Can we design better public streets?

Episode Transcript
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David Prytherch (00:04):
My journey to this book began through the
rabbit holes of trying tounderstand how the street became
the space it was.

Peter Norton (00:12):
Justice has been a very important frame for looking
at streets historically.Engineers are not used to the
vocabulary of justice.

Mimi Sheller (00:22):
So we started this approach called the new
mobilities paradigm, where wewanted to put mobility at the
center of our thinking.

Hello. I'm David Prithridge, professor of
geography at Miami University inOxford, Ohio. I'm author of
Reclaiming the Mobility, JusticeBeyond Complete Streets,
published by the amazingUniversity of Minnesota Press.
Like many listeners, I've longbeen fascinated by public
streets, the streets that wetraverse daily and where we
spend so much of our lives. As ageographer, I want to understand

(00:57):
why they have the shape they do.
As a pedestrian cyclist, I'velong wondered why they're so
hostile. And as a planner, Iwonder how they might be
different and better. And that'swhy I'm honored today to be
joined on this podcast byDoctor. Peter Norton, Associate
Professor of History in theDepartment of Engineering and
Society at the University ofVirginia. Peter is author of The

(01:21):
Dawn of the Motor Age in theAmerican City by MIT Press and
The Illusory Promise ofHigh-tech Driving, by Island
Press, among many other awardwinning publications.
Hello, Peter.

Hello. It's a pleasure to be here.

It's wonderful to have you. We're also joined
by Doctor. Mimi Scheller. Mimiis the dean of the Global School
at the Worcester PolytechnicInstitute, WPI. Mimi is founding
co editor of the journalMobilities and the author of The
Politics of Movement in an Ageof Extremes published by Verso,

(01:59):
Advanced Introduction toMobilities published by Edward
Elgar, and so many othergroundbreaking books and
articles.
So welcome, Mimi.

Thanks, David. Hi, David. Hi, Peter. Great to be
with you.

Alright. Wonderful. And now I must say at
the outset what an honor it isto be joined by such original
and powerful thinkers. There's aquote that goes back to Isaac
Newton beyond, but he said thatif I have seen further, it is by
standing on the shoulders ofgiants. And I could go on at
length how much my own modestwork stands on the shoulders of

(02:32):
giants like Peter Norton andMimi Scheller, but suffice it to
say that copies of their bookssit over my shoulder on my
office bookshelf dog eared fromuse, and I'm sure I'm not the
only person who uses theirfoundational work in their own
work.
Before we get into what I'm surewill be a really, really rich
conversation, it would be goodto first preface it from where

(02:56):
we're coming from, the questionsthat drive our own work related
to mobility and streets. Andsince I guess I'm the host, I
guess I'll start. So I'm ageographer. I'm driven by
questions like how has thepublic street taken its current
shape? It may seem strange tosome listeners to think of
streets having the geography.

(03:18):
Often we think of streets asinfrastructure, and that's why
Peter in a department thatinvolves engineers is where we
typically look. But even if youdo some basic back of the napkin
math, there are something like4,000,000 miles of roadways in
The United States. Making someassumptions about standard lane
width, it reveals that there'ssomething like 20,000 square

(03:39):
miles of roadway surface in TheUnited States. And that's an
area greater than the four smallstates combined. Locally,
streets comprise more than 25%of American downtown land area
and 80% of municipally ownedpublic space.
We spend a lot of our lives onthe streets, typically an hour a
day driving or riding invehicles, in addition to time

(04:01):
walking, biking, rolling, orriding transit. We socialize on
streets, whether passinggreetings or long conversations.
All of us live adjacent tostreets, and unhoused people
often live on them. Streets havea vast territory whose geography
profoundly structures our livesand how we get around. So if you

(04:23):
navigate streets like meprimarily, or as I do as a
pedestrian cyclist, you can'thelp wonder why roadways are so
auto dominated and hostile,indeed deadly to non drivers.
More than seven thousand fivehundred pedestrians are killed
on US roadways every year.That's more than twenty per day
on average. Now this raises,those people who are killed are

(04:45):
predominantly the mostvulnerable among us. They're
people of low income. They'reolder or younger people.
And so this raises some prettyprofound equity issues and
questions like, well, what ismobility justice exactly? What
would a just street look like intheory and practice? Now, for
those of us who are planners orpolicymakers, I get to teach

(05:06):
planning. I'm a citizen planner.I'm privileged to serve as a
city councilor here in Oxford.
We naturally wonder, can't wedesign better streets? This
starts with the basics oftransportation, safety and
equity. An engineer would callthat accommodating other users.
Streets are places, and so thereare larger issues that I explore
in the book of how streets mightbecome not only more equitable

(05:27):
transportation facilities butalso more vibrant and convivial
spaces, not just on the marginsbut across the entire right of
way. These are the questionsthat are at the heart of my
book, Reclaiming the Road, whereI explore the ongoing reclaiming
of American roadways from cars,especially through and beyond
the watershed moment of theCOVID-nineteen pandemic, not

(05:48):
only for more diverse forms ofmobility, but also for broader
public life.
So in the book, I ponder whatthese changes might mean for how
we think about mobility andpublic infrastructure and what
might constitute a just street.It's part of a movement to
rethink mobility and Americanstreets that I think is as
significant in theory as it isin practice. As I say, I stand

(06:09):
on the shoulders of giants whohave been pondering these
questions for a long time. SoI'll start with you Mimi. Can
you share what drives MimiSchettler when it comes to
mobility in the public street?

Okay, thanks David. And I'm excited also,
I'll just say, to see your workthat's pushing forward this
examination of mobility,justice, and streets, and
transportation equity, and whatit means today. My work started,
almost twenty five years ago.I'm a sociologist and I was
working with sociologist inEngland named John Urie, who was

(06:45):
very well known for his work onmobilities also. And we started
to talk about thinking aboutsociety and all of the big
challenges facing us through thelens of how we move, how people
move, how things move, howinformation moves, and the way
all of this mobility had beenkind of ignored in some sense by

(07:07):
traditional sociologicalapproaches.
So we started this approachcalled the new mobilities
paradigm, where we wanted to putmobility at the center of our
thinking. And it was thatjourney, I guess, of thinking
through mobilities that led meto the concept of mobility
justice. And in my book of thattitle, what I started with was

(07:32):
that we were in a number ofcrisis situations. It seemed one
being the climate crisis and theneed to move beyond fossil fuel
driven mobility and decarbonizedtransportation. The second
crisis seemed to be aroundurbanism and the inequities that

(07:53):
were sort of built into oururban infrastructure and what
you could think of as bothhealth issues, traffic issues,
the impacts that you've talkedof on, you know, road safety and
things like that.
And then thirdly, was interestedalso in the migration and border
crisis and the ways in which ourmobility systems and our impact

(08:18):
are planetary. So how we movelocally also relates to how we
move globally. So the concept ofmobility justice and the book
was an attempt to think acrossall of those different crises,
how they intersect with eachother and really how the system
of automobility is at the heartof many of those problems. And

(08:41):
the things you've talked aboutof how do planners, how do urban
thinkers, policymakers, decisionmakers, well as the public and
civil society, how do we changethis, what seems like a locked
in system of automobilitytowards something better?

Wonderful. Thank you, and thank you for
creating that space for thiskind of conversation. So, Peter,
you've come at this from adifferent angle, discipline
wise, so tell us about whatmotivates you.

Well, first, David, I'd like to comment on,
Isaac Newton's wisdom, where theparadox is, of course, that the
giants whose shoulders you standon are depending in turn on the
giants before them. And I'd liketo propose to you that in a in
in effect, the the giant isreally a compound, a

(09:30):
collaboration. And I love thismeeting for bringing together
geography, sociology, andhistory, because that helps us
make sure that this giant thatwe're constituting here has all
the faculties necessary toperceive and understand the
problem we are trying to grapplewith here. You you pointed out,

(09:53):
that I I'm in an engineeringschool, and we are used to
looking at these spaces sincethe early twentieth century,
primarily as an engineeringproblem. And sometimes, that can
come at the cost of geographicwisdom, sociological wisdom, and
historical wisdom that is not somuch disregarded as just omitted

(10:15):
from the engineeringconversations.
We used to think of problemsolving as something we approach
from the perspective of commonsense experience. Engineering
took the notion that we can haveapplied science substitute for
that, but there are hazards toboth. And I think we need to

(10:35):
have a science that's informedby experience, and we need to
have experience that's guided byscience. I think history can
offer that to us. I want tostress that as a historian, my
interest is actually very muchin the present and in the
future, but it's only through ahistorical perspective that I
think we can really perceive andanticipate the future.

(10:58):
Everything we see, everything weexperience, everything we
encounter every single day isthe product of a history that we
don't personally know and couldnot personally experience. We
tend to fill that lack ofknowledge about history with
official stories, some of whichserve agendas, and this

(11:20):
immediately, intersects withMimi's interest in justice,
because I grew up hearing thatthe status quo that you so aptly
described, David, of a hostileand dangerous environment, I
learned that that was theproduct of consumer demand in a
free market or of democracy inaction or of mass preferences or

(11:43):
of technological progress. Andwhile I don't think any of those
accounts is entirely wrong, theyeven combined, they are woefully
deficient in explaining what wehave. What we have is the result
of a power struggle. And some ina power struggle, there are
winners and losers.
And, this is something I think,historical study can help us

(12:06):
appreciate. Justice has been avery important frame for looking
at streets historically.Engineers are not used to the
vocabulary of justice, and soit's easy to miss that fact. But
if you simply look, say in thedaily newspapers of a century
ago, you will see every singleissue of any large city

(12:28):
newspaper has mobility justiceon the front page and many of
the back pages as well. Now thevocabulary is different.
They won't speak of mobilityjustice. But if you read between
the lines, that's unequivocallywhat they are struggling with a
century ago and that we'restruggling with again, today.

(12:49):
This is where I come from inlooking at our common subject of
interest here.

Well, is just the perfect segue because what I
hope we might do is begin as ahistorically minded person would
with some context and you'vealready gotten us started with
that and your work is sopowerful in that regard. So
streets are as ancient as humansettlement and are the product
of continuous evolution overtime. They are really a social

(13:17):
product. But let's focus on themodern street, the timeframe of
perhaps the last few centuries,and the complex story of how
streets went from what werepublic spaces that maybe
prioritized transportation butwere open to other uses, to
vehicular thoroughfares thatoften exclude anything but
vehicular traffic and what thatmeans for mobility justice. So

(13:41):
since, Peter, this is kind ofyour domain, I wonder if you
could it's a long story, andyou've gotten us started
already, but how you mightrecount how that played out
really about a century ago andperhaps before.

Certainly, in some ways, streets of today resemble
the streets of a century andeven two centuries ago. They go
between destinations, they linkpeople up, they serve mobility
needs, transport needs ofvarious kinds. But as you
already suggested, David, theyalso served a multiplicity of
other needs. And diverse streetuses were fairly compatible

(14:19):
provided no one was going at arate of speed that made them a
lethal danger to others. Andit's that particular use of
streets for fast vehicles thathas made streets hostile for
everything except vehiculartransportation.
There was a notion in streetsthat we still have in other

(14:42):
realms today. We have it forpublic spaces, for city parks.
We have it in the same normsapply in a busy, say, airport
corridor, where we welcome allkinds of different uses for
these spaces on conditions. Onecondition being that, you don't
make a nuisance out of yourselffor others. And so you'll see on

(15:06):
the sign as you enter a citypark, certain rules that, list
those nuisances for you in caseyou need that reminder, and also
that you don't endanger others.
And so a city street was a placewhere you were certainly welcome
to do almost anything, dependingon the street. Children might be
playing in it. People might beselling things from a cart in a

(15:28):
street. This that was verycommon as well. And people, of
course, might be traveling, byvarious pre twentieth century
modes of transport.
But there would be no tolerancefor any use that was a danger to
others or that was a impedimentto others. And notice that by

(15:50):
that standard, the automobile,the passenger car, was the most
dubious user of streets early onbecause it did both of those
things. It did endanger othersand it did inconvenience others.
For example, when clog streetswith parked cars or block a
street car with motor vehicletraffic, you're violating these

(16:15):
norms, norms that still survivetoday in a busy airport corridor
where, know, you when thosesometimes those electric
transporters are traveling downa corridor, they are deferring
to others because they know thatthe street or the corridor is
for everybody. And now today, wehave absolute right of way for

(16:39):
the motor vehicle almosteverywhere.
And even where the pedestrianhas a legal right, very often
they can't exercise it safely oreven defer their right because
they have so adopted thedriver's perspective that a
pedestrian will very often noteven exercise the right of way

(16:59):
that they do have. And so thattransformation is the legacy of
the twentieth century that weare living with now in 2025.

Yeah, I've long thought about how, by law, to
exert your right to thecrosswalk in many of our state
statutes, you have to be in orapproaching the traffic travel
lane. You literally have to putyour body in front of the car
before you even trigger yourright, which is an interesting
way of thinking about rights andjustice. So Mimi, looking back

(17:32):
to that kind of moment a centuryago and the things building up
to you, how would you interpretthat through the lens of
mobility justice that Petertalks about as being kind of
implicit in what would have beenon the newspaper front cover in
1925?

Well, it reminds me of that the 1920s were right
in the middle of what we mightcall the Jim Crow era in The
United States. And to thinkabout mobility justice in The US
context, you have to look at itwithin the history of a system

(18:07):
of slavery, of emancipation thatfollowed that, of Reconstruction
era, followed by migration, theGreat Migration, which brought
populations from the southernplantations into the cities that
were industrializing in theearly twentieth century. And so
when we talk about the struggleover streets and mobility, we

(18:30):
have to remember that it wasracialized, gendered, classed
struggles that were taking placewithin these populations, also
of many immigrants coming fromaround the world into the
industrializing cities. So thekind of power struggles that
were happening were not justabout vehicular modes or use of

(18:53):
street space. They were aboutrace, gender and class power.
So that would be one startingpoint I would think about. The
other side of that, I think,would be to kind of bring it
forward also to the civil rightsmovement, the efforts at
desegregation and how centralbusing was to that Rosa Parks

(19:16):
and being able to ride the bus.But those struggles actually go
back to the nineteenth centuryand the segregation of
streetcars, for example. Sothere's a really long history of
struggles of access to streets,to mobility, to inclusion in
public space. And what we seehappen in a sort of later period

(19:38):
as we come into the 1960s and70s, you see the urban uprisings
that occurred around the civilrights movement and then urban
redevelopment, urban what wascalled urban renewal.
And that was a moment of highwaybuilding that completely
transformed the street space ofof older cities that had maybe

(20:02):
the original grid from, youknow, like I grew up in
Philadelphia, has the classiccolonial grid system created by
William Penn. But when highwaybuilding came in, it of course
disrupted those traditionalurban street patterns with this
much higher speed automobileonly roadways. And that was also

(20:25):
a racial and class strugglearound where those highways
would be situated, whoseneighbourhoods would be
impacted, how it would affecteveryone to have a right to the
city, a right to the streets, aright to public space. And, you
know, there's some famousexamples of the struggles over
highway building. There's theclassic work by Jane Jacobs, if

(20:48):
I got that right, the life anddeath of great American cities
and preserving Greenwich Villagein New York City versus the kind
of highway building of RobertMoses.
That's one of the sort ofclassic histories. But there
were struggles over highwaybuilding in many cities and
there were also manytraditionally African American
business districts andresidential neighbourhoods that

(21:11):
were destroyed by highwaybuildings. So I think for me,
that's a starting point forthinking about kind of where we
are now and the whole processthat then occurred of
suburbanization and what wascalled white flight and the way
in which our sprawl patterns inThe US and our automobile
dependence are grounded in thathistory of racial injustice.

Well, you've just really kind of highlighted
one of the core relationships ordialectics that both of you have
emphasized, which is that at onelevel, the street is a public
right of way, which is kind of adistinct legal entity that's
engineered kind of in isolationfrom urban space around it, but
the roadway and its sharing hasalways been central to urban

(21:59):
life and urban change, and it'sbeen a contested space so that
equity on the roadway isdifficult to disentangle from
all these other things. I was,in researching the book, had
learned that the earliesttraffic fatalities in New York
City were in Harlem and theywere racialized conflicts right
from the very beginning and theyremain so today in terms of who

(22:20):
gets run over by cars. Thinkabout this dialectic between the
street and wider societalchange. So I've been thinking a
lot about orders and the passingof orders. We're probably
thinking a lot about that in2025, widely, but that there was
a pretty durable order that wasliterally durably built into the

(22:42):
urban landscape over the courseof the twentieth century.
The the engineering and designstandards that that took
societal ideas and materializedthem literally in concrete,
asphalt, retro reflectivestriping, marking, signage,
through the kind of manuals thatif you want to understand the

(23:03):
street, you can't understand thestreet apart from the AASHTO
Green Book and the MUTCD, ManualUniform Traffic Control Devices.
It created and reinforced aparticular order that was very
durable and most of us grew upjust kind of, as Peter notes,
assuming that's the way thingsare. But there were always
people who we engineered thestreet as pipes for cars, but it

(23:25):
was always a controversialproject. And and over time,
there were people who werediscontented with it. But over
the course of the twentiethcentury, towards the beginning
of the twenty first century,there's been a building movement
to at least accommodate the nondrivers and that coalesced in
the movement that has beencalled Complete Streets.
And Complete Streets, SmurkNorth America defines it as an

(23:47):
approach to planning, designing,building and operating and
maintaining streets that enablesafe access for all people who
need to use them, includingpedestrians, bicyclists,
motorists and transit riders ofall ages and abilities. I was
always interested because thiswas expressed initially, it came
out of bicycle advocacy and anintersection. The original

(24:08):
Police Streets Coalition was theAARP. It was a coalition of
people. At least initially, itwas not explicitly, as Peter
notes in Tolkien a Century ago,about equity.
That was not the language thatwas, but it was implicit. So
let's talk about this. And whatdo you see as the significance
of this movement to at leastreclaim roadways for diverse

(24:32):
modes of travel, which we wouldimagine as seeing in terms of
crosswalks being striped orbicycle lanes or traffic signals
prioritizing pedestrians, onemight lump this all together as
multimodalism. Mimi, you werealready kind of moving us far to
think about the twentiethcentury and the ongoing battles.

(24:52):
So how would you interpret thismultimodalism, Complete Streets
vis a vis mobility justice?

I have to say when I first heard about Complete
Streets, I was all on board withit. I thought, perfect, this is
what we need. We want access toall modes of all users of the
roadway to be considered in thedesign specifications. And that
would help us overcome thedominance of fast moving level

(25:24):
of service, of traffic, ofmotorized vehicles, just kind of
using it as a sort of pipelineto get from point A to point B.
Sounds great.
But over the study of mobilityjustice, I came to recognize
that there were some deeperissues there that went beyond

(25:46):
engineering design, the sort offurnishing of the street space.
And again, it goes back to whereI started in the questions of
inequity and power. I learnedfrom a group called the
Ontokening about the idea thatdifferent people's bodies have a

(26:06):
different relationship to thestreet space. So even what may
appear as an open, accessibleright of way that we can all get
to, we approach it withdifferent bodies, different
experiences, different socialcues and social contexts, some
of which are more invisible andare not necessarily the hard

(26:28):
design of the street, but haveto do with other forms of social
control, policing, gender roles,things like that, racial
segregation. And all of thatcomes into play to mean that, as
Dan Tokening put it, differentbodies demand distinct social,

(26:50):
physical and cultural supportswithin shared mobility
environments.
And so that adds a whole otherlayer of nuance to what is a
complete street.

Yeah, this has been really interesting to me,
I'm curious to hear yourperspective, Peter. And this
was, I would just say, for mebecause that had been my frame,
and that was enough of aproject. To just make the street
accessible for the pedestrianand bicyclist is a monumental
project we've only begun toscratch at the surface of. But

(27:24):
then to be pushed beyond to say,well perhaps there is a sense
beyond the right of way. Evencritiques, for example, people
making the connection betweentransportation improvement like
bike lanes and urban justiceissues like gentrification.
So partly my book was aboutwrestling with how do I make
sense of that? What do we meanby justice? Particularly since

(27:46):
there are different ways that wecan talk about justice that
sometimes talk past each otheror seem to be in conflict? So
but we'll come back to thatlater. Peter, how have you
interpreted this through yourlens?

Well, it's again, it's a power struggle. And so, I
mean, the good news aboutComplete Streets is this idea
began with advocates. It didn'tbegin with engineers. It didn't
begin with the National HighwayTraffic Safety Administration or
a state department oftransportation, these official
agencies adopted it underpressure. They adopted this idea

(28:19):
of complete streets underpressure.
Now, of course, the paradox ofthat kind of success is once
it's institutionalized, you'relikely to see it diluted to a
point where you don't recognizethe advocacy anymore in it,
where it's not what youanticipated. We've seen this,
for example, with the VisionZero movement, the movement that
says we should be aspiringtoward mobility safety in which

(28:45):
the only acceptable result iszero deaths and zero serious
injuries. Well, vision zerobegins as a idea outside of the
institutional frameworks. It wasadopted within institutional
frameworks and then inevitablyis diluted to a point where now
it's often criticized as emptyrhetoric. And we see this with

(29:05):
Complete Streets as well.
And yet, yeah, I think we shouldtake some satisfaction in the
fact that there was at leastsufficient pressure pressure to
get the, officialdom to adoptthe term and at least to some
extent the aspiration. Though Iwould emphatically agree with
Mimi that in practice, it'snothing like true mobility

(29:26):
justice. I think what wecontinue to find is that the
expert institutions serve apurpose. I mean, they serve the
explicit purpose of applyingscience to our problems, but
unofficially, they also servethe purpose of closing off

(29:47):
answers to social questions. Forexample, a century ago, the
first generation of trafficengineers redefined the terms of
the debate through the influenceof automobile interest groups in
such a way that while trafficcongestion used to be defined as
too many people driving cars,and that's a waste of street

(30:10):
space, they turn that on itshead into our roads are are
outdated, they don't provideenough space for driving and
parking.
Same thing with safety. Theconventional wisdom circa 1920
is that traffic safety isprimarily a problem of getting
drivers to slow down to a nonlethal speed and to respect the

(30:31):
rights of other street users.Institutions ostensibly applying
science, but in practice,really, applying the agendas of
their sponsors, and I mean theirtheir money, transform that
framing of traffic safety intoone of how do we exclude people
walking? How do we exclude,people who are using the street

(30:55):
for anything other than driving?And this, of course, leads to
profound inequities because themoment you're reserving streets,
including every ordinary citystreet, you're prioritizing
drivers, you're excludingmajorities.
I grew up hearing that cardomination in The US was really

(31:15):
whether you like it or not, it'sa reflection of majority
preferences. And what peopledon't realize when they offer
that explanation and usuallystill agree with it is that most
women of driving age in TheUnited States didn't have a
driver's license until thenineteen sixties, which means we
had several decades, in whichwhen the so called experts said,

(31:39):
well, everybody prefers todrive, They they defined
everybody as like them, I. E,male. So there was an extremely
strong gender dimension to thiswhere every time a street was
redefined as a place fordrivers, not only did that
exclude most people, it wasoverwhelmingly gendered and

(32:00):
also, of course, with big classand race implications too, since
those are densely intertwinedhistorically. So Complete
Streets is a success story inthe sense that the term begins
in advocacy and becomes adopted,and then paradoxically, for
exactly the same reason.
It's also a disappointment.

Yeah. It is one of those things that I struggle
with conceptually andpractically. My journey to this
book began through the rabbitholes of trying to understand
how the street became the spaceit was, which then leads you to
traffic statutes adopted bystates, to the case law that
adjudicates who gets asettlement when one person

(32:44):
collides into another person. Itleads you into highway capacity
analysis. It leads toengineering.
It leads to marking,signalization of the roadway,
what they call traffic control.And the book that I wrote in
2018, it ultimately was anindictment of how auto centric
those parts of the system are totheir very base of the DNA. And

(33:07):
that still is despite thecomplete streets movement, the
traffic statutes of most statesare not that different from what
was initially adopted Uni WarVehicle Code a century ago. So
we shouldn't underestimate how,even at that base level, there's
so much work yet to be done. Butas Mimi points out, there have

(33:28):
been rightful arguments thatthere are limits to
multimodalism.
That was partly for me trying tounderstand mobility justice
beyond the Complete Streetsmodel of multimodalism. But I
want to shift to thinking aboutsomething even broader, and this
is where it kind of stretched mybrain, is what I saw going on,
what was initially a frame abouttransportation, we've always

(33:49):
known that streets were alsoplaces. For a long time, back to
Jane Jacobs, I won't be able toquote her, but she effectively
says, show me the city sidewalkand you'll show me the city.
That's the first chapter afterthe introduction in the death
and life of great Americancities is the use of sidewalk

(34:11):
safety. And there have long beencomplaints, but I think as you
point out, Peter, they were kindof the frame of the conversation
was that public space wassomething that happened on
sidewalks.
Public space, even in geography,which is a very, very robust
history of talking about publicspace, focused on parks, those
things that we understood to bepublic spaces. And the roadway

(34:35):
surface itself was, in many ofthose conversations, kind of
excluded from that. But what Isaw that was really interesting
as I was looking at what citieswere doing is that there had
been a movement beyond justthinking about livability to
really thinking about andreclaiming streets as the public
spaces that they are. And so inmy book, I came to be really

(34:58):
interested on this buildingmovement that was very nascent
prior to the pandemic, butaccelerated so rapidly in a
dizzyingly fast fashion to gobeyond multimobilism to reclaim
streets as public spaces. Manyof us have seen this in our own
cities.
In my own book, looked at placeslike Boston, Massachusetts that

(35:19):
were slowing their streetsinitially from what they called
slow streets that were designedcarefully with traffic calming
to a citywide standard thatsays, Hey, the local street
deserves traffic calming andexpects speed humps on your
local street. Cities likeOakland, California and
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania threwupon initial efforts to plan
bicycle boulevards that kind ofcalm traffic to slow cars to at

(35:43):
least to bicycle speed toprioritize cyclists and maybe
also make the street morelivable for the people who live
along it. That goes beyond that.Cities like New York, Denver,
Los Angeles, they started out bythings like Philly Free Streets
or Cyclavia in Los Angeles thatclosed streets to through

(36:04):
traffic, what were initiallyweekend closures became durable
closures over the course of thepandemic where barricades were
erected that said, Hey, nothrough traffic here. Or maybe
they were open streets thatexcluded cars altogether and
invited cafe tables onto theroadway, which is kind of a
profound shift.

(36:26):
And then even more durably,cities across The United States
like San Francisco, Portland,Washington, DC, but in small
towns, large towns haveconverted curbside parking into
parklets or streeterees, andthey go by different names for
dining or public space uses. Andin some places, closing the
entire public right of way andcreating the kind of plazas that

(36:49):
we're familiar with when wevisit Europe. And of course,
York had done this with TimesSquare under the Bloomberg
administration. But we start tosee this in streets and alleys
across The United States whereit used to be car travel or
parking. You might now sit andconverse with someone on the
asphalt surface.
So these interventions are verydynamic and they're probably, in

(37:12):
most places, reduced frompandemic peaks. But at least the
programs themselves have becomepermanent. And they're starting
to be woven into the theengineering manuals have shared
streets as an option. They're,in some places, being woven into
permanent street redesign. SoI'm kind of curious how you both

(37:33):
think about these recent effortsto transform roadways into more
public spaces, whether just byslowing them, opening them, or
reconstructing them on a semipermanent basis as parklets or
plazas.
So, you know, I guess what I'lldo, I'm gonna keep swifting back
and forth, I'm gonna start withyou, Peter, from a historical
perspective.

Well, that's such a big question, and there's so
many ways of approaching it. Ithink one thing we can learn
about reconceiving streets is,we can find out how
reconceptions have worked in thepast and take lessons from them.
So for example, the street of1920 was a profoundly different

(38:15):
place. And in fact, in 1922, anexecutive in Motordum wrote as
an editorial, the obvioussolution lies only in a radical
revision of our conception ofwhat a city street is for. So
this is a statement by a maninterested in selling cars and
roads that to pursue thatagenda, he would first have to

(38:39):
get together with his friendsand industry and have what he
called a radical revision of ourconception of what a city street
is for.
Now in 1922, when he wrote thateditorial, it was a fanciful,
farfetched, implausibleambition. And yet, over the next
couple of decades, it wasextraordinarily and

(38:59):
breathtakingly successful. And Ithink we can learn from that
success as we try to reconceivestreets today. And if we look at
how that transformation waspursued, while I am horrified by
the ambition, I am I am admirethe imagination and the
ingenuity that went into makingit work. And above all, it

(39:23):
worked because they pursued,three, paths toward this
transformation that wereinterdependent.
One was changing social norms.They had to persuade people, and
it was not easy that justwalking wherever you wanted to
walk was no longer okay, whichis a pretty crazily ambitious
thing to do and a substantiallysuccessful one as well. And

(39:46):
that's that's a a whole study initself. A second line of attack
was that they had to transformlaw. If you transform law
without social norms, you getpeople breaking the law.
You know, this is for example,if you have prohibition in a in
a community where peopletraditionally enjoyed social
drinking, you're gonna have alot of law breaking. Well, same

(40:07):
thing here. They had to changelaw and social norms in tandem.
And then, third was atransformation of engineering.
And this meant establishingexpert bodies that didn't exist
and using, experts within thosebodies to, introduce a kind of

(40:29):
dogma that would be in the guiseof science and, would include a
lot of applied science thatbuilt upon dogmatic
presuppositions.
And those dogmaticpresuppositions, in other words,
points of principle that werenot questionable, were that any
congestion problem is a roadcapacity problem, not a

(40:51):
excessive reliance on drivingproblem. And every safety
problem is a problem of havingtoo many people walking in the
street or having road designthat's antiquated. They love to
talk about horse and buggystreets in a automobile age. And
the and that rhetoric wasdesigned to imply that the fault

(41:13):
was not with the motor vehicle,because that's the modern thing,
but rather with the street. Andwe need to build streets that
are, safe for fast driving,which is very hard to do.
But as early as, the late 1920sand early 1930s, in The US,
there are highway projects goingthrough cities, with the

(41:37):
intention of making fast drivingsafe, and those roads which made
no sense at all by theconventional, norms, even expert
norms of a few years earlier,did make sense once these
dogmatic positions wereinstitutionalized, such as to,
make streets safe, you have torebuild streets for the

(41:58):
twentieth century. In fact, thefirst generation of these were
called by their proponents, andI quote, foolproof highways. And
we know that when you make a socalled foolproof highway, you
certainly can prevent some kindsof crashes, for example, by
having overpasses andunderpasses or median strips.

(42:21):
But then you in you deliberatelyencourage fast driving that
makes those crashes that youstill do have far more deadly.
And and and at the same time,you also make lots of other
modes of travel, like walkingespecially, much harder.
So, we are the heirs of thatradical revision, and that's,

(42:43):
from my point of view, terriblenews, but it comes with some
very heartening news, and thatis that radical revisions that
seem impossible are in factpossible. We just need to pursue
them through change on threefronts, each one dependent on
the other, and those are socialnorms, laws, and engineering

(43:04):
standards.

This is really so interesting because I think
that one of the things that intalking to planners and
transportation advocates, one ofthe things that I had just been
curious about, if you walked onstreets, I remember being in
Boston in the North End, such atight neighborhood, and they
basically converted the streetsalmost entirely into screeneries

(43:27):
and the cars were just It wasalready difficult to drive in
the North End and it justflipped the script. And so to me
it was such an interestingevolution to give people access
to resources that they had beenexcluded from for a century,
which is a long time. And somost people have no memory or

(43:49):
experience of what it's like toshare the street in a different
kind of way. But suddenly youcould walk down the middle of
the street in the North Endamong many other people in the
car with the interloper, whichflipped the script to where
things had been a century prior.What I learned from talking to
planners is that planners areforward thinking, but they were

(44:09):
ready for an opportunity tobegin to change the
conversation.
And the pandemic was as Ram RahmEmanuele is always quoted as
saying, Don't let a good crisisgo to waste. And the planners
jumped on it really, really,really fast. And I think what
they had in mind was very much amobility justice project that

(44:30):
they had been thinking about.And many of the planning
documents of the twenty ten'sare imbued with a police street
equity set of principles thatled them, when given the
opportunity, to carve out streetfor pedestrians. They did it.
But what was so interesting isthat in many of these places,
they instantly encountered notonly kind of a political it was

(44:51):
a political move, but theyencountered equity issues that
were perhaps bigger than theyhad anticipated, Which of
course, 2020 is the summer oftwenty twenty will go down in
history. It's a remarkable timebecause in addition to these
national conversations aboutstreets, we also have an
incredible national conversationabout equity, racial equity, a

(45:15):
very, very dynamic, much ofwhich literally took place on
streets. And so those two verydynamic forces collide in some
of these efforts that made theunfurling of slow streets, open
streets, parklets, verycomplicated conversations. So
I'm wondering, turning to youMimi, how you would interpret
some of these changes throughthe lens of mobility justice as

(45:38):
it's been evolving in parallelwith the street itself.

Yeah. So first I wanna say I would interpret what
happened a little bitdifferently. And I'll start by
going a little bit back inhistory as well to the 1970s
when Ivan Illich, who was a sortof socialist philosopher and
thinker, he he noted that theroad has been degraded from a

(46:06):
commons to a simple resource forthe circulation of vehicles. And
in the 1970s, there was alreadya strong pushback happening
against this kind ofappropriation, almost
colonization of street spaceaway from people's everyday life

(46:27):
and life worlds. And when we seeEuropean cities begin to push
back against the automobiledominance that was coming to
reshape their spaces.
What we saw then was cities likeAmsterdam, where it was families
whose children were at risk nowfrom and no longer able to play

(46:51):
in the streets. And it wasmothers in particular who
started these protests againstthis car culture. And they began
to advocate for streets to begiven back as living space for
everyday people. And that kindof led to what we see in
Amsterdam today, the bikeculture, the really famous

(47:13):
Amsterdam bike culture, but ithappened in other cities in
Europe as well. What'sinteresting is I was living in
London in the 1980s and theretoo, there was another wave of a
movement against card dominanceand it was through bicycle

(47:34):
movements partly and somethingcalled reclaim the streets.
And in both these cases, in sortof 1970s Amsterdam or 1980s
London, there was a classpolitics as well as a gender
politics to the idea that oureveryday reproductive capacities

(47:57):
of walking around, taking careof children and elderly people,
getting food, being able to sitoutdoors and being able to
bicycle, those were all underthreat and there was a pushback
against that. What I seehappening as we move into what
you were describing in TheUnited States, urban planners

(48:20):
began to pick up on some of thenice aspects of reclaiming the
streets and of placemaking andparklets and open streets
movements, some of which alsowere adopted from Latin American
cities. Justified it in The US.Ideologically, had to justify,

(48:40):
well, why would we startplanning this way? And they
argued because it contributed toeconomic growth, job creation
and raising real estate values.
So what happened is it got coopted onto an urban growth
agenda, an urban boosterismagenda as it was called. And

(49:01):
that brought it into the moremainstream kind of urban
planning and urban decisionmaking so that when the pandemic
came along, those tools, thoseideas, those as you call them
programs already existed and hadalready been considered for over

(49:22):
a decade and all the pieces werethere. And so they used the
pandemic as a moment toimplement this. The trouble with
that is that there had alreadybeen some long standing concerns
that these kinds of place makingpolicies were leading to what
some people call greengentrification. They were

(49:45):
raising real estate values andtherefore taxes and they were
displacing people from moreaffordable housing who were no
longer able to live in thesenewly improved walkable, lovely
parklet filled urban spaces.
And so place making became akind of project of capitalist

(50:12):
development or redevelopment.And it pushed people who could
not afford there out toperipheries of the city where
they also had poor access topublic transportation, for
example. And so by the time thepandemic comes, those lines had
already been drawn, those kindof resentments at what was

(50:32):
happening in terms of bike lanebuilding and parklets and green
gentrification. So the pandemicin a way exacerbated that
because you also had theemergency frontline workers who
had to go to work versus thepeople who were able to stay
home and have things deliveredand get food brought to them and

(50:55):
have their entertainment online.And so it was the workers who
were most put at risk.
In The US it tended also to beracialized and ethnic minority
workers who are the onesoperating the public transport
system, driving the buses, doingthe deliveries, doing the gig
economy, driving. And so theywere at risk from the pandemic

(51:19):
and they were also notbenefiting in the same way from
the green open streets policies.So I see those battle lines as
having been drawn in the pastand having been deepened during
the pandemic and now continuinginto our current sort of policy
situation.

Yeah, it's a really interesting, and I think
many of us have been wrestlingwith this idea of the complete
street being incomplete becauseit's limited in its ability to
address wider inequalities. Yourown work on mobility justice has
always insisted on placingequity on the street in a wider
frame. And that's an evolutionthat has been building, both
theoretically, but I think alsoin transportation planning, the

(52:04):
rise of equity matrices in whichplanners are trying to make
decisions relative to a varietyof, as a planner would put it,
terms of an index and thinkingabout vulnerable populations and
where. So that was where, in myown book, trying to resolve two
different things. One is thatseeing that there are arguments,

(52:27):
for example, about greengentrification, that a bike lane
could be a white lane, and thatit can exacerbate injustices
like gentrification.
But then at the same timeknowing that, well, what about
the psychost whose bodily harmis experiencing injustice on a

(52:48):
different axis in terms of theiruse of the transportation
system. Then I try to step backand think about all the
different discourses there arearound equity that follow
different lines of logic. So I'min geography, and so we have
many scholars who think of it ingeography and planning who think

(53:10):
about it spatially in terms ofthe spatial distribution of
goods and bads. That's one wayto think about when we would
make a transportation decision.There's the multimodal
perspective of what mode are youtraveling?
There's social justice, which ismore about who you are, whether
it's your identity or bodilydifference, things like your

(53:31):
gender identification ordisability. But then there are
the other kind of place basedthings, like the concern about
green gentrification. But thenthere's also an
intergenerational thing, what dowe owe people in the future? So
do we prohibit a bike lane todaybecause we're worried about
gentrification in 2025 wherethat might help decarbonize our

(53:52):
cities, which would be a favorto our grandchildren? And then
there's procedural justice ontop of all of it.
So my own book was trying topull these things together
because I saw the conversationsometimes going past each other
or colliding with each other,which is why ultimately I was
drawn to the powerful idea ofintersectionality, which trying

(54:12):
to very carefully, with utmostrespect for its origins in black
feminist scholarship, legalscholarship, but the idea that
as individuals and also oursystems, there are different
axes on which privilege anddisadvantage operate. And then
each of us embodies a compoundednature of some combination of

(54:33):
those different axes. Andthinking about Kimberle Crenshaw
who used the metaphor at theintersection, that's what a
traffic signal does. To try tothink about the street in a way
that sought to balance thesethings. What I was really kind
of impressed by talking toplanners is that planners are
thoughtful people.

(54:55):
Biased in saying so, I trainthem. But your perfect example
was Oakland, California, whichwas one of the leaders in
rolling out the Slow Streetsmovement. In the blink of an
eye, their Department ofTransportation, I can't remember
the acronym, who's a bicycleplanner, heads that agency,

(55:17):
which is itself kind of achange, closed all these
streets. But the experience ofthe street closures was so
different in differentneighborhoods based on income
and race. Almost within weeks,the program was butting up
against all these other lines.
And I think that's one of thereasons why some of these cities

(55:37):
have pulled back or tried to dothis. I think the work is, if
you talk to the planners, toreally open with how imperfect
it is and how hard it is tobalance these different factors.
Planners, like engineers, wantto rely on standards. And this
is why I was interested in howsome of these things have been
codified in policies that justas a century ago we took

(56:00):
emerging new social norms andtried to put them down on paper.
I don't know how deeply itpenetrates.
So I'm kind of curious as wekind of round out this portion
of the conversation, and we'vebeen doing a good job taking
turns, but I think it'd be funto kind of open it up, is let's
presume this is a reallyimperfect project. And the
minute you codify something in apolicy, you codified some

(56:23):
balance of things whichprivileges someone over another
person. And other angle I wouldput in is the planners are aware
of your critique, Mimi, aboutthe idea of agentification. But
just as in the 1920s, the autocompanies were a powerful force
for transforming, what couldpossibly provide a
countervailing force to the autointerest? It turns out

(56:45):
businesses have been, in thisprocess, turned into a
countervailing political forcewith a lot of business
improvement districts anddowntowns have a lot of power.
And they have embraced thisagenda because they see real
estate potential in the literalstreet. So at least the street
space, hugely complicated. Butthe planners are often there
recognizing that just like theyrecognize nimbyism, that they

(57:09):
hope that nimbyism can be aforce for progressive change.
It's a tough game that they'remessing with. And they wrestle
with this in terms of what kindof lease price do we charge for
the leasing of a public streetspace.
It's really messy. I'll kick itto you, Peter, by that kind of
open open ended conversation,which is how do you see this
playing out in terms of thecodification of of a mobility

(57:30):
justice that we hope to be asjust as it can reasonably be
given the imperfections? And howdo we put that stuff down on
paper and then ultimately maybein concrete? And and wonder the
like what's the likelihood thatthat's going to approximate our
idea of a just city or not?

Well, I appreciated your cautions,
David, about codifying policiesbecause as your comments just
indicated, they reflect abalance of power at the point of
codification that willinevitably advantage some over
others. And I think we can take,as another countervailing force,

(58:10):
the tradition, which is anAmerican tradition of activism,
of vocal in the street,literally in the street
politics, of free speech, ofadvocacy, of collective
organization. We have a longtradition in this country and of
this sort of thing even instreets. So I appreciated Mimi's

(58:32):
reference to the struggle in TheNetherlands, especially in the
nineteen seventies, to recoverstreets that are safe for all.
And that movement in TheNetherlands, particularly under
the name, stop the child murder,stop the Kinder Morad is fairly
well known at least amongplanners in the planning
community.
What's far less well known isthat Americans were doing stop

(58:55):
the Kinder Morgue, stop thechild murder movements in
American streets decadesearlier. You find, and as Mimi
indicated, this was primarily,mothers or women in general,
often though with allies acrossthe demographic spectrum. And it
took the form, as it did in TheNetherlands, of illegal street

(59:15):
blockades of, American citiescoast to coast, large and small
suburbs and downtowns, big cityresidential neighborhoods, and
even smaller town communities.Typically, women blocking
streets often with lawn chairs,demanding safer conditions. And

(59:36):
rhetorically, these demands wereoften framed in terms of safer
for children.
I think also they intended saferfor us too because invoking
children was both an honesteffort but also as a a
rhetorical strategy. We havethis tradition in America too.
It is completely absent from ourhistory books, from our museums,
from our documentary films, butit is prominent in the

(01:00:01):
collections of every citynewspaper archive that you can
find. These were common in LosAngeles, in Boston, in
Philadelphia, and in Chicago,and in Seattle, and everywhere
in between. And I think whatthis tradition, if we could give
this the attention it has beendue but that has been neglected,

(01:00:22):
is it can reconnect us to alegitimizing story, a story that
says, no.
We today, in 02/2025, who wantstreets that are welcoming to
all kinds of people, to allkinds of bodies, to all kinds of
uses and users. We are within, arich historical tradition. We

(01:00:44):
are not some edgy new fringe.The end the edgy new idea of the
twentieth century was torestrict streets and give them
primarily to drivers. That wasthe edgy new fringe idea.
The mainstream idea, themainstream tradition in America
was to ensure that streets, tosome degree at least, serve all

(01:01:06):
and serve all somewhatequitably. This was even
codified into law. For example,every street railway, every
streetcar company in America hadto agree with the public utility
commission or the public servicecommission. It went by various
names in various states thatthey would provide affordable
service to all, that they couldnot raise their fares without

(01:01:27):
permission, that they could notexclude certain neighborhoods
that were unprofitable. That wasa recognition that to use the
streets is a demand on thepublic.
And that means that if you wannamake that demand, the public has
the right to insist on equity inreturn. We have largely lost
that tradition that says thatthe uses to which we put our

(01:01:48):
streets must serve the publicgenerally and not just the the
interest of a private company.We saw that struggle when Cruise
and Waymo demanded access to thestreets of San Francisco for
their robo taxis. The city saidno, but the state said yes and
forced, San Franciscans to putup with this over the will of
San Franciscans' own localelected representatives. That's

(01:02:11):
a sign that we lost thattradition that the streets
belong to the people, andtherefore, the purposes to which
we commit them must serve thepeople and the public benefit
generally and not just any onebusiness.
We can reconnect with thathistorical tradition and that
will empower us to recommit ourstreets today toward mobility

(01:02:33):
justice purposes.

David Prytherch (01:02:35):
So Des, you mentioned San Francisco, which
is a city that had innovated theidea of the parklet as a way of
like the parking space. If youcould put money in to store your
car on the roadway, then why notput your money in and set up a
greenery and sit in it? Thatbecame a permanent program,
initially was entirely public.It did not permit outdoor

(01:02:55):
commercial uses in the parklets.They changed that in the
pandemic, but codified rulesthat require that the space be
open after business hours orhave a seat and very what they
recognize being really imperfectsolutions.
And so I'm kinda curious, Mimi,this idea of to the degree that
ultimately we have to reconcilethese different perspectives,

(01:03:18):
and I think like a planner,like, do you do the bike lane or
not? Do you do the park lane ornot? How do you do it? What do
you think is the likelihood thatwe're going to be able to
approximate mobility justice inthese interventions? Where are
the opportunities?
Where are the challenges?

Mimi Sheller (01:03:31):
So I have to say that the way you pose the
question is from the point ofview of the planner. And there
is an argument in this questionaround what is justice, which
you mentioned proceduraljustice, but this whole idea of
how do we envision moreinclusive and collaboratively

(01:03:54):
governed cities? That is, who ismaking these decisions? Who is
the one planning? There's a fewthings that have happened in
recent years.
One, the rise of more diversepeople entering into the
planning professions. And it hasbeen a struggle. And I'll say,
you know, when you would go tothe major, say, transportation

(01:04:19):
conference, the TransportationResearch Board conference, it
has traditionally been very muchmale dominated and there began
to be a sort of women intransportation network and group
within that organization. Butincreasingly people of color and
Black, Indigenous, Latinx peoplehave entered into planning. And

(01:04:42):
I'm thinking of the peoplewho've been part of the
Ontokening and part of a groupcalled People for Mobility
Justice.
So Adonia Lugo, Naomi Durner,Tamika Butler, Sara Rebellozzo
McCullough. There's like a wholegroup of generational shift in
who is pushing the conversationabout inclusivity. And also I'll

(01:05:06):
say within the field of criticaldisability studies, there's also
been a really strong politics ofwho is at the table, who's
making the decisions, who'sdoing the planning. I think in
that sense, that's crucial. Andso what we see happening when
you look at some of the earliermovements we were talking about,

(01:05:27):
there was a politics ofmobility.
When you talk about engineering,planning, investment, it's
depoliticizing in a way. Andwhat we need is to get back to a
politics of mobility that isactually mobilizing people to
make claims on their own selfdetermination of their

(01:05:48):
mobilities, of their dwelling,of their street space, and to be
part of the decision making, theplanning and the conversation.
And that's something that Iinclude within this idea that I
call mobile commoning, is thatwe need to common not only the
street itself, our mobilitiesthrough it, but also how cities
are governed.

And that to me has been perhaps the most
profound takeaway, and I'mtrying to continue to push the
idea. One thing is about ourbodily access to the street, but
the access of people to thedecision making table has in
some ways really been crackedopen in a way that some of these
open streets and for these to beneighborhood bottom up
initiatives presents a lot ofequity issues, particularly not

(01:06:31):
all neighborhoods have thecapacity to find their way to
the table. But the idea that weun black box the design of the
street and we get it out of theengineering domain into the
Roomba politics, way we thinkabout a public park. You don't
just engineer a public park, youhave a conversation about how
you want to use the public spaceand you include stakeholders at

(01:06:53):
the table. That to me is thehopeful part of this.
It changes the decision makingdynamic. So we could keep going
for hours talking about such arich topic, but to try to bring
this around to a close, we wekinda started to point away in
the future, and I'm kindainterested in what you're
thinking all this means. Is thisa little experiment that will be

(01:07:14):
snuffed out and will go back tothe twentieth century order to
solve this conversation aboutmobility justice and open,
slowed, and and and publicstreets. Like, where are we
going? Of course, it's 2025, sowe all are doing a lot of
thinking about where things areheaded.
So I'll open it up. Peter, wheredo you think we're headed?

Peter Norton (01:07:34):
Well, as you gently implied, we're in danger.
And, specifically, the dangerthat I see in our streets and
and public spaces is the dangerthat comes from the people who
wanna persuade us that withenough futuristic technology, we
will deliver a utopia that willbe a paradise for everyone. This

(01:07:58):
is a message that while weconstantly mistake it for being
a new one is actually very old.If you wanna sell a tool, which
is what technology is, don'tcall it a tool. Tools are not
that impressive.
Call it a solution. You'llnotice that, within just the
last couple of decades, almost,every technology you can think

(01:08:21):
of has been repackaged as asolution. The fact is no
technology can ever solve ourproblems for us. It's only
people who solve our problems.The technology that we use helps
us solve our problems, but thatreduces the technology to a
tool.
It is not, and it is never thesolution. And yet, we are
saturated with messages. If youjust look online a little bit

(01:08:42):
about the future of mobility orsomething like that, you won't
see publicly enjoyed spaces ofall kinds of people of all
degrees of income and so onsharing public spaces together.
You'll see bizarre jetsonianfutures with everybody in their
own so called autonomousvehicle. And, of course, that

(01:09:03):
word is is completely false.
A successful so calledautonomous vehicle is
deterministic, and that's theopposite of autonomous. The
technology is absurdlyexpensive. But if you're selling
it, you know, that you justwanna convince people to buy it.
And so we are being soldcompletely implausible futures
that if we try to pursue them,we will only worsen our problem.

(01:09:26):
And this is incidentally how wegot into the jam of car
dependency, namely theautomobile which was introduced
as a useful tool for a fewpeople who might find it useful,
like farmers and doctors andgrocers delivering groceries to
people, got repackaged as an allpurpose mobility solution.
That is something everybody hasto have and it will solve all
your problems, which isabsolutely false. The automobile

(01:09:49):
is in fact a useful tool. It isabsolutely not an all purpose
mobility solution. Well, now themessage is that with enough
futuristic state of the artamazing tech, we will turn it
into the solution that has neverbeen. And the truth is amazing
technology really is amazing,but it cannot make car
dependency work because that's amatter of basic geometry and

(01:10:11):
basic costs.
And and also basic physics, theamount of energy it takes to
move a mass is proportional tothe mass. And so if you want a
future of electrification that'sactually sustainable, that means
we not only need to electrify,but we also need to reduce
energy demand. Because the morewe increase energy demand while

(01:10:31):
we're electrifying, the harderit is to generate enough
electric power for all of theseever growing and ever more
intensive energy demands. Sothat's the scary future, and it
is a grave threat, and I don'twant our preference to be
optimistic to deflect ourattention from that disastrous
threat. On the other hand, I dowant to note that we do have

(01:10:54):
grounds for some very cautiousoptimism, namely in the kinds of
trends we've been talking about.
There is growing interest in amore equitable, future for
mobility and shared spaces. Andmaybe the most encouraging thing
of all is that if we stop beingdistracted by futuristic tech,
we have a chance of recognizingthe fact that we have everything

(01:11:17):
we need already. We have all thetechnology we need. We don't
need any new technology at all.What we just need to do is to
prioritize walking, prioritizecycling, prioritize transit.
You know, The Netherlands isshows every day how this can be
done realistically. People willtell me, well, The Netherlands
is not The US. And my answer isno, but it's a lot like New

(01:11:38):
Jersey. The Netherlands isbasically two New Jerseys.
That's true for income.
That's true for populationdensity. That's true for
topography, and that's true forclimate. And so if we can do it
in New Jersey, we could do it inthe rest of the country. And we
have an even greater or at leasta longer tradition of mobility
justice here in The USA thanthey have in The Netherlands to

(01:11:59):
draw upon to do it. So if we canresist the distracting utopian
techno utopian messages and lookat these practical examples, I
do think we can hope for abetter future than we have right
now.

Amy, what are you thinking?

Oh, I would love to go along with Peter's
argument, but I have to say I'msitting at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute where there's a lot ofyoung folks very excited about
new technologies, innovation,artificial intelligence,
robotics, automation. There's ahuge push within our STEM

(01:12:35):
institutions to push that visionforward. So we're also at a
point in time under the currentadministration where there's
been a sort of re embrace offossil fuel, of, you know, oil
dominance, energy dominance, anda kind of backlash, I would say,

(01:12:58):
against the kind of sustainablecomplete streets, walkability,
bikeability vision that Peterjust offered us. So I do worry
about the forces that arepushing us towards other
futures. And in some of the workthat I've done, we look at
different future scenarios andkind of look at them in an

(01:13:18):
extreme way and try to tease outsome of the trends that are
happening.
And I would say coming out ofthat work is, as Peter argued,
we can't just go along with thedominant narrative that we're
being sold. We have to recognizethat we shape the future. People
and our decisions, our politics,our efforts to be part of the

(01:13:44):
conversation, part of thedecision making, that's what
will shape the future. And so weneed to all stay alert, stay
involved, advocate for thethings we want. Think about
ethics, think aboutresponsibility and think about
limiting our energy consumption,maybe limiting our mobility as a

(01:14:04):
way towards reaching a moreinclusive and just mobility
system.

Well, this conversation has been as
interesting and robust as I andanybody who listens to this and
your readers, many of whom Ipretty sure would call
themselves fans, could havehoped. I would say that my own
journey to understand theorigins of today's public
street, how policy and designgive them shape and their
implications for mobilityjustice have followed a path,

(01:14:33):
and forgive the pun, paved bythe likes of Mimi Scheller and
Peter Dorton. And I know I'm notthe only person. In my own book,
Reclaiming the Road, I'm tryingto build on such work of so many
scholars across disciplines totry to articulate an
integrative, for me,intersectional understanding of
mobility justice, and to try tooperationalize it in order to

(01:14:56):
try to plan and design a morejust street. It's been really an
interesting project to try totake these big picture ideas and
see how they played out on theroadway literally in the cities
that are trying to slow trafficdown to foster more human speed
transportation, to open roadwaysto more diverse users in public

(01:15:18):
spaces, to put a lawn chair inthe public street is a pretty
radical move in The UnitedStates, and even more radical is
to completely reconstructroadways and pedestrianize them
as the public realm.
And these are really complicatedtopics conceptually and
practical as our conversationhas gone in. This is what I'm
saying is like, once we startreally thinking about the street

(01:15:40):
as a public space, then we'reout of the realm of engineering
into politics, which is reallywhere I think the streets and
its future needs to bedetermined, not in black box
processes. So thank you Peterand Mimi, to the University of
Minnesota, and Maggie who'sbehind the production of this
podcast. Thanks everybody forhelping us reimagine and remake

(01:16:01):
our public streets and for allthe insights that shared today.
This is an ongoing conversation,of course, and it's a project as
interesting and as important asthe future of our cities.
I don't think that's anunderstatement. I'm firmly
convinced that a moresustainable, just and convivial
city can only come throughreclaiming the roadways from the

(01:16:22):
cars. And I think thisconversation we've had today
offers something of a roadmapfor why we would think about
doing that, how we want to thinkabout the future of the roadway,
and how we might reclaim itequitably. So thanks to
everybody.

Thank you.

Peter Norton (01:16:39):
Thank you. What a pleasure to join you all today
for conversation.

Alright. Awesome. Thank you so much to
the University of MinnesotaPress.

Narrator (01:16:47):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book Reclaimingthe Road Mobility, Justice
Beyond Complete Streets by DavidPrithurch is available from
University of Minnesota Press.Thank you for listening.

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