Unequal realities and racialized geographies: Men of color biking in Portland

Abstract

ABSTRACT The city of Portland has developed a national reputation as a bike-friendly city as a result of numerous citywide bike infrastructure plans, yet as is true across the country, ridership data indicates that people of color make up a small portion of regular cyclists. The current study draws from 25 interviews with men of color bicyclists in Portland, Oregon, and builds upon the work of Black and Latinx geographers, mobility justice scholars, and the scholarship on gentrification to explore the racialized nature of public cycling spaces. We use our data to argue that: (1) men of color bicyclists experience public cycling spaces as exclusionary; (2) uneven spatial dynamics, or racialized geographies, generate a sense of “out of place-ness” for bicyclists of color. Though some scholarship has considered the quantitative aspects of racialized bicycling inequalities, this paper is the first to elucidate the qualitative experiences of men of color bicyclists.