Al-Qadaffi said the situation at hand is another example of a shift that he and other activists believe drove last year’s sweeping changes to the bus system.

The overhaul, called the Richmond Transit Network Plan, established new routes throughout the city and region and was touted by GRTC, city and state officials as an effort to make the bus system “faster, more reliable and easier to use.”

But Al-Qadaffi, other bus riders and transit advocates have said those improvements are not geared toward riders who have historically relied on the bus system. In his view, the changes have catered to what are called “choice riders,” transit parlance for people who own a car but elect to take public transportation.

In Richmond, the former is a group consisting predominately of low-income and black residents, and the latter are middle- or upper-middle income and mostly white.

About 10,000 residential units in poor neighborhoods are farther from a transit stop than they were before the overhaul took place, according to a report issued by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Urban and Regional Analysis at the end of 2018.