Picture this.  A city holds a big press conference.  New app.  New dashboard.  Officials smiling.  Someone says the word “equity” about six times.

Meanwhile, across town, a 68-year-old woman is standing at her usual bus stop. The route changed last week. She has no idea.

The alert went out through an app she doesn’t have, on a smartphone she can’t afford, and tech savvy instructions she doesn’t understand.

She waits. The bus doesn’t come.

This is the digital divide. And in the world of mobility transformation, we treat it like a problem we’ll get to later — after the platform is built, after the algorithm is running.  And seldom do – as we keep rolling and make ready for the next upgrade.

It’s bigger than not having a phone

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, only 79% of adults in households earning less than $30,000 a year own a smartphone, versus 98% of those earning $100,000 or more. Of those lower-income adults who do have a phone, 28% have no home broadband. The FCC reported in 2024 that approximately 23% of people on Tribal lands lack access to high-speed broadband, compared with 7% of the overall U.S. population — a gap three times the national rate and, by the FCC’s own admission, likely understated.

But access is only part of it. Even with a device, apps built by and for the digitally “confident” exclude people through language, complexity, and design. And many communities — those historically stereotyped or neglected by government — have rational reasons to be concerned about handing their daily movements to a city database. That’s not resistance.  That’s memory.[1]

Finally, the deepest problem: much of what we call “engagement” is all too frequently more show than deep assessment.  Online surveys. Zoom calls. Comment portals. And then the plan that was already largely written gets approved.  Being asked is not the same as having power.

Being asked is not the same as being heard. Being heard is not the same as having power.

Some people are raising the bar

The Untokening, founded in Atlanta in 2016, started from a simple observation: mobility spaces routinely tokenize the communities they claim to serve.  Out of that came the Principles of Mobility Justice[2] — a framework insisting that the communities most harmed by the transportation system must have real power to shape its future, not just a seat at the table. Chicago’s Transportation Equity Network puts Black and Brown community members in leadership, not advisory roles.  People for Mobility Justice in Los Angeles trains community members to originate plans, not just react to them.[3]

These groups aren’t asking for a seat at somebody else’s table. They’re building their own.

The workforce problem nobody wants to name

Here’s another version of the same blind spot. Cities spend years planning a mobility transformation — new technology, new data systems, new apps — and treat the people who actually  operate the system as a cost to manage through the change.  Not partners.  Not experts.  A line item.

Just think about it.  The bus operator who has driven the same route for 12 years knows things that no dataset captures. She knows which bus stop floods when it rains. She knows the elderly man who needs an extra 30 seconds at the door or he falls. She knows where the schedule says eight minutes but reality is always 14.

That knowledge — accumulated over years, held in “people”, not systems — is irreplaceable institutional capital.   Unfortunately, most transformation plans treat it as secondary anecdote or irrelevant.

The same is true when AI gets deployed. Routing algorithms built without asking operators where they’re wrong or could be significantly improved.   Predictive maintenance tools installed without asking mechanics what the sensors don’t catch.  And then everyone acts surprised when the technology underperforms in the field.

My personal experience.  Workers aren’t resistant to technology. They are resistant to being excluded from the outset and then treated as obstacles to it.  There’s a big difference.

Serious “people-readiness” investment means three things: real upskilling — paid learning time, career pathways and growth, not a three-hour module before go-live;  adequate training resources to support the continuous learning and associated safety considerations required in our 21^st century rapid deployment of new technologies; frontline workers actively engaged in technology design and procurement from the start, not after the contract is signed; and job security through transitions that is honored.

The workforce that runs a transit system often reflects its community more accurately than the leadership that plans it. Transformation that discards that doesn’t just lose knowledge. It loses trust.

The people who run the system know the system. Transform with them, not around them.

What needs to change

Keep some of the paper schedules,  phone lines, and customer “touch”.   Design for the person with the least, and the system works better for everyone.

Go to where people already are — libraries, churches, schools, community centers — to understand what they need before building anything.  Support the community-based organizations doing and supporting this work with some much-needed funding and respect their  independence.

And stop — at every decision point — to ask who is still being left out.  Not as a checklist item.  As a foundational question about whether what’s being built is truly “people-and-community-centered”.

Technology should meet people where they are. When it makes them come to it instead, that’s not progress. That’s a new kind of exclusion.

The woman at the bus stop isn’t asking for a smarter app.  She’s asking for a system that knew she existed when they were designing it.

We know how to do that.  We just need the will to do it!

Footnotes:

1 Sheller, Mimi. “Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.” Verso, 2018.

2 Untokening Collective. “Principles of Mobility Justice 1.0,” released Nov. 11, 2017. Available at untokening.org.

3 Lopez, S., et al. “Mobility Justice: A New Framework.” U.S. Department of Transportation, Report No. DOT-76928, August 2024. Available via the National Transportation Library: https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/76928