Alliance > Media center > People Powered Blog

Entries tagged: Social Justice

Earlier this year, the Alliance recognized the work of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition with one of our national Advocacy Awards. The LACBC took home the Best Practices plaque, in part, because of the advocates’ work to elevate the voices and call attention to the needs of low-income cyclists in underserved communities. This week, the organization took another innovative step by creating new maps that highlight bicycle crash hotspots.

Using data extrapolated from the TIMS database, LACBC intern Jimmy Nghe created a series of downloadable maps that show how crash fatalities are unevenly distributed in areas of higher density and lower income neighborhoods in the City of Los Angeles. The visuals drive home a critical point: Transportation planners and policy-makers have generally failed to address many of the problems of dangerous streets where the highest need lies.

“We see large discrepancies in where higher rates of crashes and bicyclist injuries/fatalities lie: in marginalized, low-income areas of Central and South LA,” Allison Mannos, LACBC’s Urban Strategy Director, explains. “We created these maps to start a nationwide conversation with other advocates, planners, and members of the public. These maps are the first time that, as a movement, we have put our heads together to pinpoint environmental injustices as they relate to bicycling on a neighborhood level.”

The advocates emphasize that these maps show only a rough relationship between population density, income, and rates of collisions involving people who bicycle or walk. More data needs to be collected to show causation. But the maps are a clear indication that the City of LA needs to heed the example of LACBC and invest more resources in underserved neighborhoods.

“This presents a major environmental and social injustice,” LACBC suggests. “Through the installation of more facilities in these neighborhoods, the City of Los Angeles will not only reduce deaths and injuries to low-income people who bicycle, but reduce the overall number of bicycle-related fatalities and injuries citywide.”

Click here to read more and see all three maps.

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.