Recent Streetsblog CHICAGO posts about equity

How Does the Threat of Police Violence Affect How You Use the Street?

By Ben Fried | Dec 4, 2014 | No Comments

When the news came out yesterday that a Staten Island grand jury had failed to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold, like many people I found the outcome difficult to comprehend. With clear video evidence showing that Pantaleo broke NYPD protocol and a coroner’s report certifying that Garner’s death […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Dear Bike People

By Tanya Snyder | Oct 23, 2014 | No Comments

Do people of color and low-income people ride bikes? Not as much as they could, given all the great benefits biking offers, particularly to people without a lot of disposable cash. But yes, non-white and non-rich people ride bikes — in high numbers compared to the general population, by some measures. Even though they’re biking […]

Conquering the Unbearable Whiteness of Bike Advocacy: An Equity How-To

By Tanya Snyder | Oct 15, 2014 | No Comments

Many bicycle advocacy groups find themselves in a sticky position today: They’re increasingly aware that their membership doesn’t reflect the diversity of the broader population, but they’re not sure how to go about recruiting new members, or how to do it in a way that doesn’t amount to tokenism. The League of American Bicyclists has […]

The Pros and Cons of Divvy’s New Expansion Map

By John Greenfield | Aug 22, 2014 | 32 Comments

In mid-July, Alta Bicycle Share’s Mia Birk told Marketplace that, due to pipeline issues, new bikes for the systems Alta runs probably wouldn’t arrive until 2015. At the time, I predicted that the Chicago Department of Transportation would soon announce that it wouldn’t be able to expand the Divvy system from 3,000 to 4,750 cycles […]

What the Data Tell Us About Bicycling and Household Income in America

By Michael Andersen | Aug 7, 2014 | No Comments

Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. As part of the Green Lane Project’s upcoming report on the connection between transportation equity and protected bike infrastructure, I’ve been digging deeper into the difference between (as Veronica Davis put it […]

Study: People in Low-Income Areas More Likely to Be Killed While Walking

By Tanya Snyder | Aug 5, 2014 | No Comments

Who is most at risk of being hit by a car? People on foot make up a growing proportion of people killed in traffic — 15 percent in 2012, up from 11 percent in 2007. Children, seniors, and people of color account for a disproportionate share of the victims. So do people living in low-income […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Poor Door Von Spreckelsen

By Tanya Snyder | Aug 4, 2014 | No Comments

In this week’s podcast, Jeff and I take on the infamous New York City “poor door,” designed to keep tenants of affordable units segregated from the wealthy residents that occupy the rest of the high-rise at 40 Riverside. In the process, we take on the assumptions and methods that cities use to provide housing, and […]

African American Cyclists — And Others — Weigh in on Race and Biking

By Angie Schmitt | Jul 29, 2014 | No Comments

Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets. Yesterday I wrote about a complicated subject: the links between biking and race in the United States. It’s the first in an ongoing series over the next three months that will finish […]

Arizona Police Arrest “Jaywalking” Professor in Racially-Charged Incident

By Tanya Snyder | Jun 30, 2014 | No Comments

Arizona earned its reputation for police excess yet again recently when an officer demanded identification of an African-American pedestrian — for the crime of walking in a campus street to avoid construction on the sidewalk — and got violent when she refused to produce it. Arizona State University professor Ersula Ore was walking around some […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Helmet Hair

By Tanya Snyder | Jun 24, 2014 | No Comments

Did you wear your helmet when you biked to work this morning? Whether you did or you didn’t, it’s up to you. So why are there so many people shrieking about it? On one side, the 85-percenters, overstating the protection helmets offer against head injuries. On the other side, the 3-footers, claiming that it’s actually […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Let Them Drive Cars

By Tanya Snyder | Apr 9, 2014 | No Comments

Quick quiz: What city is the world leader in highway teardowns? San Francisco? Portland? Madrid? Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s Seoul, South Korea, which has removed 15 urban highways — and is about to remove another. In this week’s Talking Headways episode, Jeff and I talk about what can take the place of a freeway in […]

The Problem With Prescribing “Access to Cars” in the Fight Against Poverty

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 4, 2014 | No Comments

It goes without saying that the mass suburbanization of the past 60 years has been very bad news for people who can’t afford cars, and it’s getting worse as poverty levels rise in the suburbs. In nearly every place America has built since the 1950s, owning a car is a prerequisite for participating in the […]

Load more stories