To black activists, transportation justice matters

The city’s transportation department generally does seek input and approval from local stakeholders before making major roadway changes. But in the past, opposition from neighborhood leaders and/or residents threw a wrench in plans for new bikeways on King Drive in Bronzeville, Division Street in Humboldt Park, and Independence Boulevard in West Garfield Park. Some transportation advocates and community activists might disagree about whether these cases were missed opportunities to improve safety, or examples of the city yielding to the will of the community.

Likewise, Carruthers and Ware say the city should proceed with caution when implementing its Vision Zero plan, slated for release this fall. That document will lay out a strategy to eliminate all Chicago traffic fatalities by 2026 through engineering, education, and enforcement.

“How do we make sure the enforcement doesn’t disproportionately affect communities of color?” Carruthers asks. “There are already more police in these communities than other parts of the city, and the mayor is hiring hundreds more officers,” Carruthers says. “Giving more resources to the police does not make brown and black neighborhoods safer—investments in education, jobs, and mental health do.”

Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey has said Vision Zero efforts will, in fact, be concentrated in the neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by severe crashes, largely lower-income neighborhoods on the south and west sides.

Transportation advocates have argued that well-run traffic camera programs not only reduce crashes and fatalities but also address the problem of racially biased enforcement by officers. Still, Ware isn’t a fan. “I hate the cameras, personally and politically,” he says, arguing that Chicago’s $100 fines for running red lights or speeding by 11 mph over the limit are an unreasonable burden on lower-income people.

He did warm up to the idea of sliding-scale traffic tickets, with penalties based on income, a concept I’ve discussed in this column.

“That sounds like a great idea,” he says.

Another equity strategy would be diversionary programs, where drivers have the option of attending traffic school as an alternative to fines, which could help prevent future violations. However, Carruthers notes that it might be difficult for hourly and shift workers to take advantage of this.

But beyond public transit and biking, from talking to these two activists, it sounds like the biggest discrepancies in the way white folks and people of color experience transportation and public space may occur when they’re pedestrians. Ware said his students’ route decisions are shaped by gang territory borders, and they might avoid standing on certain corners to avoid being confronted by police.

“There are places I will avoid if I know there will be a lot of police there, because of their unpredictability,” says Carruthers. For example, she says, the fact that officers frequent the area around her local Green Line stop discourages her from riding the train.

“I’m fortunate because I drive nowadays,” she says. “But people who don’t drive don’t have a choice. They risk being harassed, violated, or even killed. I may sound very dramatic, but these are all the things that happen to black people at the hands of police in Chicago.”

The CPD didn’t provide a response to Carruthers’s statements before press time.

And while Donald Trump recently called for introducing New York-style stop-and-frisk policing to Chicago as a solution to our city’s gun violence epidemic, Carruthers says this is already the de facto policy in communities of color, noting, for example, that the rate at which African-American pedestrians are stopped and ticketed for minor marijuana possession has been shown to be exponentially higher than that for whites.

“We already have a system of targeting black and brown people as a so-called broken windows policy,” Carruthers said. “It is not effective for creating the type of communities that we actually want to live in.”

From talking to Carruthers and Ware, the takeaway for local walking, biking, and transit advocates is clear. We’re not going to achieve real transportation equity in Chicago without taking into account the other social justice issues many African-American and Latino residents have to deal with on a daily basis.

Article Appeared @http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/black-lives-matter-transit-justice/Content?oid=24066620

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