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Entries tagged: City Of Lights

Allison Mannos is working to reframe the concept of environmental justice. With the City of Lights program, Mannos and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition are not just empowering immigrant cyclists, but challenging local officials to recognize the transportation needs of low-income neighborhoods as a critical social justice issue. Last week, the evolving initiative earned some ink and air time from GOOD magazine.

In the thoughtful story, GOOD highlights the history and objective of the still-young program. “The goals of the City of Lights program are ambitious, but the group started small, in response to complaints that immigrant bicyclists were riding on sidewalks at night (which is legal in the city of Los Angeles) but without lights or reflectors (which is not),” reporter Alex Schmidt writes. “City of Lights began distributing lights at day labor centers and were soon inundated with questions about routes and the intricacies of bike repair. Their next step was to open a weekly educational and bike repair workshop at a day labor center, south of downtown. In October, they were successful in getting the city to install bike racks in some of the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles. All small steps, the organizers concede. But they could be crucial ones in building momentum for big picture environmental justice.”

The article does a great job delving into that big picture issue, speaking not only with day laborers but an organizer with the Bus Riders’ Union. It explains Mannos’ efforts to integrate low-income neighborhoods into the city’s Master Bike Plan — an idea city officials were open to but had no idea how to implement. “So Mannos looked for models she could follow around the country but found next to nothing,” Schmidt reports. “She ended up doing the legwork herself, talking to 20 urban planners and submitting recommendations for how to target bike planning to lower-income areas. She recommended that the census, transit dependence, obesity and concentration of industrial sites all to be taken into account to determine the course of the city’s bike planning. She borrowed a recommendation from Seattle’s Master Plan, which offered suggestions for targeting amenities to low-income communities.”

To Mannos, that’s what the City of Lights ultimately aims to do. It’s not just about blinky lights and bike racks and weekly repair workshops. It’s about making bicycling — a necessary mode of transportation for those who can’t afford a car — safe and accessible for everyone.

“I think environmental justice is going to broaden to become increasingly more about urban planning, not just about factories and other important issues,” Mannos says in a companion video produced by GOOD. “It will be about the day-to-day lives that we lead and that’s shaped by housing, transportation and land use. My interest in that and in the City of Lights is how to address the people who don’t really ever get taken into account in these planning issues even though transportation is a major part of a low-wage worker’s life.”

Read the full story from GOOD here or learn more about the City of Lights program on its blog.

Last summer, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition launched its City of Lights program to assist and empower the area’s many immigrant cyclists. The new initiative quickly led to the creation and distribution of more than 600 Spanish guides that cover the fundamentals of safe cycling.

Bridging the language gap is just the first step, though. The far bigger leap is addressing the lack of bicycling infrastructure in Central LA. But early in the campaign, City of Lights volunteers recognized a serious problem — with a relatively cheap and simple solution.

“Despite the affordability of cycling to work, some day laborers have told us about an unwillingness to bike to the day laborer center because of the threat of bicycle theft,” the City of Lights blog noted back in December. “The fences and poles that laborers use to lock up their bicycles often do not provide adequate visibility or assurance to potential cyclists.”

It wasn’t just the day laborer center that lacked safe parking options, either. When the City of Lights crew conducted a survey in late 2009 they discovered that the Pico-Union and Westlake neighborhoods — two of the city’s most densely inhabited areas with more than 140,000 residents within a five-mile radius — had a mere 53 bike racks. The scoping led to a list of 40 proposed bike parking locations submitted to the LA Department of Transportation, and a new Bike Parking Community Resource Guide for advocates and business owners.

Last week, LACBC celebrated a key victory in its parking campaign. Video cameras rolled and volunteers cheered as LADOT pounded four new bike racks into the pavement outside the CARECEN day labor center.

“This is a really important site, because it was the birthplace of City of Lights,” says Allison Mannos, the LACBC’s urban programs coordinator. “It also sets a precedent for low-income cyclists and working people who don’t own cars that their needs for safer neighborhoods, worksites, and streets are just as important. Having bike parking encourages such long-running ‘accidental environmentalism’ that working class people, such as day laborer cyclists, practice everyday.”

With the City of Lights program gaining steam, city officials promised CARECEN is just the first site of many to come. “LADOT is proud to partner with LACBC, CARECEN, and Councilmember [Ed] Reyes in providing adequate bicycle parking opportunities to some of the Angelinos who are most in need,” said Rita L. Robinson, LADOT General Manager.

Learn more about the exciting work of the City of Lights program here.

Photo: Allison Mannos, LACBC urban programs coordinator, celebrates with CARECEN’s Jose Veliz.