My vote for word of the year (and, unfortunately, for the 20th and 21st centuries)
// The world we live in is built for cars, so it just makes sense to drive. So get with the program, already. (“Zoom Zoom,” No Money Down, welcome to a lifetime of debt.)
That is the essence of “Motonormativity,” a term employed by Ian Walker, an enviromental psychology professor at the Swansea University in Wales and the lead author of a paper published last year.
As Walker, who is also an extreme distance cyclist who holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest bicycle ride across Europe, explains in a recent episode of the War on Cars podcast, motonormativity is simply a reiteration of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume’s hoary old “is-ought problem.” The idea is that because something “is,” that’s how it “ought” to be. (A fallacy that neatly encapsulates the worldview of many conservatives.) If you’re hearing an echo of the term “heteronormativity,” it’s deliberate, according to Walker. Just as those who choose to walk, ride, or roll rather than drive are forced to navigate a world built for the convenience of drivers, non-binary people are forced to fit into the categories of a heteronormative world. Here’s a link to the paper: https://psyarxiv.com/egnmj
Other useful terms to describe the state of a car-dominated world have issued from academe. “Motordom” was one put forth by Peter D. Norton in his essential book Fighting Traffic, as a blanket descriptor for the concatenation of interets—GM, highway builders, traffic engineers, Eisenhower, Robert Moses, Tesla—who have worked together to make the world safe for drivers (and unsafe, and unpleasant, for just about everyone else).
“Motordom” isn’t really a conspiracy, according to Norton; think of it as a community of shared interests, whose collective efforts have put 1.4 billion automobiles on the road, kill 1.4 million people a year (at least), strip the earth for lithium, and whose collective emissions we should all remember when the Thwaites Ice Shelf collapses. When "Motordom” really gets together, it can achieve wonders, like the cabal of car and tire-makers and petroleum producers who tore up streetcar and interurban tracks in North America and replaced them with municipal bus systems, which were then allowed to moulder.
“Automobility” is a term used by some sociologists and philosophers to refer to a “global system of automobilities.” The critics of automobility—I’m thinking of Ivan Illich, John Urry, Georges Amar—can be quite fun to read. Peter Sloterdijk, for example, deploys a mass of metaphors to describe the automobile in his essay "Uterus on Wheels" (turd, uterus, phallus); the idea of it being a mobile version of Plato's Cave, in the Spiegel interview below, is genius.
“Automobility” is a bit high-falutin’, for my taste. The “car system” works just fine for me.
“Autophobia,” set forth in the book of the same name by Brian Ladd, just bugs me. Ladd, who is shown in the driver’s seat of a car in the photo on the flap, builds a case that fear of cars is just a form of maladaptation to modern life. The book is a useful compilation of a century-plus of objections to the dominance of cars—people after my own heart!—which is why I keep it on my shelf, but the cover photo might be the best thing about Autophobia. It shows artist Dustin Shuler’s installation “Spindle,” in which eight beaters were impaled on a 50-foot-tall spike outside an Illinois mall. Since torn down, alas, it might have been my only reason to make a pilgrimage to Berwyn.
When I started thinking about writing a book about my own relationship with the “car system,” I initially imagined taking the kind of approach adopted by the good people over at The War on Cars podcast (of which I’m a longtime listener): a confrontational embrace of a marginal position. The podcast team in turn borrowed their name from Rob Ford, the populist, cyclist-baiting mayor of Toronto, who garnered support by dreaming up a nefarious “War on Cars” led by transit-riding zealots. (Reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s 15-Minute-City conspiracy theory, but that’s another post.)
But my M.O. has always been to Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive, as Johnny Mercer put it. (I blame it on my upbringing on the hippie-anarchist-punk west coast, which imbued me with a last-gasp breath of optimism and melioralism.) I realized that the cities that worked best—the places I really liked to linger in—had reduced car dependency while still finding a way to keep their citizens moving. They did it by using public transit, whether in the form of the vaporettos of Venice, the subway trains of New York, or the tramways of Zürich.
That’s why I chose the title “Straphanger” for my own book on mobility. It was an attempt to reappropriate a maligned identity—that of the long-suffering commuter stuffed into a train, bus, funicular or subway car—and make it into something to be proud of.
Because fingers at cars and drivers only gets you so far, and it doesn’t make you friends. Most of them don’t have much choice in how they get around, thanks to zoning, sprawl, and lack of alternatives. Saying we should all move to Amsterdam or Copenhagen is fine, but those cities are already crowded with Dutch and Danish people. Declaring war on cars is fine—I guess I’m a fellow traveller—but I prefer to advocate for transit and active transport. Get the essential mode right—public transit—and compact, walkable, bikeable, livable cities follow.
A good first move is understanding how “Motonormativity” has framed the debate, and recognizing there are ways to step out of that frame. So let’s thank the good Dr. Walker for giving us a useful way of describing the bizarre status quo we have all been born into.
