I had the privilege to accompany Backwards Brian to the Climate Ride Green Fondo. I talked with some of the organizers about their decision to allow him to join after hearing about what happened with AIDS LIfeCycle. To Climate Ride's credit, they were willing to sit with the discomfort for a while, and eventually let Brian do his thing. Can we foster that kind of inclusion throughout the bike world? I'm pretty sure we'd all benefit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m working on a series of maps of Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. I’m just going to drop a bunch of...
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.
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.
