Wednesday October 30
2:00–3:30 pm ET
We hosted a groundbreaking plenary session during the ITE Annual Meeting, featuring a dynamic panel and diving into how we can challenge our perceptions around race and transportation. We had so many questions from our audience go unanswered, that this webinar is an opportunity to dive back into the conversation. We are bringing our original panelists and moderator back, virtually, to answer your questions and more.
From our moderator, Cipriana Patterson, “As transportation professionals, we aren’t just planning, designing, engineering, and implementing. We have the capacity to begin to address decades of injustice, dis-service and discriminatory practices, and policies. We have the capacity to literally change lives with the way we bring projects and access to communities… We challenge you to shift out of the “neutral expert” zone and own the power and responsibility to do things differently.” Let’s use this time to continue the conversation on how we can do that – together.
While statistics paint a clear picture of racial disparities in our transportation systems (Black Americans experience a 73% higher passenger fatality rate than white American and face longer public transit commutes for healthcare despite similar distances traveled), they often fail to capture the lived experiences behind these numbers. We need to challenge ourselves to go beyond numbers and connect with people and their experiences. This session will delve into current disparities by highlighting the experiences of people who have lived through these inequities. It will examine how planning decisions and infrastructure development have perpetuated safety inequities and marginalization, where planning has succeeded, and how we can collectively do better. The session will conclude by focusing on innovative solutions and transformative approaches that attendees can take and apply to create a more just and equitable transportation future.
The plenary also featured the viewing of a compilation of excerpts from the documentary When They Speak: Stories of Black Men in America, a video produced by Cipriana Thompson Photography and Sunchase Media that presents candid and honest viewpoints of America from the perspectives of Black men, and from a COMTO DC panel discussion on the Intersectionality of Race and Transportation. They share their experiences and feelings about how they respond individually to the general societal approach to them as Black men.
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