A relative of mine bought his first car the year he was promoted, and for the next decade he inched down an eight-lane road at roughly the speed of a determined pedestrian, sweating into upholstery he was still paying off. He loved that car. Of course he did. In the Manila I grew up in, a car was less transport than evidence, and the fact that it could barely carry him across town was a detail nobody was rude enough to raise.

Most of the world’s aspiring middle class has made that same purchase, and the line above exists to tell them they were wrong to enjoy it.

Who actually said it

Almost everyone sharing that line credits it to Gustavo Petro, the Colombian president and former mayor of Bogotá. He never said it. As documented by Jason Kottke, who went looking for the original, the thought belongs to a different former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, who wrote it in Spanish in 2012 and gave his own English rendering in a talk the following year.

Peñalosa’s version turns on a word the popular rewrite throws away. An advanced city, he told a TED audience in 2013, is one where “even the rich use public transport”, a line about how universal a service has become rather than about who ought to feel humbled by it. He had spent a mayoral term fighting for bus lanes and footpaths, and he was arguing about street space rather than status. His case in that talk began with arithmetic. A bus carrying a hundred people has as much right to the road as a hundred cars carrying one person each, and a citizen on a cheap bicycle is owed the same safety as a citizen in an expensive one.

What one American survey found

In the United States, the inversion has not happened. Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in late 2015 and found that regular public transport use skewed towards people on lower incomes, Black and Hispanic Americans, immigrants and the under-fifties. Among city dwellers, daily or weekly ridership ran at 34 per cent for Black respondents and 27 per cent for Hispanic respondents, against 14 per cent of white city dwellers. Pew’s explanation was mundane and convincing. Those groups are likelier to live in large metropolitan areas where transit exists at all, and likelier to have no car available.

That is one survey, now a decade old, and it counts riders without explaining them. It also matches what anybody who has waited for an American bus already suspected.

Switzerland passes the test and stays unequal

So what happens somewhere the work has actually been done? A brief communication published in npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport in March by Matthias Hudecek, Julia Kammer and Corinne Moser of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland went through the Swiss Mobility and Transport Microcensus for 2015 and 2021, each round covering more than 55,000 people.

Their distribution is startling. In 2021 the most mobile tenth of the Swiss population accounted for 56 per cent of all distance travelled domestically in a day, up from 53 per cent six years earlier, with the Gini coefficient for daily travel distance climbing from 0.72 to 0.76. Cars drive most of that gap. Long-distance train travel drives much of the rest, since public transport distance rises steeply through the upper deciles, and the people in those deciles disproportionately report household incomes above 12,000 francs a month and a university degree. Walking and cycling were the only modes spread evenly across everybody.

Swiss high earners do use public transport, then. They use it to go further than anyone else, and when travel collapsed across the country between the two survey rounds, the top tenth’s distance fell by 8 per cent while the rest of the population averaged a 25 per cent drop.

The authors are careful about what this can carry. Their machine learning models explained only around a fifth of the variation in how far an individual travels in a day, so income, education, city size and transit quality are together weak predictors of behaviour. Domestic trips only, one country, and the 2021 round was collected in a year still bent out of shape by the pandemic.

One paper is one paper.

The question I would rather ask

Where I live now, in Bangkok, the test half-passes. The Skytrain glides above the jam, fast and air-conditioned and priced like a service built for anyone who draws a salary, and it fills up accordingly with people in good shoes. Below it, buses inch through the same traffic, and at the mouth of most side streets a man in an orange vest will run you out to the main road on the back of his motorbike for twenty baht. I have used all three in a week. The sorting is not subtle, and Peñalosa’s line would still score this city rather well.

What I want measured is whether a household at the bottom can reach a clinic, a school and a job without owning a vehicle it cannot afford. Answerable, countable, and it requires nothing at all from the rich before the poor get anything.

An aphorism you can satisfy by coaxing bankers onto the 7.40 train is a comfortable aphorism. It flatters countries that sorted their footpaths out two generations ago and hands nothing to a city still arguing about whether pavements count as infrastructure. Peñalosa’s harder point survives the misquoting intact: road space is public property, and giving most of it away to whoever can afford a bonnet is a decision, taken and retaken, by people who will never once stand at a bus stop in the rain.