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Taking immediate steps to be anti-racist in Bicycle Friendly America applications
Effective today, the “Enforcement” sections of the Bicycle Friendly America applications for Fall 2020 will be taken offline while the League evaluates and updates the application questions about communities’ and universities’ “Enforcement” of road safety. We will collaborate with Bicycle Friendly Communities, Universities, and other partners, listen, and roll out changes to the applications to encourage more equitable policies that make streets safer for everyone.
The Bicycle Friendly America program grades communities on six Es–Engineering, Education, Enforcement, Evaluation, Encouragement, and Equity–and awards places based on their efforts towards building better places to ride and making streets safer for everyone. We recognize that police enforcement does not always make everyone, particularly Black people, safer.
As part of our anti-racist evaluation of the Enforcement questions, the League is considering completely removing Enforcement from our program.
“The League is committed to listening, learning, and acting to be anti-racist in our programs, our advocacy, and our promotion of bicycling as a way to make life better for everyone,” said Bill Nesper, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. “Our Bicycle Friendly Community program is used by cities and bicycling advocates to shape the way people experience biking in their neighborhood and so we have a responsibility to ensure our application is in line with our values.”
As we consider larger changes to the Enforcement section of the BFA program, the League is inspired by our partners in national advocacy leading on this issue when it comes to building safer streets:
The League has begun updating our “Resources for Building a Bicycle Friendly Community” page to include new policing equity and accountability resources, which we encourage Bicycle Friendly Communities and bike advocates to review. We welcome and want to hear from you about resources you recommend at [email protected].
Read our statement on how Black Lives Matter and find more resources in our blog post from last week.