Dr. Deb Niemeier

Professor

University of Maryland

Social Media and Community Engagement: The Bike Lane Wars

Abstract:

Most research agrees that while social media promotes community engagement, it can also increase the spread of misinformation. To examine the role of social media in urban design, I use recent dialogue on the addition of a bike lane in Washington DC. Not unexpectedly, the anti-bike lane complaints revolve around the economic impacts to adjacent businesses, increased safety hazards, and the loss of parking. The pro-bike lane contingents argue that bike lanes bring improvements in safety, significant beneficial health effects, and help with decarbonization. Consistent with other bike lane wars, the rhetoric becomes increasingly incendiary over time. This signals more than a simple dispute over design benefits, suggesting that opinions are deeply rooted in culture and ideology. In this talk, I will explore how the use of a moderated listserv amplified differences in opinion and increased misinformation about the design features of a proposed bike lane project in a wealthy, white, highly educated and almost exclusively Democratic community. More fundamentally, this talk will show that while the use of social media promotes civic engagement, it also can also increase the spread of misinformation even in a largely homogeneous community. This has important implications for the ways in which we can engage with community in designing a more equitable built environment.

Bio

Prof. Niemeier studies how formal and informal governance processes in urban planning shape community resilience. Her current research examines constraints to equitable technology adoption across aspects of the built environment. Her work in vehicle emissions shaped next generation state and federal policy in the early 2000s. In 2014, she was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “distinguished contributions to energy and environmental science study and policy development.” In 2015, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for foundational work on pro bono service in engineering. In 2017, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. More recently, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society (2021); received the Perry McCarty AEESP Founders’ Award (2022), and in 2023, she received the Franklin Institute’s Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, the first to a civil engineer. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. She holds the Clark Distinguished Chair and is a Professor in the Dept of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and an Affiliate Professor in the College of Information Studies and the Dept of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland. She directs the Center for Community Disaster and Resilience.

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