It seems that many BART supporters are suffering from a fatal fallacy which I also believed until recently.<p>What is the purpose of public transit? Do you believe that public transit is designed so that poor people can commute to jobs?<p>Wrong. Public transit is designed so that people can go shopping. Buses and trains move people around to shopping centers and stores and malls.<p>It is only by accident that poor people can commute to some jobs with public transit. There are far, far more jobs that are more-or-less unreachable by bus or train, and poor people end up walking, cycling, or moving closer to those jobs.<p>When I was a young child, Grandma didn't drive, and so our weekends were consumed by walking around the neighborhood, shopping and eating in restaurants. We'd hang out at the 7-Eleven playing Centipede, Missile Command, and Asteroids. We'd pick up some sodas and <i>Cracked</i> magazine and go home.<p>Then later in life, we started going to malls. None of the malls were walking-distance from Grandma's house, so we rode the bus. And I fell in love with public transit; we'd ride the bus to any one of 3-4 malls nearby, walk around to our heart's content, and ride the bus back home carrying our spoils for the day. It was always a treat to do this.<p>What I definitely noticed was that a lot of poor people rode the bus. What I didn't realize is that mostly, they didn't have anywhere else to go. It wasn't a matter of commuting to their jobs, but just hanging out for the day.<p>Here in Phoenix, most bus stations are in shopping malls, or they become <i>de facto</i> shopping centers, and the light rail corridor is basically a commerce incubator by the way stores and shopping centers are popping up now that the track is permanently laid down.<p>On the weekends it may be common to see working-class Hispanic moms take their children to church on the free buses, but the free buses are intended to get tourists and residents into the shopping areas and/or connect them to the full-fare routes so that they can really do some hardcore "shop 'til you drop" activity.<p>In fact, the public transit sectors that <i>are designed for commuting</i> are the Express buses, which have a higher base fare and serve 9-5 white-collar office workers. It's transparently upper-crust. None of those Express routes can possibly help poor people get to poor-people jobs. Express buses get people into the city center so they don't need cars there: attorneys, civil servants, accountants, clerks. That's the Express system only. The rest of transit: shopping, shopping and more shopping.