I hate starting out with a disclaimer for something that I've written but in this case, I believe that it is warrented. In this case I can honestly say that I do not have a well deliniated opinion on the matter. I can see merits in several different viewpoints but nothing motivating enough to make me feel compelled to take a strong viewpoint. I find myself comfortable accepting the way things are but expecting that over time, things will continue to evolve.
The Backstory
A few weeks ago in Chicago a cyclist was killed in an "alleycat" unsanctioned race when he ran a red light and was struck by a SUV crossing the intersection with a green light. This was covered on The
FredCast Cycling Podcast and Dave Bernstein, the presenter, played a couple excerpts from people talking about the death. One was by someone discribed as "Mr. Wilson" who attributed the death to our modern car dominated culture. The Fredcast editorialized at length about how wrong this viewpoint was.
Listening to the commentary, I came to believe that Mr. Bernstein, the FredCast presenter was not familiar with the viewpoint that Mr. Wilson was presenting and the way that the clip by Mr. Wilson was edited either by the news source or The FredCast obscured the ideas behind it in such a way that it made Mr. Wilson sound irrational. Without being to conspiritorily minded, I expect that the majority of the editing was done by the news media to package the idea for a time constrained media outlet such as the television or radio news. Unfortunately, stripping Mr. Wilson's commentary down to that very short clip makes it impossible to understand the larger idea that Mr. Wilson was driving at.
I do not know Mr. Wilson. I have never talked to him. I do not even have 3rd or 4th hand knowledge of what he actually believes. However, in his commentary, he used some key words and phrases that indicate to me that he was an adherant of a particular viewpoint that I
am familiar with. The following is my attempt to articulate that viewpoint for the purposes of promoting understanding and possibly clarifying Mr. Wilson's comments.
I originally intended to make this a email to Mr. Bernstein that he could excerpt on the FredCast but as I thought about it I realized that at the root of the misunderstanding was the editing and repackaging of a viewpoint in a compact format so that it could be presented on either radio or TV where time is a commodity. The FredCast is not quite as time constrained but it does have limits and since this idea takes some explaining and context, I figured that I would take the time to post it to my dusty neglected philosophical ranting blog and give Mr. Bernstein the opportunity to refer to the idea in a full length format without taking up excessive time in his podcast.
Notes on Living Memory
As things drift back in time and people tend to view them differently. This goes beyond just nostalgia. For some reason when people look back in time, they tend to remember the good better than they remember the bad. Thus times at early in living memory are often considered some kind of "Golden Years". They somehow omit most of the problems, that were extant at that time and so the retrospective image that people end up with is bathed in a rosey glow. I would argue that the 50's in america are currently viewed like that.
When something slips beyond living memory, this tendency becomes even more pronounced because there are few if any people who can say something along the lines of "It wasn't like that, I was there." Pre-living memory increasingly becomes an expression of what people who were never there wish it was like. It becomes context, a setting if you will, where they can express their fondest desires. It is very seldom, that people go back to historical records and verify that the way they believe it was is in fact the way it truly was. Yet they continue to believe that thier perspective on the way things were, is in fact the way it was.
Habituation
Slowly, things move from living memory into history where they become stories and fables that are maybe backed up by records of one type or another. Those of us who are fairly young start out with the way things are and take it for granted, we become habituated to that way of being but maybe when we are old and we look back with nostalgia and think about the way things were, we get misty eyed for the things that we lost. The old people talk about $0.35 gas, $0.10 loaves of bread, and a flourishing mainstreet where people communed and lingered at locally owned and operated stores. Those ideas are all still within living memory. The horse and buggy days where downtown was muddy streets dominated by horses and pedestrians and the occasional buggy is drifting to the edge of living memory. Maybe a few of our oldest grandparents or great grandparents remember the end of those days in their youth. At this point it is probably fair to say, that few if any actually remember the days before cars and motorized transit were ubiquidious. The time before motorized transit has now dropped beyond the horizon of living memory.
Most if not all of us who are listening to podcasts of blogging, grew up in the 60's through the 90's well after the car culture had been developed into a fairly fully formed edifice. The rules of the road and even the road markings and the design of the signs were fairly well established by the time we became aware of them. We take them for granted as if they hold the full authority of history going back to the dawn of time. The truth of the matter is, that most of "the rules of the road" were solidified between 1900 and 1950 as a response to ever increasing automobile traffic. Before that time, there was less of a need for rules governing traffic. There were many times fewer vehicles and they opporated at a much slower relative speed. Therefore, most situations could be dealt with though either common sense or through other means of human to human interaction.
I remember hiking in Redwood National forest along the Northern California coast. Part of the trail that we were on, was the old road bed for Highway 1. The current Highway 1 had been moved inland a considerable distance. This old road bed had features which appeared odd to a person habituated to modern automobile culture. There were, taps of springs and basins along the road where people could stop and give water to their horses or refill their radiator or maybe even stop and get a drink. These taps and basins didn't have pullouts. Presumably, people would just stop and get the water that they needed. Traffic was probably light enough and slow enough that having a car or a horse stopped in the road didn't provide much of an impediment to traffic. People would just go around them in the opposing lane or stop and have a drink themselves. Today, stopping in the middle of a main highway to have a drink would be unthinkable. Your car would likely be rear ended by another vehicle going 70MPH. Having horses going 5-15mph (I really don't know how fast a horse goes. Excuse my ignorance if that is considerbly wrong.) share a main highway with cars would seem dangerous. In the Amish and Menonite areas where people still use horse and buggy to get around, they are required by the current vehicle codes to have huge obvious
reflectors to warn cars. There are also signs along the side of the road warning motorists that they may be in an area where there are horse drawn carriages. Our modern high speed, motor vehicles have come to so dominate our roads that both motorists and these older slower modes of transport have to take special care.
I believe that a key to understanding Mr. Wilson's point of view is to roll back time, to the more genteel days when automobiles were not as dominant, to think back and consider what we have lost as we have adopted the automobile as our primary form of tranportation. He was referencing a time before we had become habituated to the way things are with automobiles dominating our transport. Much of this could be the overly positive reflective form of invented nostalgia that I mentioned before. I'm not sure, I wasn't there. I grew up in the 1970's not before the turn of the 20th century.
The Rules of the Road
If you look closely at the rules of the road in most states, they are published by the "Department of Motor Vehicles" or some such entity that implies motorized transport. However, the regulations may be called something like the "Vehicle Code" rather than the "Motor Vehicle Code". A department whose purpose is smooth the interactions between motor vehicles is given the task of regulating all vehicles. Non-motor vehicles are basically an after thought. Mr. Wilson would probably argue that the department of motor vehicles was created to regulate the interactions between motor vehicles and solve the problems that were being caused by higher speed motor vehicle interactions. He would argue that before the days of motor vehicles, there was little need for a department of "vehicles" and that roads and trails were a shared resource that didn't require labyrinthian regulation to manage. Horses, pedestrians, and carriages got along fairly well without government regulation. It was only when people got sealed up, insulated from each other, in high speed motor vehicles did they need government to step in and define a set of "rules of the road".
One example that I've heard was that on some college campuses there are converging pedestrian sidewalks going across a quad or something like that. Between classes, there are a huge number of students converging on intersections of these sidewalks most of them pedestrians but also a few skateboards and a few bike and all going different directions. Yet we do not need a pedestrian version of a traffic light to ensure safety and avoid dangerous collisions. The converging traffic somehow weaves in and out of itself safely without the need for regulation or a traffic light. It is only when, high speed, high mass motor vehicles are added to the mix that we need regulation.
Some who are very radical would argue that our default state is freedom and that the Department of MOTOR Vehicles has no right to take away an individual's rights of passage on or use of public land the streets, just for the benefit of one constituency, the motorists. They would argue that the pubic lands are held in trust for us all. They would argue by giving dominion over these public throughways to the department of MOTOR vehicles shifts the power too far in favor of
motorists and that other users of these public resources are marginalized by the department of MOTOR vehicles.
They believe that all users of the public lands should treated on equal footing, they argue the public right of ways between private property should be given to all people for all uses. They should be sort of like parks where children can plan, where bicycles and pedestrians can move freely without fear and where motor vehicles instead of being granted almost exclusive use of these public lands should be just another user of these right of ways. If they in their use of these public lands, end up hurting one of the other users of these public lands, then they should be prosecuted for the injury as a form of assault with a deadly weapon. In other words, cars would be required to creep along in a milieu of pedestrians, cyclists, and very likely children's baseball or kickball games.
For them the slogan, "Share the road" has an almost opposite meaning than it does to who have a less radical point of view. Instead of encouraging motorists to share the road with cyclists and pedestrians, they believe that most people should be cyclists or pedestrians and that they should share the road with the occasional well behaved car.
What have we lost?
Those people who have such an extreme viewpoint about the place of motor vehicles and motorists often point back to what we have lost in the process of creating a motor vehicle centric society. Making an exhaustive list is much more work than I have time for but here are some of the ideas that I have heard passed about.
Where do the children play? With all the land being sucked up into private property, there are very few abandoned fields where children can gather and play. Parks are few and far beween and often too small. The community owned property between privately owned land, has now been given over completely to automobiles and so the days of children having the opportunity to play in the street with the other neighborhood children have gone. Why do we give such a large percentage of our public resource to motorists?
Communities used to be formed on the streets between the privately owned properties. People would walk down the streets and see their neighbors and they would be going slowly enough that they might talk to them for a few moments. They weren't hermetically sealed up in climate controlled steel cages with their own entertainment systems from the moment that they leave their attached garages to the point in which they arrived at work. They interacted with each other and got to know each other. People who commuted around the same time and might be going to the same or similar destination might talk along the way and build social connections.
The speeds were lower and so people might stop at a place of business between where there were going and where they were. This helped build local commerce. What vehicles were smaller and people were encumbered by loads. Therefore people would shop on a daily basis and that would lead to more social interaction between people and local businesses. You didn't want to go 10 miles to a supermarket in a car buy a huge cart full of groceries. How could you carry that even if you had a horse? You passed through the local produce seller, the local butcher, the local grocer and bought what you needed for that day.
Because the speeds were lower it was impractical to live far away from your work. People gathered to live where the work was and the wages given by the work had to make it affordable to live in that community. That also meant that the people supporting that community also had to be able to live in that community and had to have wages that enabled them to do so. You didn't get situations where all the police and school teachers and house keepers couldn't afford to live in a community where they worked. They were part of the community and known by the community and involved in building and maintaining the community. Some argue that this practically solves the problems with affordable housing and breaks down income disparities by pushing more people toward the median income and therefore supports the middle class. Some also argue that this also solves problems with social isolation, and lack of civic support and political participation. They argue that spending a large percent of your life involved in the community leads to a greater personal investment in the community and a greater willingness to work for the good of the community as a whole.
When the right of ways between private property are not completely given over to motor vehicles, then they do not need to be paved. They can become wildlife cooridors and some might fall into disuse become wildlife refuges.
Furthermore, it takes much less energy to travel at lower speeds and so cars do not need to be as heavy, strong and powerful. Thus they can use vastly less fuel and put vastly less CO2 into the atmosphere. Also if travel across distances becomes increasingly time consuming because speeds are lower, then people are less likely to travel far. Lighter and less powerful cars also take fewer resources to build. Furthermore, when the the speeds, weight, and maximum distance that a vehicle needs to travel goes down considably, then alternative means of powering it such as batteries and fuel cells suddenly become much more practical. All of these effects multiplied together drastically cut down our environmental footprint.
Conclusion
So I think that Mr. Wilson's argument that the cyclist's death was caused by our culture's habituation to motor vehicle culture was poorly edited and therefore misunderstood. I believe that he was not looking at the world from the perspective of obedience to the current law of the land. He was fully convinced that Ghandi was right when he said, "It is the duty of a ethical man to break unethical laws". He was also grieving for a comrade and maybe not as articulate as he would have liked at that particular moment. However, he was probably looking at the world through a wider angle lens, one that either looked back to the days before motor vehicles dominate our culture and our civic life or one looking forward to a day when or society is reorganized in such a way that automobiles share the common space between private property with other users and the huge envionmental footprint caused by our car dominated culture is viturally eliminated.
Addendum: My personal views
Far from being an impartial reporter of someone else's viewpoint, in writing this I have unconciously expressed my sympathies to a rather radical viewpoint reguarding car culture. However, I'm far to pragmatic to believe that the way achieve it is to pretend that "rules of the road" don't exist or that they don't apply to me. Personally, I try to take the longest view possible and believe that our current car culture is entirely unsustainable and that through environmental necessity it will go away and be replaced by something more akin to the vision now considered extremely radical by those fully habituated into car culture. However, I believe that unless there is a calamity of remarkable purportions like a sudden acceleration of global warming, this change of mindset and social organization will have to be gradual and span several generations.
