The theme of representation and inclusivity is topic that is very well meaning and often preached in cycling media, advocacy, and sport. We hear it preached from poc, women, body types, disabled, and lgbtqia folks. When we see a person of color, woman, or body type in an ad campaign we celebrate it and share it with our communities without thinking if we have served the needs of everyone in our community. It’s a concept we all can get behind. If you asked 100 cyclists, they’d probably all agree it’s something we should do. If you asked city planners, they’d say the same thing. However, there is a big difference in what we say—versus what we do.
Anne Lusk’s powerful article “You Can’t Design Bike-Friendly Cities Without Considering Race and Class,”published in CityLab, was a recent call to action for all bicycle advocates. In it, Lusk calls out urban planners across the country—not for their progress in building bike-friendly infrastructure, but because they have overlooked the people who likely need it the most. According to Lusk, “Urban cycling investments tend to focus on the needs of wealthy riders and neglect lower-income residents and people of color.”
This approach to cycling activism has also filtered into cycling media culture in which brands and events market and serve a type of “desirable” cyclist. And because many of us want to be a part of a community, we often uphold the status quo and blend into the mainstream culture of it, excluding and leaving out alternative meanings of cycling and possibilities of entry. Perhaps because of this attitude of mainstream cycling culture, diverse communities are often passed over when it comes to marketing, media coverage, public outrage, investment, and outreach.
What many of us know, urban cycling is a growing trend. Cities are competing and being rated for their “bike-friendliness”. But research shows protected or painted bike lanes and urban trails are all popping up in moderate- to high-income areas. A look at New York City Bike share program shows just that: bike lanes and access to ride share stations are connected in well to do communities or “priority zones”.
By contrast, Lusk says cities often add only the easiest and least safe elements in marginalized neighborhoods, such as painted sharrows (stencils of bikes and double chevrons) or bike lane markings, and placing them next to curbs or between parked cars and traffic.
While the services are in favor of one group over others “the single biggest group of Americans who bike to work live in households that earn less than $10,000 yearly,” according to one study.
Low income areas, where more people depend on only bicycles for transportation, many times face higher risk of collisions and fatal crashes. In New York, some of our most dangerous high-crash corridors are high-speed roads where low-income residents coincide.
Lusk worked with a group from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, to learn what low-income, non-white bicyclists in Boston and Brooklyn wanted. What kind of bike infrastructure best met their needs?
Lusk’s team showed people in the survey, who included workers at the local YMCA, residents and the former incarcerated, several pictures of places where people could ride a bike and asked them the rank them from the safest to the least safe. People in the study perceived neighborhoods, especially low-income apartment complexes, as a very dangerous places to ride their bikes. Many said they were worried about being mugged or robbed—especially in areas like public housing or neighborhoods with rundown homes. In contrast, they saw busy commercial corridors, where people are always present, and streets are lit better as safer from potential crime.
Even more, they perceived higher income neighborhoods as the most safe, comfortable places to ride, for two reasons: 1) they are relatively free of crime 2) cars traveling at slower speeds pose less of a risk of crashes. Central Park is a great example of a significant investment of bike infrastructure into an upper-class neighborhood.
Like many equity issues, it seems to be a failure of bicycle advocacy. City and county leaders listen to their constituents (as they should), most often in the forum of a commissioners’ meeting. So, who has the ability to leave home in the evening and drive down to a public meeting in order to advocate for new bike lanes? It’s probably not the single mother of three with no car. It’s probably not the father who’s working two minimum wage jobs to support his family. And because their voices aren’t always heard, their needs are overlooked. Again, a failure of the system that affects real people.
We, as a community, should organize to get input from all stakeholders in an issue, making sure no one is overlooked. And it will take work. It will also take the people in charge “rethinking” the way they approach certain issues. Rather than having just having people comment, give reviews, or hold a public meeting in the evening at a library, we should go out and seek the opinions of people who can’t access those meetings or survey’s. We all have a lot to do to make cycling representative and more inclusive, while being wary of tokenizing communities to appear diverse without ever achieving it. We should work to get a wide range of leadership, opinions, insight and suggestions before deciding where to invest in our community. We should think about people who use their bikes for transportation in addition to those who use it for recreation.
As demographic gaps persist within bicycling, we should be looking at the people who have the greatest barriers but are finding a way to ride anyways in greater numbers than those who occasionally do.