On Achieving a Racially Equitable Transportation System
Dear Equiticity Family,
Good day and trust all is well for you all and your families.
As we near the end of our fundraising campaign, I am sharing this email to inform you of the upcoming Transit is Essential Town Hall event, explore our work on mobility justice, and ask for your financial support of Equiticity.
Transit is Essential Town Hall
Tomorrow, Saturday, March 2, the Equiticity team, in partnership with Active Transportation Alliance and several additional organizations, will participate in an important event to uplift community voices and highlight our advocacy work. Residents will have the opportunity to share their concerns about Chicago's transit system with community leaders, policymakers, and elected officials.
We invite you to join us and share this important event:
Transit is Essential Town Hall
Saturday, March 2, 2024
12:30 – 3:00 p.m. CT
Mount Carmel Baptist Church, 2976 S Wabash Ave, Chicago
Learn more here: equiticity.org/events/transit-is-essential-town-hall
Flyer attached.
Mobility Justice in Chicago Campaign
In 2023, Equiticity executed an outreach campaign directly addressing the candidates running in the Chicago mayoral primary – to encourage them to explicitly support an operational commitment to racial equity, mobility justice, and environmental justice in the Chicago region's transportation system.
We highlighted research showing Chicago’s automated enforcement generated tickets to households in majority Black and Brown areas at twice the rate of white households, although studies show cameras are not disproportionately concentrated in Black and Brown areas. These tickets became particularly burdensome to low-income Black and Brown residents, who more often incur late fees and penalties which rapidly increase the cost of a ticket to hundreds of dollars. These findings continue to drive our Mobility Justice in Chicago campaign through which we advocate for 1) eliminating automated enforcement and 2) focusing on infrastructure solutions proven to improve traffic safety. These two advocacy strategies ensure Black and Brown don't bear the brunt of harms from automated enforcement and from traffic violence.
As a result of Equiticity’s Mobility Justice in Chicago campaign, two Equiticity senior leaders – Senior Advisor for Mobility Innovation Ellen Partridge and myself were invited to serve on City of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Transportation Transition Team. This gave Equiticity the opportunity to call attention to the need to operationalize racial equity and racial justice in our planning processes.
While the Johnson Administration has not yet adopted all of Equiticity’s recommended policy positions, the relationships we have built have help raise awareness of the need to create infrastructure solutions that substitute for traffic enforcement policies that unfairly target Black and Brown people, as well as help us bring racial equity and environmental justice concerns into emerging plans for initiatives such as Bus Rapid Transit serving disinvested neighborhoods and city-funded sidewalk plowing.
2024 Advocacy Priorities
In 2024, Equiticity has ambitious advocacy plans, including:
Eliminating Automated Enforcement: As part of our 2023 Mobility Justice in Chicago campaign, Equiticity partnered with University of Chicago researchers to develop a tool to analyze available data on automated enforcement. In 2024, we aim to drive policy on automated enforcement by finding ways to use this tool in support of our advocacy efforts.
Reducing Police Investigatory Stops: In 2023, Equiticity was a partner in a project gathering community input on experiences with police investigatory stops and generating recommendations for the Chicago Police Department’s investigatory stop policy. While little progress toward change occurred in 2023, in the second half of the year, through a FOIA request, the Free2Move Coalition secured extensive documentation of CPD’s existing attitudes and policies toward investigatory stops – documentation that suggests investigatory stops unfairly target Black and Brown people. Equiticity and the Free2Move Coalition intend to use these resources to move the City of Chicago to ban all CPD pretextual stops.
I am honored to lead The Equiticity Racial Equity Movement and work alongside a passionate and brilliant team of colleagues and partners. I look forward to our continued work on behalf of racially marginalized people in our society.
May our collective work toward racial equity continue.
Warm regards,
Olatunji Oboi Reed
President & CEO, Equiticity
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