On May 24, 2023, Yotala Oszkay Febres-Cordero F’22 published an article in the Los Angeles Times titled “Opinion: Here’s why L.A.’s Metro system should let everyone ride for free.” Febres-Cordero is an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow at the Alliance for Community Transit-Los Angeles (ACT-LA), a coalition of 42 organizations that fight for housing and transit justice in Los Angeles County.
The ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship Program, supported by the Mellon Foundation, aims to demonstrate the potential of humanistic knowledge and methods to solve problems, build capacity, and advance social justice and equity. The fellowships support recent PhDs in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they work with social justice organizations in communities across the United States.
Whatever the challenges of a universal fareless system, there is no more efficient policy to simultaneously address the climate crisis, public safety and equity…Metro should be understood not as a business that delivers transit for a price, but as a public service that listens to, and invests in, community.
