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Entries tagged: Underserved Communities

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.