What’s crazy is I grew up with this and struggled with it, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized it was such a systemic issue.
I once had to bike through this:
I believe there’s a sidewalk on the other side of the underpass, but there isn’t a crosswalk for miles. I just had to wait for a gap in traffic and pray. Speed limit is 45.
In my city, they deliberately designed underpasses with minimal space like that not only to save money, but also because they were at the border between white and black neighborhoods and making it harder for carless people to get through helped enforce segregation. And even now, when they put bike lanes in, they end at such historical barriers because it’s “too expensive” to widen them and taking space from cars is out of the question. In other words, they’re still perpetuating the harm of segregation to this day.
What’s crazy is I grew up with this and struggled with it, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized it was such a systemic issue.
I once had to bike through this:
I believe there’s a sidewalk on the other side of the underpass, but there isn’t a crosswalk for miles. I just had to wait for a gap in traffic and pray. Speed limit is 45.
This was me trying to bike to the mall.
In my city, they deliberately designed underpasses with minimal space like that not only to save money, but also because they were at the border between white and black neighborhoods and making it harder for carless people to get through helped enforce segregation. And even now, when they put bike lanes in, they end at such historical barriers because it’s “too expensive” to widen them and taking space from cars is out of the question. In other words, they’re still perpetuating the harm of segregation to this day.