Cunningham, and there’s Transportation Riders United that does a lot of policy, background and research. Recently, we were able to go to Lansing to advocate for more state funding in light of this new federal government that seems to be cutting a lot of social programs and disregarding transit. So through advocacy, through popular education, through earned media, through always being visible and vocal about transit, whenever there’s an opportunity publicly, we were able to shift not just the media but public, so other public commenters that don’t ride the bus or concerned with it, have spoken on our behalf to say, “Hey, you need more investment in transit.”

I have a relative that uses the bus. They’re tired of being stranded every night. We have turned transit into a main budgetary issue this year with the DDOT campaign. Every year over year, we’ve gotten more sophisticated with our campaigns in building power and awareness and shifting policy change. So I as an organizer, organizers are charged with transforming unjust systems. We use tools like advocacy, getting people that are impacted to speak, building up their leadership to do so. This is hard work and it takes time. This was years in the making of base building on the streets, talking to officials, meeting with council members one-on-one individually, and having our volunteers be in these spaces where they get to use their voice.

Another opportunity that we’ve been able to use was working with the transit administration. We would meet with the director informally once a month, and we were able to create that space as activists, advocates, and organizers. And people don’t notice, but every third Thursday of the month, there is an open meeting forum. It’s been virtual, but the Detroit Department of Transportation holds these meetings every third Thursday at five o’clock where people are able to elicit their concerns, provide solutions for the department, and to hear updates. And actually, the Detroit Department of Transportation’s one of the most open public facing departments and other city departments started using DDOT as their model for how to engage and talk with residents. We transformed that space that used to be a shouting match where people were just angry and venting towards the directors.

Now, it’s more orderly like city council where people, everyone gets to speak. We get to speak to the administrative staff, public safety as well about our concerns and create a constructive space. We even budgeted American Rescue Plan Act dollars with the department in a participatory budgeting session. This was years of fostering a frank conversation with the director and then really saying, “We are your eyes, your ears.” We are your exports on the ground for the service, so it’s a co-governance relationship as well. Participatory budgeting, co-governance, and organizing are our three tools that we were able to create and create visibility for ourselves as transit riders. We were invisible, now we’re not.

We have created a report on transit advocacy and organizing. It was called an activist toolkit on how to create bonafide leadership teams and activist teams. So one, it showed our story of how we organized. We had a timeline of our wins from 2015 to now. We’ve done so many different things like create language equity for our departments or department literature is not just English only, but it’s in Spanish, Bengali and Arabic, the languages that we speak in Detroit. Detroit’s multilingual, multicultural. Transit helps us understand that and access that as well.

In terms of our transit leadership team, there has been nothing like this before of majority Black Detroit bus riders and residents that use transit and are dedicated. We basically open up with a toolkit of our reality where majority Black ridership, one in three Detroiters don’t own a car. The toolkit talks about basically our philosophy in transit justice, how we serve the public during COVID-19. I myself risking life and limb and health, passing out masks, gloves, and literature to bus riders. So being direct service to the communities, usually direct service is contrasted to organizing.

But when we in emergency situation where riders were risking their lives to get on the bus so they can continue to work and sustain our society, essential workers. We created a distinction called Essential Riders. The transit is essential to our livelihood and we are essential to the transit system as well, so it’s that relationship. It goes into how to build a cohesive team, how to check in on your volunteers. And it’s a report out of our campaigns like the one I mentioned earlier. Keep Woodward on Woodward. We have united with the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local number 26 of Detroit, that’s our bus driver mechanics union to build up their wages and power.

We are still organizing for a low-income fare program for individuals that are returning citizens, veterans. Those experiencing unemployment and homelessness will have a severe extreme reduced fare so that people can access our transit system. That’s been one of our still longest ongoing fights because there’s a lot of refusal at the city level to provide this program despite the fact that the state is paying for the QLINE into the late-2030s.

And then we had a company, Priority Waste, subsidize the operations of the People Mover, but there’s no provision for Detroiters in terms of using DDOT. The toolkit explains how we reacted to the fare increase that happened in 2017, and it also goes into how to maintain your teams, how to build, how to use media to amplify our messaging, how to stay on message and develop a narrative as well too. And this is why we were so consistent.

Another aspect of our work was the DDOT Passenger Bill of Rights, and right now they’re doing the code of conduct policy, trying to pass that. But we also wanted to ensure that riders have enumerated rights that reflect our American system of addressing grievances to your government and expectation of fare service. Your voices are heard as well too. So visual images of how we do our work with media, our podcast series that we had. 36 pages of really rich material of all of our past campaigns that we’ve done, the narrative that we built around transit in terms of a social justice narrative.

And honestly, it serves to be a manual for any type of issue-based team that is organizing. This one is themed in public transit. We created something new in Detroit, a transit team of Detroit bus riders that are able to effectuate service changes for the better to provide solutions and advice, and to also get riders involved in using their voice and organizing and advocacy for better transit service and funding. And this toolkit is our body of work, and that’s what I call it. And I encourage people to look at our toolkit, search for the Transit Toolkit on detroitpeoplesplatform.org.

It’s hard to encapsulate so much work that we’ve done over the years, but it’s all bent towards the arc of justice as Martin Luther King says, towards transit justice. That is our central goal in Detroit to ensure that wherever you live in the city of Detroit, regardless of your background, and regardless of where you come from, that transit is not a barrier to you in the city of Detroit. And I know that our mission will be accomplished when you can use the bus to get around primarily to areas that automobile drivers have easy access to. The day that you could put on a job application that you ride a bus and you still get an interview, that’s when we know our work has reached the next level and we have transformed the system to something that works.

Charles Brown:
Any advice for other transit organizations and activists in other cities beyond Detroit?

Renard Monczunski:
First one, you got to find your people. This is going to where people use transit. Talk to people at bus stops, at shelters. Just ask certain questions like how long you’ve been waiting here or how often you ride the bus? Do you experience any slowdowns or have you been stranded to where, build up conversation.

The other thing that we were able to do was when we started having our public facing meetings. Be consistent. People are going to expect that we meet on Thursdays at 5:00. That’s my transit team. Year over year, we meet to decide, okay, what are we going to tackle first? Who are we going to target? And then how are we going to promote this campaign? We’re meeting space to create campaigns. A campaign has to be relevant to the situation in your community. A lot of communities, for example, do not have a lot of bus stops with seating and shelter. That’s an accessibility campaign.

What other relationships you can build with other organizations that, or working on an issue or a similar issue, and who are the decision makers? So you have to answer these questions and then you grow your team, you talk to people, you build a contact list to say, “Hey, can I get your email or phone number? I’m going to invite you to this community event that we’re having.”

You want to move people up a leadership ladder, right? Give people certain responsibilities like, “Hey, come to this meeting,” that can be one.

Or, “We’re having an action on this day. Meet us downtown at this transit center and learn more about how you can improve our transit system.” And you want to really target people that are directly impacted and then find your allies as well too. But the people most impacted are going to be your best leaders as well.

You want to do coaching, you want to do some teachings as well. Basics on how your transit system works, who are the decision makers as well? And I would say consult the activist toolkit as well to on step by step on how to build your team. Do not expect overnight results. This work takes time. Celebrate your wins however small they are because that will motivate people. Why do you want me to do this work? What’s the point out of it? And also, not to sound transactional, but people have to get something out of their selves. What is their motivation for that? Fast do a one-on-one, having these one-on-one conversations with a person that you recruit or talk to, you understand what their challenges are, their motivation, how they want to grow in their leadership, what’s this mean to them?

And then check on your teammates, call them, build these relationships with them. And in many ways, a lot of these grassroots organizations, you develop friendship relationships and activist relationships as well too. Building power and building an organization is through building relationships through one-on-one encounters at the core. And you build up, you grow your team, you get them to do one-on-ones with new recruits. Your team members are now taking on organizing responsibilities that the organizer has done. There’s the leadership ladder, organizing one-on-one conversations, and hitting the ground where people are impacted, and also connecting people to leadership where they can use their voice to effectuate the change that they want to see.

Charles Brown:
Renard helps us to understand the real world consequences of underfunding public transportation. For example, drivers waiting hours in the cold, routes running once an hour in underserved neighborhoods, and people not being able to get to work or medical appointments on time. Often, it’s not a funding problem in some cases. It’s also a problem of political will. It’s a problem of who matters and who doesn’t. And it’s exactly the kind of problem that organizing can change, slowly but surely. If you’re facing transit injustice in your own community, you’re not alone. This is a national movement and your voice matters. You can learn more about this work and access the activist toolkit at detroitpeoplesplatform.org.

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