Jay Walljasper, People for Bikes - Rev. Kenneth Gunn’s ministry at Chicago’s Bread of Life Church covers both the Bible and bicycles. He organized a bike club that regularly rides from the South Side church to Lake Michigan and along the Lakefront Trail. In his spare time, Gunn repairs donated bikes that he gives to kids in the predominantly African-American neighborhood.
Rev. Gunn believes biking offers great benefits to the community. “Besides good recreation, biking is economical,” the 70-year-old minister explains, especially in a city where many people don’t own cars and transit fares are rising. “But health is the number one reason to ride a bike. It’s good for your coronary, your respiratory and your blood pressure. And I find it’s good for my arthritis.”
Gunn welcomes the new protected bike lanes popping up across Chicago’s South Side as a way to encourage more African Americans to bike. “The city is becoming more and more bike friendly. The new lanes on 55th Street are super-safe and I love it.”
While African Americans comprise the fastest growing demographic of bicyclists, doubling from 2001 and 2009, bike lanes proposed for African-American neighborhoods in several cities have drawn controversy. And black churches like Rev. Gunn’s, which are highly influential among African-Americans, find themselves in the middle of the debate.
A few miles from the Bread of Life Church, a protected bike lane was planned for Martin Luther King Drive, which would pass six African-American churches. This raised serious concerns from some church leaders about the availability of parking for events, as well as aesthetic concerns on this historic street.
This controversy, and ones like it in other cities, highlights the importance of community engagement in planning new and innovative bike projects. “The city was doing a lot of bike projects fast, and talking with the community was not always a priority,” said Chicago Alderman Pat Dowell, who represents residents in the historically African-American neighborhoods around King Drive.
Dowell pointed to that experience as one reason some African-Americans are skeptical about bike lanes in a presentation at the Summit on Bike Lanes & Equity, a diverse gathering of transportation leaders convened last May in Austin by the Green Lane Project. (A program of People for Bikes, the Green Lane Project helps cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.)
Dialogue between the Chicago Department of Transportation and church and community leaders led to modifications in the plan. The protected bike lanes were shifted to a nearby street, and buffered bike lanes (which use wide swaths of paint rather than physical dividers to organize bikes and cars) were added to King Drive.
“The churches still have access to parking for church events.” Dowell said. “I think it marks a shift in how the city approaches neighbors.” Community discussions around the project also led to the creation of the Bronzeville Bikes group to encourage more people to bike in the neighborhood.
Some residents even associate highly visible street changes, like bike lanes, with the displacement of long-time black residents in favor of younger, often white newcomers. “You hear that bike lanes are white lanes,” says Cynthia Bell, an African-American organizer with Chicago’s Active Transportation Alliance. “But there are a lot more youth on bikes in my neighborhood these days, so you hear it less.”
.. Yet there are still widespread feelings in some African-American communities that bike lanes are the opening act of gentrification, says Adrian Lipscomb, a bicycle project coordinator for the city of Austin, Texas who is writing a Ph.D dissertation on African-Americans and biking. One woman in the historically African-American neighborhood of East Austin told Lipscomb, “When the bikes came in, the blacks went out.” However, Census data shows the white population in the neighborhood increased only one percentage point between 2000 and 2009, while the Latino population climbed eight.
(The numbers of Latinos biking in the United States rose 50 percent between 2000 and 2009, compared to 22 percent for whites. Whites and Latinos now bike at the same level on overall trips but slightly more Latinos commute to work by bike, according to Census figures. Native Americans bike the most of all racial groups.)
Six Ways to Broaden Support of Better Bike Lanes
At the Bike Lanes & Equity Summit in Austin, participants from a number of cities identified a number of common themes to create better bike lanes and better neighborhoods, especially in low-income and minority communities:
1) It’s important to involve local community leaders and residents early and often in the process, listening carefully and responding appropriately. As Chicago Alderman Pat Dowell emphasized, “The majority of the work with bike lanes is community engagement.”
2) Project planners need to understand and be respectful of an area’s history, especially if there is a history of underinvestment or injustice. Outreach efforts should be tailored to the particular conditions of an area, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach. You need to go to the people and speak their language.
3) Everybody wants safer streets and better neighborhoods. Figuring out how to further those goals is an essential part of any bike project. As much as possible, link bike infrastructure to other community improvements such as safe sidewalks and crosswalks, traffic calming, street lighting, waste removal, crime prevention and economic development. As Dowell noted, “If you can tie bike lanes to a community seeking more economic opportunity—that’s powerful.”
4) Recognize the pivotal role that churches and other social institutions play in neighborhoods, especially in communities of color.
5) Community-led education campaigns help overcome some people of color’s unease and unfamiliarity about biking. Veronica Davis from Washington, D.C., told the story of how she was biking to meet a friend for a movie when an African-American child proclaimed, “Mommy, mommy there’s a black woman on a bike!” That was the genesis of Black Women Bike, an organization that conducts workshops on the ABCs of getting around on two wheels—how to buy a bike, how to ride at night and in the winter, how to find the best routes on D.C.’s busy streets...
6) It’s crucial to address the status issues associated with biking. Eboni Hawkins, co-founder of Chicago's chapter of the national advocacy organization Red, Bike & Green that sponsors community rides and other events to promote biking, noted, “The automobile has long been marketed as a symbol of independence and wealth. For a group of people that has been systematically disenfranchised, this is an important socio-cultural marker. So we’ve distilled the idea of riding stylishly into one phrase: ‘Ride Fly’. When we post photos on social media of people like Alicia Keys, Beyonce Knowles, LeBron James, Al Sharpton and Serena Williams on bikes, our comments, shares and likes go through the roof.”
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