It is not a Marvel, nor is it from DC, but BART, the San Francisco Bay Area’s wonderful heavy rail system, has produced a comic book for helping passengers negotiate the metro system.  What a more skeptical reader may see is a long, probably expensive, simplistic explanation of what is already an easily understood system (subways being far easier to grasp than nearly all bus systems, the London Tube notwithstanding, and BART having only 5 lines).  But I see something different:  a 26-page paean to BART’s Title VI obligations.

To review, the objectives of Title VI regulations (49 CFR part 21) are to:

a. Ensure that the level and quality of transportation service is provided without regard to race, color, or national origin;

b. Identify and address, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health and environmental effects, including social and economic effects of programs and activities on minority populations and low-income populations;

c. Promote the full and fair participation of all affected populations in transportation decision making;

d. Prevent the denial, reduction, or delay in benefits related to programs and activities that benefit minority populations or low-income populations;

e. Ensure meaningful access to programs and activities by persons with limited English proficiency.

The comic book begins with the three characters who will guide us through the steps of using the system: an elderly white man, a younger black man, and an a woman of indeterminate but clearly non-Caucasian origin.  She is in a wheelchair.  They are essentially welcoming all comers, letting the public know this transit system does not discriminate.  Between them they cover the five immutable characteristics of race, ethnicity/nationality, age, disability status, and hair.  (Okay, hair is not considered a basis for discrimination but with a bald-American, a half-bald-American, and a fully haired-American pictured BART doesn’t seem to be taking any chances.)

Using simple language and large letters (for those with poor eyesight), the three go through the step-by-step process of riding the transit system including paying the fare, choosing the route, negotiating the turnstiles, and boarding the train.  More importantly the whole thing is rendered in friendly, accessible black and white drawings—again, B&W is easier for some with visual disabilities to follow—with lots of arrows and pictograms.  FTA likes pictograms, having even put out a powerpoint introduction to Title VI (found here) that includes a slide showing several pictograms of common rules on transit (pictured below).

Pictograms from FTA Title VI presentation

The book is too basic for a PhD or most other reasonably intelligent, native-born US Americans, to use Miss Teen South Carolina’s phrase.  But those are not the people the book targets; it was made to explain transit to people with developmental disabilities, young people, and most of all LEPs, those with limited English proficiency.  Readers may recall BART spending $800,000 to establish its standard for a “major service change” a seemingly unseemly amount, but much of that money went to interpreters for multiple languages—Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, Russian, etc.—at many public meetings.  San Francisco is America’s European city that also happens to be our window on Asia and a 9-hour drive to Mexico.  Many cultures converge there and the transit agency has an obligation to reach out to them.  That obligation is called Title VI and that little comic just might do the trick.