What does it mean to be “safe” on the road? Read our take on the Vision Zero Cities Journal, where we outline the need for equity, inclusiveness, and a retreat from zero-tolerance enforcement in #VisionZero and all street safety initiatives.
Donate to BPP today to fund our advocacy documentary, e-bike advocacy and other work supporting delivery cyclists in NYC.
ASK
The Biking Public Project is fundraising $4,000 to pay interpreters, give stipends to food delivery workers for their time with us, and film and edit a short low budget film on our project to share our story and best practices with our peers in the transportation, social justice, and academic universe.
See a 6-minute sneak preview of the film here: https://vimeo.com/244480966
WHY FUND US
- You support fair and safe working conditions for working cyclists
- You want working cyclists to have a voice in policy affecting them
- You want to see more positive and realistic media coverage of immigrant working cyclists
HOW WE SPEND OUR MONEY
We are a 100% volunteer organization and give the majority of our funds as stipends to food delivery workers for their time spent informing us of their work lives and interpreters so that we can understand the experiences of immigrant workers in different languages. We are also paying camera operators and editors modestly for their work on the film.
PROJECT - DELIVERING JUSTICE
The Biking Public Project has been working on a research project about food delivery cyclists in New York City for the last few years. It started with an observation that there was no data and no information about food delivery cyclists even though they are a ubiquitous presence in our city, hustling to get impatient New Yorkers food at their homes and offices.
WHAT WE ARE CURRENTLY DOING
As part of our participatory research project with the CUNY Graduate Center, we have been speaking to food delivery cyclists for the last year. We are learning who they are, concerns they share, and working conditions they face.
On October 19, 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a new policy to target delivery cyclists who use ebikes via stricter enforcement and fines. Since learning of this news, BPP has been working with delivery cyclists, immigrants rights organizations and workers rights groups in order to fight back against this racist and anti immigrant backlash against ebikes. We have collaborated with delivery cyclists to bring their concerns to the policy makers and we hope to continue to further build upon this work via demonstrations, and a rescinding of this unfair and unjust policy.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
In the past few years, we have:
WHO ARE WE?
We are a group of volunteers, which include an environmental sociologist, a filmmaker, urban planners, data analysts, map makers, students, an occasional lawyer, digital media producers, and do-gooders. We believe that immigrants who work at dangerous low wage jobs deserve respect and the right not to be criminalized by the justice systems for trying to exist.
For listeners of the Brian Lehrer show who want to support the Biking Public Project’s work with food delivery workers, donate here:
Following Mayor Bill De Blasio’s recent announcement about his impending crackdown on e-bikes, Biking Public Project in this article brings the voices of a group of food delivery workers who has shared some of their personal anecdotes from an industry where sub-minimum wages, unfair policing, harassment, and even assault affect their working conditions extensively.
Check out this terrific short video about delivery cycling from Samia Bouzid, a grad student at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. In the video, she talks with delivery workers, films a bit of delivery cycling, and talks with BPP about our work with delivery cyclists.
Check out our blog post about our work (it’s being hosted at intersectionalriding.com for more flexibility in presenting the data). Here’s also a direct link to the maps!
Delivering (in)Justice: Food Delivery Cyclists in New York CityIn NYC, we order food for delivery at all times of day and night. Delivered food feels like so luxurious especially when it’s pouring rain in the bitter cold outside while we’re bundled up warm inside. But all too often, many of us don’t like the people who deliver our food - these working food delivery cyclists who are usually low-income, male, and Asian and Latino immigrants. Despite the service they provide, many New Yorkers publicly denounce food delivery workers as ‘bad’ cyclists who threaten public safety.
The Biking Public Project has written a chapter about our English-language media analysis on food delivery cyclists in NYC that has been just published in the book, Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation: Biking for All? You can also read a pre-publication version of our chapter at this link
We identified 74 media stories from 2004-2014 that focused on food delivery cyclists in NYC.
The key takeaways from our media analysis include (as seen in our helpful infographic above designed by Mario Giampieri):
- Inequality and Erasure of Voice: Only about a quarter (20 of 74) of the media stories about food delivery cyclists included at least one quote from a food delivery cyclist. This erasure of voice means that the public story about food delivery workers is largely being crafted by more privileged New Yorkers, often the very same people who are being served food by the workers. In essence, food delivery cyclists are largely not given a chance to represent and defend themselves in the media.
- Visibly “Bad” Cyclists: the exclusion of delivery worker voices has consequences as we found that media stories without delivery worker voices were 68% more likely to depict the delivery workers as “bad” or “deviant” than those stories with delivery voices. Often immigrant cyclists are described as “invisible” cyclists in bike advocacy and planning circles but this depiction misses the high visibility of marginalized immigrant cyclists for overpolicing and being depicted as “bad” people.
- Safety From (not for) Delivery Workers: The idea of “public safety” was often framed as safety from immigrant delivery workers rather than hearing the workers’ needs for safety. Stories without delivery worker voices were twice as likely to recommend educating, policing or punishing delivery workers in the name of public safety. In contrast, stories with delivery worker voices were far more likely to talk about wage exploitation and the risk and harm the workers experience in the dangerous streets and through robberies and physical assaults on the job.
- Where’s the Infrastructure? Only 5% (4 of 74) of stories talked about how inadequate bike infrastructure might be related to delivery cyclist behavior. The Invisible Visible Man blog describes this conflict best when he writes: “Would I follow all the street direction rules if the restaurant where I worked were on a one-way street and it would add five minutes to every trip to go the right way round the block to reach it?” This lack of discussion about systematic infrastructure means that “bad” delivery cycling behavior is framed as an immoral defect of immigrant workers rather than as a byproduct of trying to do speedy deliveries in precarious tip-based jobs in streets built for cars.
- Inclusion of Delivery Worker Voice Changes the Story The stories that had delivery worker voices were exponentially more likely to humanize and contextualize the workers. Yichen Tu writes in Voices of NY: “Many delivery workers in Chinatown are saying, ‘The legislators have never ridden a bike before and they don’t know anything about food delivery.’ As a hot and humid summer approaches, wearing a vest and helmet will be a physical challenge to the workers… All these various regulations were intended to protect the safety of the delivery workers. However, those on the front line of food delivery feel that the regulations are not necessary. 'If the laws really want to protect the safety of deliverymen, then they should regulate the taxi cabs that cross into the bicycle lane.’”
Underlying this analysis is how these immigrant workers are often made “other” through their race/ethnicity and being seen as foreigners without documents. If instead of projecting illegality upon these workers, we can recognize that the food delivery cyclists who ride up to 12 hours a day have expert, intimate knowledge of our inadequate and unjust streets. As such, we suggest that if we changed the street infrastructure to meet the needs of delivery cyclists who ride everywhere and in every direction, bicycling would be vastly safer and much more convenient for many vulnerable and marginalized people who cycle or could cycle.
BPP Contributors to this book chapter include: Helen Ho, Dorothy Le, Mario Giampieri, Xiaodeng Chen, Melyssa Banks, and Do Lee.
Delivering Justice projectOften when we talk about promoting cycling in New York City, we see images of young hip people riding around on their fixies or the well-dressed professional tooling around on a Citibike. Yet when we actually look at the street, the largest number of cyclists in NYC are often immigrant food delivery workers. Food delivery cyclists do important work - they provide food in convenient and cost effective ways for New Yorkers as a key part in NYC’s restaurant industry, but their work has been misunderstood and devalued. However, a steep hidden price of delivery is carried by the food delivery cyclists who are usually low-income, male, and Asian and Latino immigrants. Delivery cyclists face tenuous, informal employment and are disproportionately targeted for ticketing and harassment while riding. The nature of food delivery, which depends upon speed and efficiency while navigating busy streets exposes delivery workers to unsafe working conditions that easily results in physical harm and unpaid recovery leave without healthcare or workers compensation. These working cyclists are one of the most underrepresented, unheard, and exploited labor forces in NYC. Yet many New Yorkers who order delivery food often demonize food delivery workers as ‘bad’ cyclists who greatly threaten public safety.
We can choose to hear food delivery cyclist voices and experiences, yet often we do not. BPP has started a new participatory research project with food delivery workers called “Delivering Justice.” In this project, BPP seeks to support and empower food delivery cyclists by partnering with them to characterize abuses, create counter-narratives, and generate actions to improve labor and street conditions. We plan to do a lot of surveying of food delivery cyclists along with some focus groups and perhaps even some mapping and other data collection and analysis.
The need to engage immigrant food delivery workers is underscored by recent efforts to raise the minimum wage, the city’s Vision Zero street safety initiative, and national discussions about equity and opportunity. To this end, our work strives to help elevate the voices of the marginalized cyclists as essential to how we construct just and equitable streets and bike infrastructure in our city.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be also coming out with posts about some of the preliminary piloting work we have done including a media analysis we did last year about food delivery cyclists.
If you’re interested in helping out or connecting with us on this project, let us know!
