My posts earlier this year suggesting that Vision Zero’s communications strategy of amplifying safety risks might be counter-productive received a little bit of attention. I wanted to revisit the analysis to include the 2018 data from both the ACS and FARS, and to address some methodological criticisms.
Aidil Ortiz, the lead organizer of Untokening Durham, came into city planning work from a background in public health, and he perspective reflects that somewhat unusual path. In addition to doing great work organizing the event, she gave probably my favorite talk of the conference, about her work on community engagement for the Durham Belt Line, a rails-to-trails greenway project on the outskirts of downtown.
Her session was fantastic, and also relevant to Oakland’s bike plan (and, I hope, others).
I had a fascinating time at Untokening Durham. I am reflecting on of some of the great sessions and conversations I had, especially with Aidil Ortiz, Aya Shabu, Oboi Reed, Josh Malloy and Bonnie Fan. But my most prominent memory right now is of riding to dinner.
After my post about the Oakland Rideout, Twitterer Dianne Y. called out my characterization of the event as over-analysissand #plannerdy. Regular readers know that over-analysis is kind of what we do here at the Bike Lab. And being a city planning nerd is not merely a fact, it’s an aspiration. But she also challenged me as writing about disadvantaged groups from a privileged perspective, and I wanted to think about that question.
My advocacy philosophy has always been to model cycling as an everyday activity which does not require special skills or equipment. Anyone able-bodied can do it. One of my tools is the Bay Area Bike Rides web site, which I created in the early 1990s when cycling in the Bay Area was predominantly a recreational activity. Now, thanks to a connection with Mariana Parreiras (station access manager for BART, and Oakland BPAC commissioner), I’m going to be contributing articles to the BARTable web site on BART-accessible bike rides and events. The first one just went up, highlighting this coming Sunday’s Niles Canyon Stroll and Roll (September 22).
Last year I ran into the Oakland Rideout by accident. This year I’m a little more connected, so I heard about it ahead of time and went down to the Beastmode store to check it out. Man, what a spectacular event.
This weekend the painting work for the Scraper Bikeway on 90th Avenue finally got started. It was a nice event, and it’s great to see the community and city support for an innovative space in Deep East Oakland.
It was interesting to contrast the ride I did with folks from the Oakland Library last week, with the Fourth Fridays in the Park event with Rich City Rides. The librarians are using the bicycle to extend the physical community space of the library out into the streets. Rich City used the bicycle to create a community out in the streets, and on Fourth Fridays they bring it back into a physical space.
Last week I went on an urban geography bike tour, sponsored by the Oakland Museum and led by Mana and Sadie from the Oakland Library. We learned about railroad history in Oakland, and got lucky with lovely weather to visit Middle Harbor Shoreline Park. As a cycling urban geographer, I love that kind of stuff, and I love that people in the Library also see the bicycle as a tool for contemplating the city. I’m curious about how this alignment of the library and cycling programs in Oakland has arisen.
I was enthused to pick up a copy of Adonia Lugo’s latest book at the Bike4Justice event at Rich City Rides a couple months ago. I found it fascinating, but it wasn’t exactly what I had expected. Titled Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance, with cover art evoking Black power movements, I suppose that I anticipated something overtly political, a critical analysis of power dynamics related to cycling in the U.S. Instead, I found the book to be deeply personal, a memoir of Lugo’s own struggles to find a place for herself in cycling advocacy as a mixed-race woman from auto-centric Orange County. Lugo’s academic work is in ethnography, so it is not surprising that she is skilled at illuminating cultural and social frameworks via her lived experiences. As an ardent follower of Lugo’s work, the book helped me understand her perspectives, and how she arrived at her particular brand of advocacy.
I recently visited a friend in Puerto Rico, my first time on the island. I was surprised at just how pervasive car culture is there; public transit is virtually non-existent (there aren’t even inter-city buses), as is biking for transport. Our friends own a decent car, and were proud to drive us around the town and to tourist destinations on the coasts. When we’d suggest that we might walk the quarter-mile into town, or wander the streets of Ponce or Isabela, they were genuinely mystified. Why would you do that? We have a car, we can drive you!
The new Oakland bike plan was officially adopted by the Oakland City Council last night. I have my critiques, of course, but I also want to give credit where it’s due. The plan represents probably the best effort possible in our current planning environment, and it’s largely the result of dedicated work by some of the folks involved who pushed back against structures which are not designed to address topics outside of infrastructure. Because of that, there’s a lot more in the plan about community programs and equity than would ever have been the case otherwise.
I’ve long admired the work of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and my current pursuits are bringing me more into contact with their work. Executive Director Zachary Norris sits on the Oakland BPAC and on the subcommittee on policing which I’m contributing to, and the Center also supported last week’s Bike4Justice ride. They have moved all over Oakland, but recently managed to participate in purchasing a building in Fruitvale which will provide them housing security, and they had an open house event to celebrate. I was glad to get the opportunity to hear Norris talk about his work. Cycling is only a tangential concern for Ella Baker, but there were a number of places where Zachary’s remarks intersected with the Bike Lab’s work.
RB posted a notification about a Bike4Justice ride-out in support of DuJuan Armstrong, a young man who died in custody at Santa Rita courthouse. Juneteenth seemed like a good day for a protest against police oppression, so I wobbled down to Lake Merritt to join in the ride, which was organized by the Urban Peace Movement and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
The gathered group of about 30 riders chanted “Justice for DuJuan” (Armstrong, who died at Santa Rita last year) and “No Justice, No Peace”, as we took over intersections around the Alameda County Courthouse.
Andy Singer (who you may know from his “No Exit” cartoons) today posted on streets.mn about the possibility of re-purposing part of a railroad bridge across the Mississippi to extend the popular Midtown Greenway. For me, this resonated with my take-away from last week’s Mobility4All panel, of how bike infrastructure became associated with gentrification partly because the bike advocacy movement chose to pair infrastructure with economic development to gain political influence.
I’d been looking forward to this day for six months, since Adonia Lugo had to cancel her talk at Rich City Rides in December. And in the meantime it had gotten even more interesting, because I’d gotten to know a bit more about Doria Robinson, and RB was joining to represent the Scraper Bike Team. I started by heading up for the weekly Self-Care Sundays ride out of Unity Park, where I got to have a number of interesting conversations with Naj, RB, and Phoenix, and then had the opportunity to meet and hear Dr. Lugo and the others at the great Mobility4All panel.
Jesus Barajas suggested to me that Allwyn Brown in Richmond (CA) had done a lot of work to change the culture of RPD. And since I’m going up to Rich City Rides tomorrow, I thought I’d see if I could run some numbers there. Getting good data is hard, but I was able to find some sources. The story is, unfortunately, no more encouraging.
After his arrest, Najari asked me to help out with research and data analysis on racially-biased policing in Oakland. Since then I’ve also been providing information to the team working on Let’s Bike Oakland, the bike plan update, and found that 68% of bike/ped stops in Oakland were of Blacks, who comprise 24% of the population. OPD argues that the bias is spatial rather than racial; they police more in Black neighborhoods because that’s where the crime is. Does that claim hold up under scrutiny? It turns out the answer is no: Blacks are significantly more likely to be stopped no matter where they are in the city.
I love how cycling changes my experience of moving through the city; it’s part of what’s informed my Bike Lab work from the start. And I love sharing that experience with others, which is why I’ve been running urban geography rides for WOBO. The urban stories of investment and disinvestment, advantage and disadvantage come to light as you ride through neighborhoods at a human pace. This week, WOBO referred to me a wonderful opportunity to lead a group of officials and planners from Portland who were in town to meet with local groups and learn about our planning issues. I took them off into West Oakland.
My post on Vision Zero’s threat amplification communications strategy got some interesting responses. One class of response as a sigh of relief, from advocates and city officials who don’t want to adopt such a confrontational style. Another was an interest in comparison data; what happened in non-Vision Zero cities over the same time frames? An entirely reasonable question, and easy for me to research.
