Community Action Association DEI Summit
Transit: The MLK Jr. Connection
Webinar: Policing the Open Road
Better Bus Stops for Better Bus Systems
What's In a Word? Stroad
Infrastructure Insights From the Interwebs
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Join the Community Action Association of Pennsylvania as they bring together leaders and partners in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for a 2-day statewide virtual summit on February 15 &16 from 1:00 to 4:00 pm on how Pennsylvanian residents, businesses, and communities can collaborate to support DEI initiatives and practices. Everyone inside and outside of Community Action is welcome to attend. You do not have to directly work in DEI to take part. The program includes reflections on the wide array of communities and conditions across the Commonwealth and how DEI initiative may take different forms in different places.
(You may also be aware that this conflicts with a workshop the Pennsylvania Downtown Center is running on the Neighborhood Assistance Program which can provide communities with funding to implement a range of projects, including active transportation. You may want to register for both and then decide which to take part in live and which to view later.)
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Think about it. When did the young pastor from Georgia first burst onto the national scene? In connection to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. MLK was a systems thinker and very much aware of the interconnections of power and urban structure, function, and investment. Sadly, the way we commemorate his legacy now in many of our cities at a nominal level is by putting his name on unremarkable and inhospitable stroads (see definition below), which divide communities and increase people’s exposure to dangerous through-traffic. During the mid-1900s he called this relationship out: “Urban transit systems in most American cities, for example, have become a genuine civil rights issue — and a valid one — because the layout of rapid-transit systems determines the accessibility of jobs to the black community."
The relationship continues to hold today. The Transit Center, a national resource on transit based in NYC, created an excellent video about the racial implications of historical decisions shaping transit and better ways to move forward for everyone (it's less than 10 minutes long).
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Did you know that early in the motor age, leaders were divided about how best to preserve order in the streets with cars as disruptors, true agents of chaos? The police did not necessarily want to have anything to do with traffic enforcement! Maybe we should revisit that vision -- not the chaos, but the alternatives to police enforcement through either technology or unarmed oversight? For some insight into how the too often deadly combination of transportation and police came about, listen to this 99% Invisible podcast interview with Professor Sarah Seo, author of Policing the Open Road. Seo is a professor of law at Columbia University where she teaches criminal law and legal history. Her book talks about the contradictory and problematic cultural history surrounding cars, ideas of freedom, and understandings of race in the US.
If you'd like a longer discussion of the topic than the podcast provides (but still short of reading the book), you can also check out this full length webinar presentation by Professor Seo.
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As discussed in the Legacy of Racism in Transit video linked above, bus services, more often serving minority and low-income communities, are often intentionally second class systems compared to commuter rail systems intended to allow primarily white commuters to leapfrog from suburbs to downtowns. Recognizing this is key to being able to change it. These are problems that have played out across the country and now the solutions are doing so as well. Whether we’re talking about New York, Georgia, California, or Pennsylvania, we are now paying attention and starting to address these gaps. In order to provide better service for everyone we need to provide better service for bus riders. And to do that, we need better bus stops. PennDOT and the Pennsylvania Public Transportation Association (PPTA) have put together the Building Better Bus Stops Resource Guide.
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Stroad? Stroad is a portmanteau that combines the words “street” and “road.” Coined by civil engineer Charles Marohn of Strong Towns, it is intended to be an ugly word. “According to Marohn… it is part street—which he describes as a 'complex environment where life in the city happens,' with pedestrians, cars, buildings close to the sidewalk for easy accessibility, with many entrances and exits to and from the street, and with spaces for temporary parking and delivery vehicles—and part road, which he describes as a 'high-speed connection between two places' with wide lanes, limited entrances and exits, and which are generally straight or have gentle curves. [He] defines a stroad as a high-speed road with many turnoffs and which lacks safety features… stroads do not function well as either a street or a road.”
Jason Slaughter of NotJustBikes has done an excellent job of illustrating the concept with a video, linked at the button. or you can read about it in one of the multiple posts about it on the Strong Towns website or view their much simpler and shorter video presentation here (5 minutes).
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Speaking of power relationships and transportation, we have some urban design and mechanical engineering/marketing thoughts... |
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A Legacy Deferred?
The dangerous and inhospitable landscapes in the vicinity of so many MLK Boulevards across the country are more of an insult than a memorial. Time for a redesign: safe, welcoming, and beautiful streets ahead!
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Consumer Reports Alert!
This latter day Unsafe-At-Any-Speed report is likely to be lost amidst so much data swirling about us, but the tweet sums it up. We need to recognize this for the threat to health and safety it is!
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Safe travels near and far!
Sam Pearson
M: 781.366.0726
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