I see advocates assume that the projects that they advocate for will address issues of historical inequities. A thread on distributing bikes in LA led me to investigate whether LA Metro bike share is equitably distributed. Bike share does not reach the Black areas of the city at all; in fact, there's not a single bike share station located in a census tract that is even 25% Black.
I'd been working on my post about disproportionate impact since before COVID-19 hit the Bay Area, but it happened to land in the middle of a broad conversation about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on poor and working-class BIPOC, and the opening of Oakland's opportunistic Slow Streets program, which streets advocates across the country are now demanding their cities emulate. Last night Oakland held its weekly COVID-19 town hall; the segment led by Warren Logan, Libby Schaaf's Director of Mobility and Interagency Relations, really made the point about how we're equity-washing streets programs.
I keep encountering a trope about how poor people of color are disproportionately impacted by the societal harms related to the topic the author is writing on. Whether it be pollution, housing insecurity, food insecurity, or health issues like asthma, diabetes, and now COVID-19, low-income BIPOC have it worse than anyone else. The trope goes further, to employ the fact of disproportionate disadvantage as a justification for the author's favored project: a bike lane, or a housing development, or a park or an urban farm or whatever it is the writer thinks is important. I will note that it's generally true. BIPOC have been disadvantaged in America since Columbus first showed up, and the effects are still seen throughout out society. But the problem with disproportionate impact—besides its existence and its effects on BIPOC—is that its very ubiquity limits its usefulness as a tool for policy analysis.
On Tuesday I did my Tour of Oakland bike ride, and one of the impressions I came away with is that East Oakland, especially Deep East, has been less affected by the shelter-in-place order than the rest of the city. Much of the economy of East Oakland is informal, so shutting down the formal economy doesn't hit the neighborhood as hard. I saw a few of the Scraper Bike Team kids out, too.
After doing some crunching this week on data about rapidly-gentrifying Valencia Street in San Francisco, and finding that residential density is actually dropping in the neighborhood despite new housing construction, I wondered whether the same phenomenon could be found elsewhere in the country. I didn't have to wait long for another case study, as Lynda Lopez and a number of other peeps I follow from Chicago posted about Mayor Lori Lightfoot's ill-considered statement about "vibrancy" in Pilsen, a gentrifying neighborhood west of the Loop. It turns out that the demographic dynamics in Pilsen are very similar to Valencia Street, and they challenge the claim that infill development is a climate solution.
I have been really, really trying to avoid getting into the housing debate. But transportation and housing are inextricably linked, and my investigation of bike infrastructure's relationship to gentrification is part of the Bike Lab's work. A Twitter thread sparked by Phil Matier's terrible SF Chronicle article led me to do some data analysis of Valencia Street's transformation. Some of the results are pretty staggering.
Phil Matier is a terrible journalist. One of the ways in which he's terrible is that he doesn't understand statistics at all, or at least, the way he uses statistics in his writing is uninformed (at best) or intentionally misleading (at worst). I'll be charitable and assume that the fallacies in his work come from a place of ignorance rather than deception.
As an urban critical theorist studying cycling cultures and neighborhood change, I've long been curious about the correlation between the terms "fixie" and "douchebag." My working definition is that douchiness is where entitlement meets cluelessness. The douchebag is a privileged person who feels entitled to that spot at the bar, that condo in the city, that job in tech, and that private bus to work which makes it all possible. And he is clueless about how his entitlement to those things pushes others out of the way.
I've been thinking about how cycling and skateboarding cultures are different, and I have the impression skating has never embraced top-down hierarchy in the same way bike advocacy has. Reading Peter Flax's interview with Effective Cycling founder John Forester, I realized that Forester is just as concerned with being at the top of the hierarchy as traditional bike advocates; he just disagrees about how to get there.
Rachel Swan (SF Chronicle) recently published a story about police bias in Oakland, including newly-available data from 2018. Overall, OPD stopped a lot fewer people in 2018, but even after accounting for that, the number of Blacks stopped dropped more than other groups. Eberhardt suggests that the reduction in stops represents a move towards "intelligence-led" policing. I don't see how the data supports her assertion. In 2018, 31% of all the stops are listed as "IntelligenceLed", while in 2016-2017 that number was 29%; a small change, certainly not enough to account for a 30%+ drop in the total number of stops. Looked at on a beat-by-beat basis, you can see that the reduction in stops was broad across the city, but the biggest drops came from West and Deep East Oakland.
