San Francisco Chronicle, "Getting on the bus is half the story: Inequity in funding discriminates against AC Transit riders, plaintiffs claim in suit"

          When Sylvia Darensburg started riding AC Transit buses from her East Oakland home a quarter-century ago, the fare was 50 cents and the routes linked her to other cities. Now, rides cost $1.50, routes have been shortened or abandoned, and more cuts are in the offing as the system faces shortfalls of $8 million to $10 million a year.
         The reason, civil rights advocates charged in a federal court lawsuit filed Tuesday, is racial discrimination by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which distributes about $1 billion in annual federal and state funds to transit operators in the nine-county region.
         "The Bay Area has two separate and unequal transit systems: an expanding state-of-the-art rail system, Caltrain and BART, for predominantly white, relatively affluent communities, and a shrinking bus system, AC Transit, for low-income people of color," said Bill Lann Lee, lead attorney for the plaintiffs and partner of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP.
         Quoting Federal Transit Administration statistics from 1998 to 2003, plaintiffs' lawyers said each AC Transit rider got a public subsidy of $2.78 per trip, compared with $6.14 for BART and $13.79 for Caltrain.
         That's consistent with each system's proportion of white passengers, the suit said: 20.6 percent for AC Transit, 43.3 percent for BART and 60 percent for Caltrain. Income breakdowns show that the percent of riders with annual household incomes of less than $30,000 are 57 percent for AC Transit, 25 percent for BART and 13 percent for Caltrain.