It was a full nine months ago when I first reported on NE Portland’s Community Cycling Center (CCC) putting together a report about why low-income people, racial minorities, and women bike at lower rates than white men and this week I was finally about to report about some of the findings of their research. With a $70,000 Metro grant and hundreds of hours logged at community meetings around Portland, the CCC didn’t collect any hard data breaking down bike ridership by race or income in the city, basing their findings on anecdotal evidence from interviews and meetings.
The first-person reasons given why people don’t bike, but they’re no big surprise. The main barriers to biking are cost, safety, and lack of familiarity with biking in general.
The three groups of color in Portland are African-Americans, Hispanics & Africans?
Also, I’m glad to hear $70,000 in Metro money was spent on results that were “no big surprise.” I’ve got a few non-surprises I’m willing to sell them for half of that cost, if they want to solicit obvious bids.
Here’s my report for FREE: People who have to work jobs where hours a day make a huge difference will never bike to work.
Nor will people who have to move things bigger than a messenger bag.
Or if it’s pi$$ing rain and cold.
Please try harder to stop living in denial of reality.
Cutting and pasting my comment from Sarah’s other story:
“[The CCC report] offers no hard numbers tracking bicyclists by race or income, but says anecdotal evidence gleaned from a survey and 70 community meetings…”
How the fuck does anecdotal evidence cost $70-fucking-thousand dollars? Did someone get paid $1000 per meeting to ask a question or two? Was it just $500 per meeting, and then $35,000 to a Soc. major to design the survey?
Commenty Colin is appropriately upset. This just looks dumb.
And “African Americans” and “Africans?” What? Do we have that many non-American Africans here? I don’t understand.
BREAKDOWN:
There are 1,629 words in this report, which cost us almost $43 per word.
If you take out the long “About Us!” section and all of the other background information that they STARTED with, the actual new information is conveyed in 568 words, or $123 per word.
There is no reference to, or explanation of, the “African-American” and “African” categories. Those words do not appear in the text, only in the graphs. The word “Asian” does not appear in the entire document.
According to their published results, we are supposed to believe that not one respondent mentioned weather, distance, time constraints, or carrying capacity as a reason they don’t use a bicycle as their primary means of transportation.
Every bullet in their “Conclusions” list is a call for more investment in their own group.
Reymont and Co., if you want more insight into the methods used in the study, take a look at the archived video of a seminar that the two principal investigators gave last spring, on their findings: http://www.cts.pdx.edu/seminars/
“Overcoming Barriers to Bicycling in Low-Income and Minority Communities”
Those weren’t the only ethnicities involved, but I guess those ones supplied the most representative data.
This report is for general public consumption, not for academia, and thus glosses past the methods (so you don’t get to see the survey, etc). I’m sure you could ask to see the survey, if you want to be sure that they didn’t cover those variables you’ve mentioned.
And yes, there are lots of non-American Africans in Portland. There’s a quite significant refugee population here.
“Those weren’t the only ethnicities involved, but I guess those ones supplied the most representative data.”
That strikes me as a weird way to conduct research.
Mucking around with the available stats for a few minutes, the non-American African population is about the same size as the Native American community. Neither approach the size of the Asian or Slavic communities, though.
Statistics failure aside, the findings aren’t surprising. People of all stripes don’t bike because they are afraid of doing something dumb or being stuck riding in shit weather, and people with lower incomes can’t really afford to.
Personally, I’m trying to understand how looking at bicycling as an issue of gender, race, and class is useful.
@ROM – Apologist.
What about: “According to their published results, we are supposed to believe that not one respondent mentioned weather, distance, time constraints, or carrying capacity as a reason they don’t use a bicycle as their primary means of transportation.”
@Reymont – You are being sarcastic in calling me an apologist? I can’t tell…
I already gave a quick response to that quote of yours. What I said was, “I’m sure you could ask to see the survey, if you want to be sure that they didn’t cover those variables you’ve mentioned.”
Those variables = “weather, distance, time constraints, or carrying capacity”
But I mean, yes you are lead to believe that those variables were not addressed. But… it doesn’t totally mean they weren’t.
@A CAT You can’t force people to take your survey. If only 4 South Koreans showed up to the town hallish meeting thing where the surveys were administered, then in the end you won’t have good data on that portion of the population. I suppose you can still call that a weird way to conduct research…
@tk At the least, looking at bicycling as an issue of gender has provided results. Studies have shown that female ridership numbers can serve as a barometer for an area’s overall sense of safety (when bicycling), and for determining how effectively the bicycle infrastructure has been implemented.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.…
@ROM: Interesting, thanks.
@ROM – It was only friendly sarcasm. 🙂
I love the idea that people drive instead of cycling because they have less money. Logic FAIL.
@ Stu: I don’t think it’s too much of a logic fail. How many bikers do you know who don’t ALSO have a car? Most middle to lower income people don’t live in the downtown area or close-in. That means having a bike and public transit as their only transportation options is very limiting, given the greater distances between all the things they want to do.
If I had to choose between Bike + Bus or Car + Bus, I’d choose car, and I think a lot of other people, in their heart of hearts, would agree, especially as things move farther and farther apart spatially as you extend from the downtown core.
I love biking, I hate taking the bus, and I love the freedom my car gives me to go just about any damn place I want the moment I want to. I can afford to do all three, but not everyone can, and I don’t fault people who want to spend a little more on what matters to them, i.e. more freedom in getting around every day.
“Portland must do more.” Do what? What must local government do to get African people to ride bikes? Why is this a government function? What if they don’t want to ride bikes? Why must the government get them to do something they aren’t interested in?
And yes, the fact that 70k was spent on this is ridiculous.
Stu, affluence allows people the flexibility to do things like biking everywhere. It is a very white-bread, middle class thing to do, because a lot of young white-bread middle class Portlanders don’t really seem to have regular working hours or anywhere to be in a hurry.
@ Blabby, actually it’s faster for me to bike to work than to take the bus, and I don’t even have any transfers to do. That doesn’t change the fact that this was a ridiculous study to undertake, at a ridiculous cost, for a ridiculously shoddy final product. As I posted elsewhere, if this 70K study had been about anything other than getting more minorities to bike, then I think Sarah would have been leading the charge to City Hall to ask WTF.
This is unbelievably stupid. Can I get $70,000 to gather anecdotal evidence about why Africans don’t ride skateboards?
I 2nd Commenty Colin’s last post. I have an 80 hour work week between full time work/school. I don’t have time for the bus and I’m not affluent. And that is why I bike.
I regular ride around with friends that happen to be black. I didn’t realize they were fulfilling a City Hall Agenda. I thought they were just biking.
To me, it’s an obvious cultural difference.
Even white folks getting “serious” about biking to work is a relatively new thing. It’s fashionable, for one, and pairs nicely with the popular eco-friendly sentiments that a lot of people are clinging to at the moment. Oregon’s green-friendly reputation and bike lanes are both things that attract fashionable young white people to Portland.
Does mainstream black culture hold the bike in such high regard? Almost certainly not. Scraper bike oddities aside (hey, even those got rapidly co-opted by hipsters), it’s way more popular for young black folks to put oversized rims on a 1980s Caprice than it is for them to put neon Deep Vs on a 1980s road bike.
Assuming that all black folks are poor— and should therefore consider biking because it’s so affordable– is just bologna. If they’re saving up to buy a car, what’s so wrong with that? Last I heard it was still legal to own a car in Portland. And fairly popular.
Is there a higher level of FAIL than EPIC? That way I know what to award this “study”.
Echoing Commenty Colin – People with limited resources are likely to choose Public Transit + Car because of the flexibility the car gives, and the regularity and shelter of public transit.
Biking gives some flexibility, but time, energy, weather and hauling disadvantages.
Another thing that might come out is that bicycles are overpriced in Portland because of perceived demand, particularly used bikes at shops, and that people disposing of bikes of any quality will sell to shops rather than sell it at a yard sale.
Let me offer this anecdote, it has to do with camping but I think there are similarities….
A friend of a friend (who’s african-american) had this to say about camping “white folks, sleeping on the ground, pretending they’re poor for the weekend.”
Regularity of public transit? Have you caught a bus recently?
Car + bike is way cheaper than car + bus, over the course of 6 months. And quicker too, once you’ve factored in time walking to and waiting at the stop. Bike + bus is even cheaper. Sure, there’s about ten days a year when the weather’s too hot/snowy/torrential to bike in, but not much more than that.
I agree with Chunty that it’s largely a cultural difference. Go to the Killingsworth area. Observe that a) there resides a relatively high concentration of african-americans, b) the neighborhood is very bike-friendly (in terms of safety, ease, nearby shops), and c) there aren’t a lot of african-americans biking.
If I could get that $70,000 in cash, that’d be great. My concern is that this might bump me into a higher tax bracket. Oh, if you’ve already got the check made out that’s fine.
The aim of the alt-weekly newspaper is weekly indignant feedback from alternative types. If you can’t see the strings being pulled in the graphic above (and its accompanying story, which is of little consequence after such a well-aimed graphic), then you should perhaps be reading Highlights for Children.
To clarify, the Metro funding was for 2 years and included two parts. The first was to perform a community needs assessment with two partners, Hacienda CDC and New Columbia, where the majority of residents are African American, African, and Latino. Then, based on the results, to create a pilot project to be developed and delivered in collaboration with our partners.
We wanted to find out about relative interests in and barriers to bicycling, since there seemed to be a gap in participation both in bicycling and among decision-makers among communities of color. Our methods were qualitative and based on focus group conversations, not surveys, because focus groups provide more context for feedback. The findings were not necessarily surprising, but with them documented, we can now use them to guide and inform future programming and policy work and measure against them. That’s the way things work in nonprofit program development: Define the problem, develop the solution, measure the change.
And what have we done? A year ago, the Community Cycling Center did not have programs at either New Columbia or Hacienda. This summer, we helped over 150 children and adults get bikes and learn how to ride them safely. Then we organized bike rides. Now there’s a bike committee at Hacienda that is learning basic bike repair and working to improve bike storage there. There’s also a group of active residents at New Columbia, where we held a community conversation to discuss bicycling and equity last week. It was the most diverse gathering of 50 people to discuss bicycles any of us had ever participated in. At the meeting, which included community members, program providers, and policy makers, one of the New Columbia residents, Charles, was asking for safer places to ride. Sitting behind him was Greg from PBOT whose job it is to create safer places to ride. They took a ride together the other day, so Charles could show Greg where he gets to on his bike. Then Greg showed Charles some projects in development. That’s what this project is all about. Ask questions, build relationships, listen and learn from community members directly what their needs are, (which may be information we already knew, but we’re a culture that needs “evidence”) and then work together to DO something about it.
This report is not meant to represent every person of color in Portland nor was it designed to reveal hard data about these groups. The funding from Metro was to support community engagement within communities of color and to design programming to address the barriers to bicycling identified in our study.
We are receiving requests from around the country about how we successfully and effectively created meaningful civic engagement that has had measurable results in just over a year. Bicycles are a powerful and empowering tool for personal and community change and we are working hard to make them accessible to as may people as possible.
To read more about the project, visit
http://www.communitycyclingcenter.org/inde…