Charm City Circulator Sociology

The bus is crowded; it is hot outside and there is a discontent silence as a pungent smell diffuses. People plug their noses, hold their shirts up to their faces, grimace; anything to express displeasure and attempt to mitigate the smell of aged sweat and vomit mixed. The silence is suddenly interrupted by a lady who loudly declares to the friend sitting next to her that someone on the bus smells awful. The source of this smell is sitting near the front of the bus and is now silently staring down at his taped together shoes, hunched over as if to hide his face from view. He is wearing too much to be comfortable on this warm day, as if he is wearing the only set of clothing he owns. Salt stains line the collar of his shirt and the distinct
These interactions highlight the socioeconomic characteristics that have come to define modern society and reveal the plight of the urban poor who are the most likely candidates to consistently rely on a free of charge public transportation options such as the Charm City Circulator. This scene therefore, offers a glimpse into something far more complex than a man who smells bad getting off a bus because he was getting dirty looks. It provides a synopsis of society defining norms which permit judgement and criticism of those who are unable to help their situation but on the other hand denies access to public transportation for someone who needs it the most. In this ethnographic work, I want to display how the socioeconomic inequality of the city of Baltimore pours into its public transportation system. To do this, I will focus on the conflicts that arise from interactions between people of differing socioeconomic backgrounds and show how these conflicts typically have a clear victor who is, as logic would assume, the socioeconomically more privileged individual. Without knowing the precise income of all individuals travelling on the Charm City Circulator, I will provide three major groupings. The group occupying the highest up socioeconomic position are the white-collar residents of the city along with most people affiliated with
Additionally, these three broad socioeconomic groupings run in conjunction with some lifelong Baltimore residents; particularly people I have met walking around the city or sitting in the park. These individuals would typically place themselves in one of the latter two groupings and would also characterize the most socioeconomically privileged grouping as being dominated by Johns Hopkins affiliates. Grouping riders into these three categories makes sense in the context of this paper, because it also helps emphasize how residents born and raised in Baltimore view the influx of the socioeconomically privileged associated with Johns Hopkins Institution. Throughout this paper, these groupings will be inherently understood from their clothing, their actions, where they get off the bus, and various other indicators. Using observation to classify individuals into one of these three groupings is an inaccurate and unscientific manner of characterizing people by their socioeconomic grouping; however, the conflicts that do emerge on the Charm City Circulator are not based on known socioeconomic status but instead on perceived socioeconomic status, therefore, this paper makes socioeconomic judgements that also run in conjunction with those of all individuals who ride the Charm City Circulator. Additionally, assumptions made regarding socioeconomic