Dr. Regan Patterson will present from her report for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which highlights ongoing challenges affecting African Americans in the transportation system and provides policy recommendations for how shared mobility, electric vehicles, and autonomous vehicles can equitably serve the Black community. She'll also discuss her research that focuses on the intersection of transportation, air quality engineering, and environmental justice.
What role can bicycling play in healing the intersecting harms of racial and climate injustice? Activists have learned that individual mode shift alone will not correct the extractive social effects of transportation governance and industries, but collective actions point toward regenerative possibilities. Professor Adonia Lugo will share ideas from her collaborations in mobility justice to argue for the significance of human-powered mobility in moving the transportation field toward a just transition.
While cyclists and pedestrians are vulnerable road users and face significant safety threats on roadways, environmental conditions in historically marginalized communities compound such vulnerability for people of color. Jesus Barajas takes a mobility justice perspective to contextualize street safety for cyclists and pedestrians. His research shows how identity shapes the way cyclists experience the streetscape, how safety has multiple meanings particularly for people of color, and how inequity in the distribution of infrastructure compounds police injustice in Black communities.
Columbia Law professor Sarah Seo's book "Policing the Open Road" is a thought-provoking look at how the automobile fundamentally changed the nature of police work, and thus the conception of freedom, in the United States. These themes are close to transportation studies, but too often ignored in transportation academia. These issues, moreover, will only become more salient as broader swaths of transportation academia seek to understand and study the role of race and ethnicity in freedom of mobility.
Multimedia artist Thompson-Hernández shares from his book, "The Compton Cowboys," and latest NPR podcast California Love. In Compton, California, 10 black riders on horseback cut an unusual profile, their cowboy hats tilted against the hot Los Angeles sun. They are the Compton Cowboys, their small ranch one of the very last in a formerly semirural area of the city that has been home to African American horse riders for decades. California Love is a new audio memoir about Walter's coming of age in Los Angeles.