The Newest Americans, Getting Off the Bus

To get to class, Ramon Garibaldo Valdez would start from his home in East Charlotte, North Carolina at 8 a.m. each weekday. He’d board the 17 at the nearby bus station, settling in for a 40-minute ride downtown. Then he’d transfer to the 7, which would take him north, to the Johnson C. Smith University campus in Biddleville. That journey, a 15-minute hop by car, took more than an hour. Some days, after he finished school, he’d take an express bus to the southern suburbs, where he tutored high school kids. Getting there would take around an hour and forty minutes.

On these long commutes, Garibaldo Valdez had a lot of time to think about the state of public transit in his city. The 22-year-old lived in Charlotte ever since he arrived in America from Mexico eight years ago. Because he’s undocumented, he isn’t eligible for a driver’s license in North Carolina. And even if he were, he wouldn’t have been able to afford his own car. So he banked on the goodwill of car-owning friends and depended on Charlotte’s spotty bus service. He developed a wish-list of improvements: more light-rail express stops in working-class immigrant neighborhoods, for example. He’d also lower the public transit fares, increase the frequency of buses and extend the service hours, make transit stops safer, and employ more Spanish-speaking staff. “In the midst of your grumbling, you come up with a lot of ideas,” Garibaldo Valdez says.