Slow Roll Calls for Greater Black and Brown Ownership of the Vision Zero Process

Earlier this month Slow Roll Chicago cofounder Oboi Reed called on the Active Transportation Alliance to cancel their planned Vision Zero Chicago Summit. Reed argued that there hadn’t been sufficient input in the planning event from members of this year’s Vision Zero focus neighborhood, which are low-to-moderate income Black communities on the West Side, and that the time, location, and $50 entry fee made it unlikely that many West Siders would attend the summit. In response to these concerns from Slow Roll and other community leaders, Active Trans announced it would be postponing the event, acknowledging that the rollout of the summit had been flawed.

Last week Reed published an extensive blog post laying out Slow Roll Chicago's position on Vision Zero, arguing that the national movement to eliminate traffic fatalities needs to be driven by people from communities of color and LMI neighborhoods. These are typically the areas that are most heavily impacted by traffic violence in U.S. cities, and therefore they are the focus of Vision Zero-related enforcement, education, and infrastructure initiatives.

In his post, Reed discusses the Chicago Police Department’s nationally known record of civil rights violations and notes that he and many other Slow Roll members have personally witnessed incidents of over-policing and police abuse. He cites a recent discussion he had with Rutgers University senior researcher and adjunct professor Charles Brown about how, in light of past cases of CPD police violence, the way that the enforcement component of our city’s Vision Zero program is carried out could literally be “a matter of life or death.”

Later in the post, Reed credits Active Trans for rethinking the summit, but also calls for a “transformative restructuring” of the organization with a new focus on social justice. "We advocate for Active Trans to sincerely and dutifully operationalize its commitment to equity from the board level to the staff level, from inclusive community engagement practices to staffing diversity, from priority projects to policies around how resources are distributed and from the removal of implicit bias to the dismantling of a dismissive culture toward LMI communities of color from within the organization."

Elsewhere in the piece, Reed discusses two major problems Brown identified with current American Vision Zero efforts. The researcher says there is currently a lack of focus on structural racism as the root cause of disparities in LMI neighborhoods and communities of color, including high traffic violence rates.

Secondly, according to Brown and Reed, there’s a lack of meaningful input from residents of these areas in the Vision Zero planning process. “The difficult truth is that many transportation professionals, mainstream Vision Zero advocates and departments of transportation simply don't value or respect the voices of people of color and LMI residents in communities of color where Vision Zero is being implemented,” Reed writes. “We are largely considered the consumers of the VZ product. In fact, we should be the owners and deliverers of the VZ product in our neighborhoods… No DOT and no advocacy organization should ever begin the process of developing or implementing a VZ plan without an authentic community engagement process where residents and stakeholders invest in the plan and take ownership of its execution. Anything less is dismissive, disrespectful and potentially deadly.”

I recommend that you set aside some time to carefully look over and fully digest Reed’s thoughtful post. The article ends with a list of future action items to promote greater ownership of Chicago’s Vision Zero process by Black and Brown residents. Among them is a plan for a research project, which would be led by Brown, using data analysis and surveys “to better understand the root cause of transportation-related inequities and injustices experienced by POC and LMI residents in communities of color on the South and West sides of Chicago.”

The next step in Slow Roll’s agenda is a live social media Q&A and video/text chat this Thursday, August 31, from 10:30-11:30 a.m. Reed says the discussion will serve as an opportunity for reflecting on the events that led to the postponement of the Active Trans summit and mobilization of Slow Roll’s Vision Zero response. Look for details and updates about the online conversation on the Slow Roll blog and via the group’s social media accounts in the near future. You can follow Thursday's conversation on Periscope, Instagram Live, and Facebook Live.