Interview with a project leader

Project leader
Steven Vance
Chicago Cityscape, Streetsblog Chicago

How did you come up with the idea for this project?

The idea came from Oboi Reed, the founder of Slow Roll Chicago.

Slow Roll Chicago works to achieve equity in bicycle access, bicycle usage, bicycle infrastructure, bicycle safety, bicycle culture, and other community-related and bicycle-related resources in Chicago with particular focus on communities on the Southside and Westside, making our communities healthier, more empowered, more economically viable, more socially cohesive, more bikeable, and ultimately more liveable.

How did Chi Hack Night help?

We found a lot of the data for bike infrastructure, income, and health, we researched how biking and hypertension are connected.

What was the impact of your project?

Slow Roll Chicago got a better understanding of how much bike infrastructure has been invested in areas of the city that are predominantly White or have middle to high incomes, and in areas that are predominantly Black or Hispanic/Latino or have lower incomes.

What did you learn from this project?

The City had changed its geographic distribution policy drastically in 2011 to install more bike infrastructure in predominantly Black areas, but predominantly Hispanic/Latino areas didn’t see any changes compared to prior to 2011. However, we also believe that their geographic distribution policy is based more on equality (equal investments in each part of Chicago) and not equity (which would be making investments according to the need in each part of Chicago).

More on this project

Slow Roll Chicago, Olatunji Oboi Reed and Steven Vance, Chi Hack Night

The Return of Slow Roll Chicago, Olatunji Oboi Reed, Sonju Walker, Derek Burk, Mary Kuhn and Eric Sherman, Chi Hack Night