June 14, 2011
Check out this video for a glimpse of one of Bici Digna’s mobile bicycle workshops!
Bici Digna will be doing mobile bicycle workshops at the CARECEN Day Labor Center every first Saturday of the month, as well as at several other locations throughout the month. Check out the Bici Digna blog for more info!
June 5, 2011
Hey all, check out the June City of Lights Newsletter!
City of Lights Newsletter – June 2011
Boletin de Ciudad de Luces -Junio 2011
May 15, 2011
This Sunday, May 22 City of Lights is going to be hosting a ride from Hollenbeck Park to MacArthur Park along 7th St. We’re excited about the Bike Master Plan’s inclusion of 7th St in its work to get more miles of bike lanes painted in the city. Hopefully you’ll join us on the ride so we can celebrate these efforts, raise awareness, and have a little fun!
We’ll be meeting at the corner of St. Louis and Inez, the southeast corner of Hollenbeck Park, at 11:30am, and taking off by noon. For more info, please contact Miguel Ramos at (626) 375-6799.
January 18, 2011
Good Magazine, one of the urban planning and art world’s favorite magazines recently interviewed City of Lights and BiciDigna volunteers, along with the BRU! Click here or on the graphic below to read the link: http://www.good.is/post/80/
We’re excited to have been shown in a magazine that reaches a different type of community than the Social Justice/bike worlds and with such a well-written article, too! The piece covered land use/transportation and equity in Los Angeles.
If this also excites you too, consider making a donation via paypal, marking “City of Lights” in the comment field.
We will be collaborating with the DREAM Act Riders for their ride from LA to the OC next month on 02/20 to highlight undocumented students’ struggles. Stay posted for more info and a flier!
January 10, 2011
Help us expand in 2011 to reach more low-income folks on bikes!
We are recruiting passionate volunte
ers to help us grow City of Lights’ efforts and be a part of our team!
By now, you’ve kept tabs on our program through our blog, and as an engaged and/or interested community member, we want to invite you to be a part of our project! Our collective of volunteers does a lot of exciting work reaching out to immigrant Latino cyclists, from getting more Spanish language safety workshops, to the BiciDigna bike repair co-op at a day labor center, to bike rides with soccer games, to more bike lanes and parking in Central LA. Though we’re a small group, we’ve managed to accomplish so much through volunteer power!
If you are interested, email allison@la-bike.org or call the LACBC office at: 213-629-2142.
December 21, 2010
There has been a lot on the LACBC blog and other cycling advocates’ blogs lately regarding the City of LA’s bike plan, which dictates where bike lanes and what programs will exist in the next 10 years. It was recently was approved by the Planning Commission, as of December 16th. Many have lauded it as finally addressing many of Angeleno cyclists’ needs, which have wholeheartedly and repeatedly been ignored over the years.
Yet, what does the plan mean for low-income cyclists who face multiple issues of economic, legal, and environmental (in)justice, on top of being second class commuters?
You can read the actual text of the City’s proposed changes, as approved by the Planning Commission here.
Text from the plan regarding income prioritization
City of Lights will be providing a brief analysis below of the changes we advocated for during the Public Comment period that will bring more of a focus and major improvements to low-income cyclists’ neighborhoods throughout the City.
Bike Lanes and Infrastructure:
Along with planning policies an
d bicycle networks for the entire City, City Planning also included an appendix of a Five Year Implementation Strategy. This will dictate which streets will be getting bike lanes in the next five years. When we first spoke with Planning, there wasn’t a way to target low-income neighborhoods in the plan. After Ciudad de Luces did some research with other bike/ped/social justice professionals around the country, it was clear that no one (beyond the Pedestrian Plan of Seattle) had ever tried to bring attention to or focus to low-income communities of color in their bicycle or pedestrian planning. As a result, we developed a synthesized criteria of ideas that we and other advocates came up with for Planning to use (included below for those who want to research or use the criteria for their plans).
LACBC City of Lights’ Submitted Factors for Prioritization
These supplement the non-equity based criteria Planning already uses for determining where a bikeway will go.
Bicycle Network Projects can be prioritized using the following factors (in order of importance):
• Areas/neighborhoods of high poverty
(Can be determined by the following: where Census tracts indicate high levels of poverty or neighborhoods that are comprised by a majority people of color and non-English speaking residents; residents of public and assisted housing developments and recipients of tenant- based assistance; residents of targeted revitalization areas, and TAZ data by stratifying the household income variable, as well as Automobile ownership, Diabetes rates, Obesity rates)
• Number of transit dependent residents/high population densities in the surrounding area/Proximity to Metro Rail stations, Orange Line stations and Metrolink stations
• Collisions
• Connection to major employment centers or industrial worksites
These were integrated into the Five Year Implementation Plan that, as part of the Bike Plan, passed a week ago!!! GOOOOAAALLLLL!
Yet, it was not enough to merely have criteria for low-income neighborhoods, it was important to have some sort of weighting system or accountability to make sure these neighborhoods would be the first to receive much needed bike lanes and facilities. Planning then created a twenty point system using various criteria, emphasizing the low-income/transit-dependent criteria. It will also incorporate SWITRS data (crash data the CHP collects) as a prioritizing criteria, which is important as low-income neighborhoods are often the most deadliest. As you can see, the areas that have higher percentages of low-income households will score more points, and thus more bikeways:
% of low-income residents per Neighborhood: Score:
0‐20% 2 points
21‐40% 4 points
41‐60% 5 points
61‐80% 6 points
81‐100% 10 points
Legal Rights:
They are also two provisions that, while positive for all cyclists, are going to benefit low-income cyclists even more.
One is the “Violator Training Program for Bicyclists”. As many low-income cyclists receive tickets for sidewalk riding and other violations that are sometimes exacerbated by being targets of police harassment, they often are forced to pay disproportionately high fines they cannot afford to pay. Through this new program that will be developed, they could receive “bicycle safety training…in lieu of paying a fine or other pecuniary penalties”.
Also, the creation of a Hot Zones Map. City Planning will be creating and compiling a GIS- based map of crash data from the Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS, referenced earlier in this post) that reflects the number and types of all collisions (auto, bicyclist, pedestrian) that are occurring throughout the City with support from LAPD and LAUSD. This map will target many arterial streets (i.e., Vermont Ave., Van Nuys Blvd.) that many low-income cyclists use to get to work and school zones, where their families walk and bike to school.
Lastly, another score for low-income cyclists is the creation of the “Bicycle Infrastructure and Incident Reporting Program”. Currently, there is no recourse for cyclists, already marginalized sometimes by legal status, to challenge or report drivers who harass them, only if they’re hit, and serious bodily injury occurs. LAPD will now be developing a program to allow bicyclists and other concerned citizens to report infrastructure obstacles or failures or to report aggressive behavior by motorists or motorist harassment. Ciudad de Luces will make such information available on our blog when this comes into fruition, in Spanish, of course.
Community Outreach/Education:
LACBC, Ciudad de Luces, and LADOT will be collaborating on conducting a new Annual Survey with bicyclists annually about the Bicycle Plan to get feedback on how to improve certain “high-risk, problem areas” or address other key issues. Ciudad de Luces will work hard to reach the low-income and/or non-English speaking cyclists that would normally not be part of the process or lack computers to access the online version, as we did during the bike plan outreach meetings.
The Share the Road Campaign, which creates PSA’s and other materials to increase cyclist safety will be expanded. Advertisements, including those for bus shelters, will be placed on major corridors and translated in multiple languages, with an emphasis on Spanish language materials.
December 14, 2010
Feliz Navidad a Todos Ustedes…
It’s been a little while since we shared our work with you. A few updates from the City of Lights team:
We’ll be hosting our 2nd Annual End of the Year Dinner Social for the jornaleros at CARECEN’s HQ. Last year was a fun event with a mima jornalero, games, food, and just a great opportunity for City of Lights volunteers and day laborers to mingle and relax. This year will be expanded to include a short bike ride beforehand, a raffle with bike related prizes, a film about the year’s accomplishments, dinner, and more.
BiciDigna has been steadily happening every week, through both Wednesday open talleres and Saturday mechanic/popular education classes, as well as collaborating with the new Bike Wrangler, Jonny Green, and his efforts to open a similar space in Westlake/MacArthur Park. The goal has always been to empower the workers to make decisions about the space and be able to run it themselves eventually after completing the set of classes, with support from Ciudad de Luces. That, we might proudly add, is happening already! Workers have taken the initiative to open/operate the space to other community members even when City of Lights volunteers aren’t able to attend.
BiciDignarios Get Down and Run the Space On Their Own
Safety and Legal Rights workshops have expanded, from the CARECEN and IDEPSCA Downtown Centers, to the Glassell Park and Hollywood Centers and recently, the Day Laborer Center in El Monte.
Jornaleros at the Hollywood IDEPSCA Center in Safety Rights Workshop
We have also been planning for our second retreat in January 2011. We have been recently re-strategizing on how to expand our operations, through empowering other low-income communities in LA County and our vision for next year. We hope to have some of the workers attend our retreat again.
With the current City of Los Angeles Bike Plan going before the Planning Commission and the City Council this month and next year, respectively, City of Lights has been thorough involved in the process. We have strongly advocated for low-income neighborhoods to be prioritized in the 5 Year Implementation Plan, which lays out which streets bike lanes and bike boulevards will go in the first 5 years after the plan is adopted. There will be more on this in a more detailed blog post coming in a week after the Planning Commission meeting this week, but this will be huge for low-income areas in LA which tend to lack almost any bicycle facilities.
All of this grassroots organizing and education is run primarily by passionate volunteers. Yet, despite the generosity and love our volunteers put forward towards empowering marginalized cyclists, our work also does require resources, such as tools, helmets, and other expenses. We cannot run this program without the community’s support (i.e. you!)! If you would like to make a donation to help City of Lights run and grow, click here to make a tax deductible donation. Please mark “City of Lights” in the comment field.
Thank you for all of your support for our program and bike safely this Holiday Season!
