Prentis Grayson is the former director of outreach and advocacy for Trailblazers. Their mission “is to lead the development of an innovative regional recreation and transportation movement that places trails, cycling, and active transportation infrastructure at the core of an inclusive, vibrant, and healthy culture.”
Active transportation is defined by the operative work active, that is, traveling without motorized means. Ideally, active transportation is paired with public transportation to decrease carbon emissions and household spending on transport. The effects of those emissions and excess transportation costs, though, do not affect all communities in the same fashion.
According to Grayson, “when transportation is not equitable, cities build at an inequitable scale.” In his work he has witnessed that active transportation can be built with intrinsic bias that makes it unavailable to impoverished corridors of Northwest Arkansas. Some of that bias is grandfathered into our zoning laws, which in some municipalities, have been the same for the past eight decades. Restrictive zoning has served as a challenge to building the kinds of active transportation networks and the infrastructure that supports them.
Trailblazers’ new blog, Shifting Culture, brings the disparities in active transportation access and knowledge to the fore. The organization’s equity analysis reports gauge the access and utilization of active transportation within marginalized groups. From those reports and their other research, Trailblazers advocates for the extension/completion of sidewalks and trails and more outreach and resources for those communities. They facilitate “Adult first rides,” which are guided classes bike rides for adults who never learned to ride a bike and after the course they get a free bike. The classes tend to be 70 percent BIPOC and women and the nonprofit works with CanopyNWA to teach in various languages.
Trailblazers identified one of the barriers to cycling as being the price of a quality bicycle. There is also a lack of representation in professional cycling and cycling in general. Grayson also believes that people need to feel safe on trails, but minority groups feel especially unsafe. Though, zoning laws stand in the way by creating large sprawling cities that prioritize speedy car travel. He argues that the best ways to remove barriers is to construct more dedicated bike lanes and increase the density of housing to make bike commuting more feasible.
Much has been made about the separate value of better housing and active transportation’s effect on the quality of NWA life, but neither of them exists in a vacuum. Increasing the density of towns and cities across the region will make it easier for everyone to get around in increasingly safe, efficient, and affordable ways. That density combined with the proliferation of construction will build the foundation upon which bike lanes, paths, and expanded walking areas can flourish.
Written by Bryson Austin