Posts by tom

On the Waterfront

October 23, 2022 tom
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Oakland, Opinon

I got into a good rant at Oakland BPAC this month, on the topic Transforming Oakland’s Waterfront Neighborhoods (TOWN) project, the city’s attempt to give away millions of dollars in support of the cynical and extractive effort to let a billionaire (A’s owner John Fisher) enrich himself by building 3,000 luxury condos at Howard Terminal. I got annoyed, because the project ignores the East Oakland waterfront neighborhoods which really need infrastructure, but also because it looks like a bad idea on its own merits.

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Map of Oakland showing the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Communities of Concern. Deep East Oakland and parts of downtown and West Oakland are mostly dark purple (Highest concern). A few areas in Deep East, and much of Fruitvale is lighter purple (Higher concern). Most of the rest of the flatlands are light purple (High concern). The hills are uncolored (Low concern).

Compromised

June 15, 2021 tom
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Oakland, Opinon

Public-private partnerships require compromises. Compromises on terms are natural in such negotiations, but I am concerned with compromises on principles. There are two ways cities compromise their principles in public-private partnerships: bullshit requirements, and bullshit enforcement.

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Group of 20 cyclists riding at night on wide road, with center lane painted orange with colorful wheel graphics. The cyclists are taking the right and center lanes. Lights of cars are seen both approaching and going away.

Scraper Bike Halloween ride

November 5, 2020 tom
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Field work, Oakland

I got to spend Halloween with the Original Scraper Bike Team, and it reminded me of why I enjoy riding with them and supporting them, and also, why it's important.

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Racially-biased policing in Oakland (updated with 2019 data)

October 15, 2020 tom
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Data, Oakland

The Oakland Police Department is legally required to provide racial data on police stops. But they're not required to make it easy. But they finally released their report. We don't have detailed public data on where the stops are occurring, only the police beat. I did some hacky stuff to estimate the racial composition of each police beat using Census data, and tested whether the stops were proportional to the racial makeup. As you might guess, the answer is "no." In 2019, the problem was marginally better, but it's still a problem.

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Collection of Chicago (North Lawndale) maps

Collection of Chicago (North Lawndale) maps

August 24, 2020 tom
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Data

I’m working on a series of maps of Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. I’m just going to drop a bunch of...

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Map of Chicago, showing Burgess' concentric-circle zone model on top of the FHA redlining map for Chicago. Nearly all of zone 2 (zone in transition) and zone 3 (zone of workingmen's homes) were redlined. Zone 4 (residential zone) is mostly yellow, and zone 5 (commuters zone) is mostly green and blue.

Burgess concentric circle map in GIS

August 12, 2020 tom
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Data

I'm going to be doing some mapping for a project from Equiticity, and one of the themes will be historical spatial inequities in Chicago. This got me thinking about the highly influential concentric-circle city development map drawn by Ernest Burgess (Chicago School of Urban Sociology) in 1925. Surprisingly I couldn't find a usable GIS representation of his drawing. So I decided to work on my georectifying skills and put one together. You can see how Burgess' racist ideas led directly to racist housing policies.

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Map of Los Angeles County census tracts, colored by percentage of Black population, overlain with Metro Bike Share system coverage.

Assumption of equity

May 26, 2020 tom
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Data, Opinon

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.

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Map of Oakland with existing, pending, and proposed Slow Streets highlighted. Four streets are marked as "Completed April 11", four more are "Pending Installation April 17", and approximately 20 more scatters around the city are "Other Streets to be Evaluated"

As I was saying…

April 17, 2020 tom
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Oakland, Opinon

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.

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Map of Oakland showing median income. All of East Oakland is shaded in red (less than $50K) or orange ($50-$100K). The hills to the north are in blue (>$200K) , while the areas further east and south trend to green and yellow ($100-$200K)

Disproportionality

April 14, 2020 tom
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Oakland, Opinon

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.

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East Oakland and resilience

April 2, 2020 tom
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Field work, Oakland

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.

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