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STUDY: New Bike Lanes Aren’t Associated With Displacement of BIPOC, Low-Income People

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/06/...income-people/

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- The installation of new protected infrastructure for bicyclists does not cause the displacement of people of color or of low-income residents of U.S. cities, a new study finds but that doesn’t mean transportation leaders always do a good job of advancing comprehensive mobility justice for underserved groups when they improve cycling infrastructure. — In what is perhaps the most comprehensive longitudinal study on the topic to date, researchers at the University of New Mexico analyzed socioeconomic and demographic changes in predominantly residential neighborhoods in 29 cities across America that had made investments into bike facilities between 2000 and 2019. — Unlike previous analyses, the UNM team painstakingly scrutinized thousands of satellite images on Google Earth to catalogue exactly what kinds of cycling infrastructure each city had installed and when, offering a more insightful glimpse into the displacement impacts of different forms of investment into sustainable transportation than offered by previous researchers.

- What they found may surprise advocates: aside from statistically insignificant decreases in the rates of new rich and White residents moving into neighborhoods with new bike facilities, there was no correlation between the installation of new bike facilities and major shifts in the socioeconomic makeup of those neighborhoods. Or to put it more simply: bike lanes, trails, and even sharrows were not found to be associated with residential displacement, either along racial or economic lines. — Of course, displacement rates are far from the only measure of mobility justice, and study author Nick Ferenchak was careful to note that the finding did not mean that U.S. transportation planners are necessarily doing a great job at using cycling as a tool for broader mobility justice. — In particular, the data revealed that transportation leaders aren’t delivering equal access to new bicycle infrastructure for people of color and in the context of a quantitative analysis, they couldn’t determine whether transportation leaders were delivering equitable access to the transportation infrastructure for which those communities are actually asking, if leaders are even asking at all.

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