[URBAN NOTE] "Why are so few Black people cycling in Toronto?"

[rfmcdonald]

D.C. Matthew writes at length in NOW Toronto about the various reasons why black people are so underrepresented in the population of cyclists. Some of the reasons are more benign than others.

People are connected to various social networks (the web of social relationships in which we are embedded), and researchers have convincingly - if not uncontroversially - argued that the behaviour of persons in our networks can affect our own in various ways. The idea is that a behaviour can spread as people pick up unconscious social signals that it's normal.

But if more people are cycling because their friends are cycling, why aren't more Black people cycling? Don't they have friends, too? Yes, but it's a well-studied fact that social networks are often less racially and ethnically diverse than we think.

Typically, when scholars study the racial homogeneity of social networks, their aim is to learn whether and how they work to disadvantage minorities by providing whites with privileged access to valuable resources such as jobs. If, for example, what matters most in getting a job is not what you know but who you know, and whites have historically dominated the most sought-after jobs, then it's easy to see why homogeneous networks might be troubling.

But racially homogenous networks can also serve as conduits for the racially differentiated spread of healthy behaviours, and one of these is cycling.

This point finds some support when we look at the neighbourhoods where cycling rates are highest. In Toronto, the areas with the highest number of utilitarian cyclists (including Parkdale, Little Portugal and nearby 'hoods) tend to be in the west end.

Although these neighbourhoods aren't among the city's whitest, they're not the Blackest either.