Biking in Los Angeles: A Q&A with the former head of LACBC

Projects tied to the city of Los Angeles's Vision Zero program are sparking clashes from Playa del Rey to Northeast Los Angeles. Vision Zero aims to end traffic deaths in the LA—the nation’s deadliest city for pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers, passengers, and motorcyclists.

It's the program's methods, not its goals, that are dividing Angelenos. Under the plan, lanes dedicated to cars have been removed to slow down traffic (speed is a proven factor in roadway deaths) and to make room for bike lanes, pitting drivers against pedestrians and bike safety advocates.

Tamika Butler, who just departed her post as the executive director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, has had firsthand experience trying to bring the needs and interests of Angelenos who ride bikes to the forefront.

Curbed spoke to Butler about biking, issues faced by people who bike, her new role as executive director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, and how to continue to make LA a fun, safe, healthy place for all residents—regardless of how they get around. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

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You’re a big promoter of equity in biking and transportation. What does that look like? Are there examples we could see in play today?

For me, when we talk about equity, if you have to simplify it—which I hate doing, because it is complicated—but if you have to simplify it, it’s making sure those who have had the least, get the most.

I think that’s really uncomfortable for people, because it sometimes means that those who have had the most aren’t going to get as much. And in their mind, they think it means they’re giving something up.

When I first joined the Bike Coalition, I remember going to my first bike summit and going to a panel with people from the bike industry who were talking about marketing to women—how they market differently to women, why it’s important to market to women, why we need more women riding bikes, and for women to seeing themselves in marketing materials.

And I remember sitting in the crowd and hearing the whispers from some of the men in the room, and also a little bit on social media, how it was sexist that this panel even existed. For me, not coming from the bike world, that experience was kind of this rude awakening.

I realized that this is a world filled with a lot of straight white men who have been relatively privileged in different ways in their life, and for them, being a cyclist and identifying as a cyclist is something that is really important. It’s something that is part of their core identity, and for many of them, in their opinion, it is the way they’ve been oppressed.

And so to even start to have a conversation with them about why even identifying as a cyclist isn’t the most inclusive, to get from there to to equity has always been a stretch.

Why don’t you like the term “cyclist”?

I’m not a cyclist. I don’t identify as a cyclist. I identify as a person who loves to ride my bike. The more we think about that—that these are people on bikes—hopefully the more drivers will see those people as grandmas and mothers and kids trying to go to school. Is it going to solve all the problems? No. But sometimes folks put those labels on us, and it helps make us less than a person, just a cyclist.

You came to LACBC toward the end of 2014, and July 14 was your last official day on the job. In that time, how have you seen biking change and improve in LA?

If you look at the pictures from that most recent meeting about the street improvements in Mar Vista, it was a packed house, and it wasn’t just people who bike. It was our friends, it was family members, it was grandmas, it was folks in the Vision Zero Alliance with us. The visibility of people who bike and the sheer numbers have increased.

I think one of the hardest parts about me leaving is that, when you leave something, you like to sit back and think about all the ways in which it’s gotten better and you helped it get better.

And maybe with some time, some reflection, and a little bit of vacation I’ll be able to do that. But right now, I think when we have the last two weeks like we’ve had with Mar Vista, when folks are talking about the fact that a few extra minutes on a commute might be more important than lives, you really wonder if things have changed.

What do you think happened there?

When you dig deeper into these incidents of “bikelash,” what keeps coming up for folks is, that they say, “We want everybody to be safe, but where’s the community engagement? When did folks talk to us?”

That’s another thing that really ties to that equity point. Our government agencies or our nonprofits need to ask: Are we getting better at community engagement? I think we’d be hard-pressed to say we’re not getting better, but have we figured it out? Have we cracked the code? I don’t know that we have.

A lot of the work you’ve done has been expanding the discussion beyond bikes at the Bicycle Coalition.

Especially for bike advocates, there has been this need to singularly focus on bicycling. I totally get it. I talk to folks who have been doing this way longer than me, who have more battle scars, and what I’ve heard is no one cared about biking.

So many of the folks who started this work, or started biking even, did it as something that wasn’t mainstream, and there was a lot of pride in that identity. But I think many movements struggle with transitioning from being the outsider to saying, “Hey, we’re like everybody else!” And do you even want to do that?

I think bicycle advocacy has struggled with that. What’s our message? Who are we? What makes us unique? What makes us the same? What are we working for?

Again, this is something that happens when a movement matures. As someone who’s black, I think there are some folks who are a little older, who were part of the Civil Rights movement, who don’t understand Black Lives Matter. There are different tactics and different ways of doing things.

What’s been the response to expanding the discussion?

That’s what I’ve gotten the most pushback about, the most harassment about, the most bullying about.

The issue is that the folks who have been the most vile and aggressive in their pushback think we’re talking about these other issues instead of biking. But we’re not.

One of my pet peeves is when people say that the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition’s mission was to make LA County a safe, healthy, and fun place to bike.

The mission didn’t change. We’ve just had to realize that if you want LA County to be that safe, healthy, fun place, the people who are riding bikes have to be able to afford to live here. They have to have affordable housing.

If they’re homeless and they’re worried about where they’re going to sleep at night, then they’re not going to be in a place where biking is fun, healthy, and safe.

If they’re riding for fun, not transportation, and they want a bike path or a nice park to ride, but there are no parks or bike paths anywhere near their neighborhood, then they’re not in a place where biking is fun, healthy, and safe.

You have to understand intersection. As a queer black woman, I live at the intersections, and so I’m not able to see a world in which there aren’t multiple factors at play in everything that happens. Folks who say, “Why are you talking about more than bikes? This is the only issue,” are doing so because they’re coming from a perspective where they’ve been really lucky and privileged that they only have to think about one issue.

How does outreach have to change or improve to get everybody behind Vision Zero, and do you think it’s possible to get everyone behind it?

Something I learned long ago is that you’re never going to get everybody to 100 percent agree on everything. What you can do is, you can hear them. You can make sure they feel validated, and you can explain why you’re doing the things you do. At the end of that, there are still going to be people who disagree with you, and there’s only so much you can do.

Engagement takes time. Our structures set up this paradigm where we have to meet deadlines and get projects done, where community engagement might be a meeting that we can check off on a list.

We don’t really ask ourselves, did that meeting happen after work? Was that meeting in a convenient location for everyone? If a majority of the people in this neighborhood are non-English speakers, did we provide translation services? Did we make sure all of the materials were in those languages? These are the things that take more time.

I happen to think that the bar that many people use for community engagement presently is too low, and that we have to up our game and really be more creative about how we’re meeting people where they are.

I think there’s this tendency in this work to say, “We need to work with a nonprofit who’s going to talk to people in the community and train the people in the community to talk like we talk and understand the issues like we understand them.”

But instead, we should be saying, “You know what? The knowledge and expertise is in the community, so I’m going to go there. And I’m not going to go in there as a savior—saying here’s the plan, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to listen. I’m going to put in some time. I’m going to go to several meetings before bike lanes even come up.” I think folks who are doing this work need to set the bar for engagement much higher.

What are some of the biggest hurdles to creating a safer, better transportation environment for Angelenos?

We can’t ignore that in LA we are a car-centric culture. We can’t ignore in LA that the Hollywood industry has historically really pushed back against bike lanes. We have unique challenges in LA that there aren’t in other places.

To be successful, we’re going to have to do more engagement. We’re going to have to understand intersectionality way better.

For transportation to continue to be successful in LA—to ride the momentum of Measure M and make sure Measure M goes well—we have to figure out how to talk about these issues in a way that people understand—and not just in terms of commuting.

When Mayor Eric Garcetti was campaigning for Measure M, one of the things I heard him say all the time was: “Transportation is the prism through which we should see all other social issues.”

If you can’t get to school, you’re not going to get your education. If you can’t get to work, you’re not going to get your paycheck. As soon as we can get better at consistently talking about that and talking about transportation and mobility in a way that brings people together and not excludes people or keeps people out, I think the better off we’ll be in Los Angeles.

You’re moving on to work at the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, which focuses on bringing parks and green space to communities of color in LA. Is that a natural progression of your work with the LACBC, or is it a totally new direction?

At the end of the day, what I’ve always cared about is social justice, people and communities, and bringing people and communities together.

I could say about the LA Neighborhood Land Trust that it’s about making sure that LA is a fun, healthy, safe place to be, just like the LACBC was.

Some people don’t want a bike lane, because they think it’s the first sign of gentrification; they think that property values might go up, and they might get pushed out. The same thing happens with a park. This job is totally a natural progression of what I’ve been doing, and it’s something I’m excited about.

To touch on what you said about how some people fear improvements—a park, bike lanes, a renewed LA River—because, for them, those improvements mean the countdown clock has started until they have to move. This suspicion of what many would consider “nice things” looks strange to people who have never had that conflict.

As the paid advocates, we have to do better at understanding that there are real concerns, especially in LA, where everything you read talks about how much money you have to have just to live here.

Whenever changes come, whether or not it’s in our relationships or in our communities, there’s always this thought: “Is that change for me? Is that change for someone else? Am I going to benefit from this? Did I get to contribute to it? Am I part of this? Did I help build this?”

Sometimes, folks who have done this work, they assume that because they’re experts, people will trust them, and people will trust them to do the right thing. But for so many of us in this country, no one’s ever really cared about us, and trusting people in power hasn’t really gotten us too far. So if we don’t think about those historical and social contexts as we go in to do our work, then our work isn’t going to be successful.

• Planning While Black: How cities can design for all [Curbed]
• Mar Vista council votes to support Venice Boulevard lane reduction—for now [Curbed LA]
• Pedestrian-friendly improvements coming to Venice Boulevard in Mar Vista [Curbed LA]