Equity
Artist and urban educator James Rojas of Place It was the keynote speaker at the League’s Future Bike conference. While in Pittsburgh, James also facilitated a planning workshop with community members. He shares his thoughts in this guest post.
It came at the end of a long week of keynote speeches and Powerpoint presentations, but Future Bike was an invitation to another dimension. As soon as the conference-weary attendees stepped in the room, there was renewed energy as we ventured into the unknown potential of the bicycle movement.
For half a day on Thursday, September 11, the Future Bike conference took over a few rooms of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in downtown Pittsburgh. Many attendees had also been a part of Pro Walk Pro Bike Pro Place, the biennial junket for planners, advocates, and other bike/ped professionals that had just wrapped up in the same center. Others were bike-interested Pittsburghers who didn’t attend PWPBPP but had something to share.
In this LCI Corner, educators Jason Tanzman and Hannah Geil-Neufeld from Cycles for Change in the Twin Cities share how their efforts are matching the needs of many women, low-income residents and immigrants through their Bike Library and Learn to Ride programs. Read more!
On September 11, Future Bike brought together leaders from across the country to discuss the intersection of mobility and identity. With nearly 150 attendees, the forum created candid and inspiring dialogue on how to create a more inclusive bike movement. Here’s a taste of the conversation on Twitter.
Initiated in 2010, Slow Roll is a mass bicycle ride that takes place every Monday night in Detroit. Last month, I was able to join the Slow Roll, riding through the Motor City with more than 4,000 people, experiencing the bicycle as truly a great equalizer, a device that can bring us together: one gigantic, happy family of humankind.
What role do physical and digital technology play in expanding access to streets and input into the design process? How can new technologies make bicycling more accessible for more people by revealing and closing gaps in who counts? Those are the questions facing our Future Technology panelists at this Thursday’s Future Bike forum, a half-day conference focused on the intersection of identity and mobility.
For many bicyclists, a Learn to Ride class or Bicycle Maintenance 101 is an introduction — a gateway — to the bike movement. Ensuring such classes are inviting, inclusive, and a safe space to learn is essential to the getting more diverse riders on bikes. Understanding that effective, culturally-competent education is one path toward achieving equity, we’ll be diving into this discussion at our Future Bike event in Pittsburgh next week.
In addition to being a part of panel discussions, attendees at Future Bike will have a chance to participate in an urban design workshop led by keynote speaker James Rojas. Here’s James’ recipe for urban design as an engagement tool: Biking is inherently spatial and experiential. For the public, biking is an activity shaped by memories, uses, experiences, and desires. Bike infrastructure is a physical place of reactions, and a mental space of imagination. Through the workshops, participants examine their physical and desired connections with the street to help develop bike projects, plans, and policies.
Chema Hernandez Gil’s background is “in engineering, with a heavy dose of community and media activism.” A perfect mix for bike advocacy, right? Hernandez Gil is a community organization at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, using both his engineering and community skills on campaigns for better infrastructure and on a collaborative program that gets reclaimed bicycles into the hands of low-income community members.