A Critical Question with Olatunji Oboi Reed

SPECIAL FEATURE

Olatunji Oboi Reed

Founding President & CEO of Equiticity

What is a current transportation issue that you find in need of a radical rethinking?

All of them. All of them. Transportation and planning in this country has deep, deep roots in structural racism and white supremacy. Your sector built monuments to racism for future generations to adore. Today we call those monuments highways, and they ravaged our neighborhoods here in Chicago and cities across the country. Your sector is more concerned about white lives than Black lives. Your sector is more concerned about bike lanes than young Black and Brown children. There is structural racism in this sector and the most important work your sector must do is the active dismantling of structural racism that is inherent within how you all operate. And next is putting the tactical strategies in place to ensure Black and Brown people are connecting to the services and the infrastructure that your sector provides in a way that improves life outcomes and reduces transportation inequities and related inequities. That should be the primary focus of the transportation and planning sector. It’s not, though, it’s not. People in your sector still need convincing that we [Black, Brown, and Indigenous people of color] are being harmed by how you all operate. I’ll give you a quick example. Here in Chicago, the three way intersection of 79th and Stony Island and South Chicago is one of the most dangerous intersections in the state of Illinois, and it’s been that way for many generations. It was that dangerous when my grandfather was coming up in this city. And to date, there’s been no wholesale re-engineering of that intersection. Yet your sector comes to us and says the solution to traffic violence is policing. There’s something fundamentally flawed, irreparably broken with a sector that takes that approach. So, naturally, there needs to be a dismantling of structural racism within your sector to ensure an active move away from enforcement to reduce traffic violence. Your sector is the root cause of traffic violence in our neighborhoods. It’s your sector that did that and you’re going to the police to ask

them to fix a problem that you created. So we need to move away from enforcement and move toward re-engineering our streets. We need to fix transit in this country. We need to restore operational and infrastructural funding at the federal level for transit. We need to financially support alternative models of mobility service delivery that includes mobility hubs that should be funded at the federal level. We need to support the communitybased organizations that are organizing around the socialization of mobility with, for example, community bicycle rides, neighborhood walking tours, group scooter rolls, public transit excursions, open street festivals, and related mobility events. There should be government dollars coming to community-based organizations to execute this work. We are doing this work with limited resources and little government support. When the truth is that these socialization activities - at Equiticity we call them Community Mobility Rituals (Figure 1) - they are transformative in our neighborhoods and they have the potential of helping to reduce violence in our communities. That’s the number one concern Black and Brown people have who live in major cities like Chicago. So when I think about the priorities of the planning sector, that’s what I think about.

Expanded Content

podcast

Continue the conversation with Oboi in our “Critical Conversations: The State of Transportation Planning in 2022” podcast series, available at planning.org/podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

➡ https://planning.org/podcast/

Cover photo: Equiticity Census Team (Photo by Norvell Tolbert Photography)

Olatunji Oboi Reed

Olatunji Oboi Reed serves as the founding President & CEO of Equiticity, a racial equity movement, operationalizing for racial equity, increased mobility, and racial justice to improve the lives of Black and Brown people across the United States. In 2015, Oboi was awarded The White House Transportation Champion of Change award. He serves as Co-Chair of the Transportation Equity Network, and Steering Committee Member of PolicyLink’s Transportation Equity Caucus. Oboi is a frequent speaker, panelist, and facilitator at conferences around the world.

Figure 1: Image of a Go Hub Friday Night Ride Series, one of Equiticity’s Mobility Rituals