Equity in LA mobility; Bike lanes, Metro Bike, and Scooters

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Last week's speaker Francie Stefan spoke about the challenges in managing the effects of the new mobility of our cities and Today's speaker Clarissa Cabansagan shared the efforts in Oakland to make sure equity is actively considered in the mobility solutions. 

Intrigued about the topic of the historically underserved population by urban transportation projects Clarissa mentioned, I've looked into the distribution of bike lanes in the greater Los Angeles area  (Map1) and mapped it on the household income distribution map of 2018, available in Tableau. It is not difficult to notice that the areas where most of the dense bike lanes are present are the more affluent areas of the Greater Los Angeles area such as Santa Monica or Pasadena. 

Based on the infrastructure, the emergence of scooters is following a similar concentration in Santa Monica, partly because GoSaMo was more open to negotiating with the service providers, but also the infrastructure was already there for easy adoption of the new services (Map2). 

Lastly, the latest LA Metro's metro bike station locations are mapped in Map 3. Of course, LA Metro must have considered other factors such as ridership, population, last mile solution necessity, the existence of bike lanes, still, the map shows a large service discrepancy in service areas. 

These three snapshots seem to be demonstrating that Los Angeles will need to actively include equity in transportation studies and form working groups such as Clarissa's organization TransForm, for a more equitable transportation solution. 

Map1 > 2018 household income and 2016 LA bike lanes(most of them)  
(Source: Shapefile from LA city, built in Tableau) 

Map2 > Capture of Scooter location in LA in May 1st (Source: Swarm of Scooters) 

Map3 > Metro Bike stations in LA as of May 1st (Source: Metro Bike Share)
Map 4 > Metro Lanes Service Map 


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