When Jessica Alvarado Gamez moved to Chicago earlier this year, she drove around to get her bearings. She couldn’t help noticing how close she came to cyclists.

“I can easily go into the painted bike lanes,” she said. Some Chicago cyclists have observed the same problem, resulting in the refrain, “paint is not protection.”

Alvarado Gamez is WBEZ’s Roy Howard fellow. She focuses on data reporting, so she dug into city data to understand why cycling in Chicago is so dangerous and what cyclists want done.

In this episode, host Erin Allen talks to Alvarado Gamez about the path toward safer biking infrastructure.