Opposition to car dominance of US cities limits itself if it acknowledges no enemies. Feel-good messaging like: giving drivers more options, reducing congestion for drivers by building bike paths to get other cars off the road, etc. Likewise with support for universal (ie, not means-tested) subsidies like perpetual low gas prices, free parking, no tolls, etc., while only adding funding for bike paths and transit. All of this avoids the tension that should be built up and maintained to press toward change. There is a real political disagreement about what US transportation (but also housing) should look like, people are dying every day, and most drivers are on the wrong side of the fight.
Introduction / Caveats
This post implicitly references Waging a Good War, A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968, by Thomas Ricks and was specifically prompted by Bret Devereaux’s guest appearance on Frames of Space. There is no winning formula here. Only a description of the tension between messaging in a way that appeals to individual drivers, versus messaging that could lead to larger scale change.
To get it out of the way, yes we live under car dependency and I understand why people drive. I drive sometimes. Even drivers doing their best, from car selection to driving habits, should be aware of the grave responsibility they have and acknowledge others shouldn’t subsidize them versus an otherwise equal non-driver. They’re still driving on public infrastructure around people who have to worry about them. They’re using heavy equipment, not a microwave. In that hypothetical best case for driving, that driver should have the emotional bearing to accept some transportation commentary that punches up at them. Everyone needs some kinds of help, some people do need help driving because alternatives don’t work for them for particular reasons, and they should want narrowly tailored programs for them. So if you’re one of those hypothetical good drivers, nothing below should bother you.
Over recent decades there has been growing appreciation of urbanist ideas and even some progress on transportation improvements in US cities. At the same time, as David Zipper put it, “The USA is the only rich country where the risk of dying in a crash rose from 2010-23.” I want to avoid victims of car dominance having to resort to something as kinetic at the Dutch Stop de Kindermoord movement scaled up to the size and degree of car dominance of the United States. (I would not apply the word “violence” to that movement in the context of 40k traffic fatalities a year, but in a nation full of guns already frequently used in road rage incidents there is no way for that style of disagreement to avoid escalating to bodily harm). So I think it is crucial to learn what we can from previous non-violent movements.
To summarize a great deal, post-war American wealth enabled the government to choose car dominance as a camera-friendly form of racial segregation. Older cheaper methods were a cold war political liability. Instead of government agents continuing to enforce segregation and limiting mobility directly, middle and upper class drivers did it in their personal vehicles while driving between economically stratified parts of newly built sprawl on infrastructure provided by the state and with the backing of police. This is still the system we live under. Car dominance costs Americans a great deal, in terms of money, injuries, and death. It makes many people’s mobility to everything from jobs to recreational opportunities largely conditional on having access to a car and ability to drive. It raises the costs of other necessities, primarily housing and healthcare. All of these harms falling disproportionately on marginalized groups, who can least afford to drive. Our infrastructure does need to be rebuilt, but the quantity and quality of driving is crucial too. If drivers drove slower starting tomorrow, bikes would be safe for a great number of trips. If drivers drove less often then bus service would markedly improve. Etc. Car dominance is a product of both car-dependent infrastructure and choices by individual drivers.
How Car Dominance is Unlike Targets of Other Non-Violent Movements
One strategy of non-violent movements is to bait the state into overreaction, to make the latent violence in the system visible to everyone. But with traffic violence, individual drivers are intermediaries. There is effectively no way to bait the state into committing violence directly. This is one reason to avoid their framing that crashes are accidents, but clarifying that nomenclature is not enough. Drivers are using violence on a regular basis, and organizing against them as such is a clearer way to understand why infrastructure improvements have to be made. Opposing violent drivers also provides an independent justification for road improvements. Hypothetically, maybe nobody will use a new concrete protected bike lane. Maybe no lives will be saved. But the existence of the bike path will anger the worst people who are ruining our communities, and that would be enough reason to build it. That’s not to excuse the state. We should also apportion blame to traffic “engineers” and other government actors. But many culpable leaders have died of old age while the violence continues, the story can’t stop with them unless their creations will remain forever.
Furthermore, if activists were to open themselves up to violence (as they have done in other movements), it cannot be effective without a commonly understood narrative. If somebody chooses to walk somewhere it should legally be safe to do so, and is killed by a driver on a hostile road, the public will blame or ignore the victim. We do not yet have a good message at our disposal for blaming the “engineers” culpable for the road nor the drivers who choose to drive dangerously through a public urban space because they think it’s somewhere pedestrians won’t be. If all the blame goes to the “engineers” and officials responsible for the infrastructure, and drivers are innocent, then drivers could reasonably object that pedestrians should stay out rather than designing safer infrastructure to slow down cars.
So many people in the US, especially people with cultural and economic power, have driving as a core part of their identity. That makes it hard for non-violent tactics of interfering with driving to get across to them. Non-violent delays for drivers will alienate those people who want to speed through cities. Unlike, e.g., proprietors of a business engaging in discrimination, there is not one narrow elite of drivers who can be pressured, while everyone else mostly goes somewhere else.
One way to thread that needle of using non-violent tactics to pressure a specific opponent, without triggering a reaction from the vast majority of voters, is to protest new car dealerships. As well as being the main source of new vehicles on the road, franchise dealership owners are very politically powerful across the US. We saw a related phenomenon with the Tesla Takedown movement outside of their showrooms. But unfortunately that never expanded to cars generally, and people even cheered as drivers bought different cars instead. Thereby ignoring that weakening the auto market by not buying at all is a much stronger political statement, even against the owner of that company specifically, than merely switching to a different car. Protests at new car dealers would be one way to exert pressure for, e.g., shifting to smaller vehicles to make that city safer.
Our attention is saturated and traffic violence is so ubiquitous, how can we craft a focused message? Civil Rights era leaders used the fact that if a major news network recorded a particular incident, many people would see it. Minneapolis protestors had many sources uploading video to social media, but ICE killing non-violent civilians was a focal point people across the nation could recognize and see others recognize. But traffic violence happens every day in every city. Drivers don't pay attention to even local deaths. There has been messaging emphasizing the tragedy of drivers killing transportation planners Riley O’Neil and Louisa Gag, but even that is not getting much national attention. The state, through police reports and court proceedings, sets the default message after so many crashes, and no advocate can have the resource to overwhelm all of those official responses that imply that the system is fine. If there are so many tragic crashes that there’s no way to make everyone focus on any given example, then maybe we might as well go the other direction and talk about every single driver as part of the collective. Treat motordom as a single entity of focus and blame, with particular drivers as mere elements. This is something like a rhetorical version of joint and several liability in law - where if a plaintiff has $N damages and there are two or more defendants, each of the defendants on their own is liable for up to $N until the plaintiff gets their full compensation. So if a driver speeds and kills a victim, instead of saying they are a small bean who was only doing what others did on the big wide road “engineers” made for speeding, we could acknowledge they are a licensed driver who chose to participate in a danger practice along with other people who also value driving faster over human life.
One aspect of other non-violent movements to force change to government behavior, is to pressure the state to protect the movement’s members from irregular or street violence from opponents. But so many people identify with driving, that they object to traffic law enforcement in protection of non-drivers (DOTs should by default enforce their rules on their users with their own personnel, nor armed police getting involved in minor infractions, alas). Drivers who would otherwise be supportive of protecting marginalized groups object to automated non-carceral enforcement through fines, and even object to private insurance companies charging dangerous drivers more. As if those premium payments, that cover a small fraction of harm to victims in the US, are a bigger problem than crash victims left injured or dead. Acknowledging this huge gap in state protection for non-drivers basically requires also acknowledging that drivers in general, and the most dangerous drivers in particular, are the direct beneficiaries.
If car dominance is only a systemic problem, then nobody is responsible for anything. But car dominance is also a matter of personal agency. Drivers who are choosing to buy cars more harmful than they need, to drive more often than they need, to avoid following safety rules, etc., should be blamed for doing so. The corollary of this multifaceted blame is giving many more opportunities to learn and improve, short of giving up driving altogether. Drive to work, but don’t go out of your way for a Starbucks drive through. Get a car to get your kid to the doctor, but don’t buy a truck to show how manly you are. Look at the road in front of you instead of texting or fiddling with the audio, using knobs or otherwise. Stop speeding. Especially avoid speeding if a violent tailgating driver behind you wants you to, because people who aren’t surrounded by a metal cage are a lot more vulnerable than you are. Etc. Theoretically identifying and blaming harmful choices could influence drivers to stop. In practice most drivers are going to keep being anti-social as long as neither concrete walls nor fines stop them, but maybe we can influence people with some good habits to stick to them rather than adopting the bad behavior of fellow drivers.
This does not mean animosity is the goal or an endless state of affairs. “Driver” is not an immutable characteristic. After progress has been won, then conciliation can occur with positive-sum agreements. Many drivers in car dependent US cities would be better off if we had policies to improve their health and their finances. We should expand transit service and have ebike credits, etc, to help more people enjoy alternatives. But as long as people are driving, they should take that responsibility seriously including being aware of the negative externalities of driving. Proponents of transportation reform should not be coddling the emotions of drivers at all, especially drivers at higher than average risk of harming others.