I include relatively short block quotes from many published sources in posts here at Savannah Unplugged. Often, those 1-3 paragraphs (almost always less than 10 sentences, I’d guess) give my readers here a pretty good sense of the key information in the article or other text being quoted.
That is NOT true for this post, so I’d suggest if you’re interested, click on through right now to Henry Grabar’s The Biggest Obstacle to Cycling’s Egalitarian Aspirations? Distance at The Atlantic Cities.
Grabar talks about trends in bicycle commuting in various cities, with special emphasis on demographics — age, education, race, ethnicity. Grabar’s piece is also filled with fascinating links to original studies and the like.
Ultimately he focuses on a demographic trend that we’ve been seeing across America: the growing number of poor Americans in suburban neighborhoods. Efforts to diversify the population of bicycle commuters is made all the more difficult if poor people increasingly inhabit suburban areas far from jobs, shopping, and other basic needs. One snippet:
Elsewhere in America, the trend is not racial but socio-economic: the country’s poor are moving to the suburbs in greater and greater numbers. These statistics aren’t news, but they seldom appear in analysis of cycling’s diversity. The consequences of gentrification’s centrifugal effects go well beyond cycling, of course. Suburbanization could reduce the visibility and mobility of the poor, change voting patterns, and more. But as bike advocates work to increase cycling’s diversity, developments in economic geography — features of what Alan Ehrenhalt has called the Great Inversion — are working against them.