On car-brain and respect

There are two very different types of respect; respect for a person as a human being, and respect for a person as an authority. But because we use the same word for these two different things, people often talk as if they were the same thing. So for example, when someone in authority says “If you don’t respect me, I won’t respect you.” What they’re actually saying (and justifying) is “If you don’t respect me as an authority, I won’t respect you as a human being.”

-Heather von Stackelberg, "Mugging the Muse", Medium, Oct 24, 2017

This came to mind when I was thinking about motonormativity. Auto-centric design and motor-normity is when the car says: "If you don't respect me as an authority, I won't respect you as a human being". When a car kills a pedestrian, people shrug and say: "must have been in the wrong place, or in the right place at the wrong time". Automobiles have no respect for anything that isn't an automobile. And that's the root of the enormous driver hostility toward bike lanes (especially protected ones) -- it's not just a denial of authority, but one backed up with consequences - enough reinforced concrete to damage a car. The use of flex posts and swale curbs rather than bollards and parking curbs is emblematic. It's nominally pedestrian-oriented design that does too little to challenge automotive authority. It's certainly better than nothing - like a crosswalk or a bike lane, it at least makes a claim that something other than a car has a right to the right of way. But data on sharrows (worthless, more dangerous than nothing) makes clear how much that is worth. 

Vehicular innovation

The core of the issue is that our roads are designed with cars as the default and they have a hard time accommodating anything else. What grudging accommodation exists has made the alternative (motorcycles, bicycles, walking) so risky and unpleasant that few people would tolerate it. But bike-sharing cracked that equilibrium, and e-bikes shattered it. We are in an era of vehicular innovation, and our design and regulatory frameworks simply no longer fit.

John Forester is dead

John Forester, "the father of vehicular cycling" died in 2020. 

Right now, his legacy is 'controversial'. I suspect in a generation his perspective will be more analogous to the miasma theory of disease. Research is pretty clear that many fields fail to move forward while their founding 'big man' continues to live, publish, and advocate. 

I understand where Forester came from -- I was a 3% 'confident and assured' cyclist playing chicken with cars basically up until the moment I started cycling with my wife. But 'vehicular cycling' functionally limited cycling participants to a tiny portion of the population, which limited its political support, which limited infrastructure development, which leads to our present mess. 

"You aren't a real cyclist unless you can ride in traffic" is bunk and always has been. "You aren't a real X unless you can do Y" is exclusionary gatekeeping. Vehicular cycling as a motorism--the idea that other modes can reach parity with cars by pretending to be cars.

Maybe vehicular cycling made sense when Forester was a teen, when the default car was the Morris Minor and there was a nationwide 30 mph speed limit. But in America, the most popular cars is a Ford F-150 with much higher mass, much better acceleration, and traveling at much higher speeds. 

Motor Socialism

 We have oriented our infrastructure investment to guarantee the provision of roadway and parking capacity in amounts necessity to eliminate scarcity. "Motor socialism" if you will. And our society has become structured around that investment schema, such that a lot of people are sustained by the status quo. A rupture with that is going to be bad for a lot of people, and they are going to fight hard to continue and preserve it.