Every day, the neoliberal consensus delivers another iteration of the split between public and private that euphemizes its ongoing project of class segregation. Private schools for the wealthy, public schools for the poor (with, of course, charter schools for enough of the native-English-speaking, non-special-needs poor to drain funds from the regular public schools). iPads for urban professionals and hollowed-out public libraries for rural housewives. Luxury condos for the 1% and ten years in a Section 8 waiting line for the other 99.

It’s no secret that the split extends to public transportation as well. Since the 1950s, US policymakers and politicians have built highways and parking spaces on what seems like every corner of the country. Meanwhile, urban transit systems from Boston to San Francisco have suffered massive disinvestment and stigmatization despite their numerous positive externalities (notably, decreased pollution and gridlock) and increasing ridership. While subway and light-rail systems are appreciated and used by many affluent urban residents, bus systems, largely the modes of last resort for poor and underserved communities, are stigmatized by these same urbanites. Ludacris’s character in Crash, a young black man hyper-aware of societal racism, disparages buses as humiliation vehicles for the least fortunate Angeleno people of color.

Human Transit’s Jarrett Walker, in a recent article for the Atlantic Monthly, recognizes this stigmatization, and he thinks the Great Neoliberal Split is an acceptable way to come to terms with it. “Even when we’ve achieved all our sustainability goals,” Walker writes, a “city councilman can still drive his BMW everywhere, and [a] leading architecture scholar need never set foot on a bus. It doesn’t matter much what [elites] do, because there just aren’t very many of them.” If affluent people disdain bus systems, that’s fine; urban planners and policymakers should continue to design bus systems around the needs of lower-income populations. Walker, a public transit planning consultant, seems terrified of the word “class,” replacing it with the innocuous “income” whenever possible.