Can we design better public streets?
My journey to this book began through the rabbit holes of trying to understand how the street became the space it was.
Peter Norton:Justice has been a very important frame for looking at streets historically. Engineers are not used to the vocabulary of justice.
Mimi Sheller:So we started this approach called the new mobilities paradigm, where we wanted to put mobility at the center of our thinking.
David Prytherch:Hello. I'm David Prithridge, professor of geography at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I'm author of Reclaiming the Mobility, Justice Beyond Complete Streets, published by the amazing University of Minnesota Press. Like many listeners, I've long been fascinated by public streets, the streets that we traverse daily and where we spend so much of our lives. As a geographer, I want to understand why they have the shape they do.
David Prytherch:As a pedestrian cyclist, I've long wondered why they're so hostile. And as a planner, I wonder how they might be different and better. And that's why I'm honored today to be joined on this podcast by Doctor. Peter Norton, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia. Peter is author of The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by MIT Press and The Illusory Promise of High-tech Driving, by Island Press, among many other award winning publications.
David Prytherch:Hello, Peter.
Peter Norton:Hello. It's a pleasure to be here.
David Prytherch:It's wonderful to have you. We're also joined by Doctor. Mimi Scheller. Mimi is the dean of the Global School at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, WPI. Mimi is founding co editor of the journal Mobilities and the author of The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes published by Verso, Advanced Introduction to Mobilities published by Edward Elgar, and so many other groundbreaking books and articles.
David Prytherch:So welcome, Mimi.
Mimi Sheller:Thanks, David. Hi, David. Hi, Peter. Great to be with you.
David Prytherch:Alright. Wonderful. And now I must say at the outset what an honor it is to be joined by such original and powerful thinkers. There's a quote that goes back to Isaac Newton beyond, but he said that if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. And I could go on at length how much my own modest work stands on the shoulders of giants like Peter Norton and Mimi Scheller, but suffice it to say that copies of their books sit over my shoulder on my office bookshelf dog eared from use, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who uses their foundational work in their own work.
David Prytherch:Before we get into what I'm sure will be a really, really rich conversation, it would be good to first preface it from where we're coming from, the questions that drive our own work related to mobility and streets. And since I guess I'm the host, I guess I'll start. So I'm a geographer. I'm driven by questions like how has the public street taken its current shape? It may seem strange to some listeners to think of streets having the geography.
David Prytherch:Often we think of streets as infrastructure, and that's why Peter in a department that involves engineers is where we typically look. But even if you do some basic back of the napkin math, there are something like 4,000,000 miles of roadways in The United States. Making some assumptions about standard lane width, it reveals that there's something like 20,000 square miles of roadway surface in The United States. And that's an area greater than the four small states combined. Locally, streets comprise more than 25% of American downtown land area and 80% of municipally owned public space.
David Prytherch:We spend a lot of our lives on the streets, typically an hour a day driving or riding in vehicles, in addition to time walking, biking, rolling, or riding transit. We socialize on streets, whether passing greetings or long conversations. All of us live adjacent to streets, and unhoused people often live on them. Streets have a vast territory whose geography profoundly structures our lives and how we get around. So if you navigate streets like me primarily, or as I do as a pedestrian cyclist, you can't help wonder why roadways are so auto dominated and hostile, indeed deadly to non drivers.
David Prytherch:More than seven thousand five hundred 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 predominantly the most vulnerable among us. They're people of low income. They're older or younger people.
David Prytherch:And so this raises some pretty profound equity issues and questions like, well, what is mobility justice exactly? What would a just street look like in theory and practice? Now, for those of us who are planners or policymakers, I get to teach planning. I'm a citizen planner. I'm privileged to serve as a city councilor here in Oxford.
David Prytherch:We naturally wonder, can't we design better streets? This starts with the basics of transportation, safety and equity. An engineer would call that accommodating other users. Streets are places, and so there are larger issues that I explore in the book of how streets might become not only more equitable transportation facilities but also more vibrant and convivial spaces, not just on the margins but across the entire right of way. These are the questions that are at the heart of my book, Reclaiming the Road, where I explore the ongoing reclaiming of American roadways from cars, especially through and beyond the watershed moment of the COVID-nineteen pandemic, not only for more diverse forms of mobility, but also for broader public life.
David Prytherch:So in the book, I ponder what these changes might mean for how we think about mobility and public infrastructure and what might constitute a just street. It's part of a movement to rethink mobility and American streets that I think is as significant in theory as it is in practice. As I say, I stand on the shoulders of giants who have been pondering these questions for a long time. So I'll start with you Mimi. Can you share what drives Mimi Schettler when it comes to mobility in the public street?
Mimi Sheller:Okay, thanks David. And I'm excited also, I'll just say, to see your work that's pushing forward this examination of mobility, justice, and streets, and transportation equity, and what it means today. My work started, almost twenty five years ago. I'm a sociologist and I was working with sociologist in England named John Urie, who was very well known for his work on mobilities also. And we started to talk about thinking about society and all of the big challenges facing us through the lens of how we move, how people move, how things move, how information moves, and the way all of this mobility had been kind of ignored in some sense by traditional sociological approaches.
Mimi Sheller:So we started this approach called the new mobilities paradigm, where we wanted to put mobility at the center of our thinking. And it was that journey, I guess, of thinking through mobilities that led me to the concept of mobility justice. And in my book of that title, what I started with was that we were in a number of crisis situations. It seemed one being the climate crisis and the need to move beyond fossil fuel driven mobility and decarbonized transportation. The second crisis seemed to be around urbanism and the inequities that were sort of built into our urban infrastructure and what you could think of as both health issues, traffic issues, the impacts that you've talked of on, you know, road safety and things like that.
Mimi Sheller:And then thirdly, was interested also in the migration and border crisis and the ways in which our mobility systems and our impact are planetary. So how we move locally also relates to how we move globally. So the concept of mobility justice and the book was an attempt to think across all of those different crises, how they intersect with each other and really how the system of automobility is at the heart of many of those problems. And the things you've talked about of how do planners, how do urban thinkers, policymakers, decision makers, well as the public and civil society, how do we change this, what seems like a locked in system of automobility towards something better?
David Prytherch:Wonderful. Thank you, and thank you for creating that space for this kind of conversation. So, Peter, you've come at this from a different angle, discipline wise, so tell us about what motivates you.
Peter Norton:Well, first, David, I'd like to comment on, Isaac Newton's wisdom, where the paradox is, of course, that the giants whose shoulders you stand on are depending in turn on the giants before them. And I'd like to propose to you that in a in in effect, the the giant is really a compound, a collaboration. And I love this meeting for bringing together geography, sociology, and history, because that helps us make sure that this giant that we're constituting here has all the faculties necessary to perceive and understand the problem we are trying to grapple with here. You you pointed out, that I I'm in an engineering school, and we are used to looking at these spaces since the early twentieth century, primarily as an engineering problem. And sometimes, that can come at the cost of geographic wisdom, sociological wisdom, and historical wisdom that is not so much disregarded as just omitted from the engineering conversations.
Peter Norton:We used to think of problem solving as something we approach from the perspective of common sense experience. Engineering took the notion that we can have applied science substitute for that, but there are hazards to both. And I think we need to have a science that's informed by experience, and we need to have experience that's guided by science. I think history can offer that to us. I want to stress that as a historian, my interest is actually very much in the present and in the future, but it's only through a historical perspective that I think we can really perceive and anticipate the future.
Peter Norton:Everything we see, everything we experience, everything we encounter every single day is the product of a history that we don't personally know and could not personally experience. We tend to fill that lack of knowledge about history with official stories, some of which serve agendas, and this immediately, intersects with Mimi's interest in justice, because I grew up hearing that the status quo that you so aptly described, David, of a hostile and dangerous environment, I learned that that was the product of consumer demand in a free market or of democracy in action or of mass preferences or of technological progress. And while I don't think any of those accounts is entirely wrong, they even combined, they are woefully deficient in explaining what we have. What we have is the result of a power struggle. And some in a power struggle, there are winners and losers.
Peter Norton:And, this is something I think, historical study can help us appreciate. Justice has been a very important frame for looking at streets historically. Engineers are not used to the vocabulary of justice, and so it's easy to miss that fact. But if you simply look, say in the daily newspapers of a century ago, you will see every single issue of any large city newspaper has mobility justice on the front page and many of the back pages as well. Now the vocabulary is different.
Peter Norton:They won't speak of mobility justice. But if you read between the lines, that's unequivocally what they are struggling with a century ago and that we're struggling with again, today. This is where I come from in looking at our common subject of interest here.
David Prytherch:Well, is just the perfect segue because what I hope we might do is begin as a historically minded person would with some context and you've already gotten us started with that and your work is so powerful in that regard. So streets are as ancient as human settlement and are the product of continuous evolution over time. They are really a social product. But let's focus on the modern street, the timeframe of perhaps the last few centuries, and the complex story of how streets went from what were public spaces that maybe prioritized transportation but were open to other uses, to vehicular thoroughfares that often exclude anything but vehicular traffic and what that means for mobility justice. So since, Peter, this is kind of your domain, I wonder if you could it's a long story, and you've gotten us started already, but how you might recount how that played out really about a century ago and perhaps before.
Peter Norton:Certainly, in some ways, streets of today resemble the streets of a century and even two centuries ago. They go between destinations, they link people up, they serve mobility needs, transport needs of various kinds. But as you already suggested, David, they also served a multiplicity of other needs. And diverse street uses were fairly compatible provided no one was going at a rate of speed that made them a lethal danger to others. And it's that particular use of streets for fast vehicles that has made streets hostile for everything except vehicular transportation.
Peter Norton:There was a notion in streets that we still have in other realms today. We have it for public spaces, for city parks. We have it in the same norms apply in a busy, say, airport corridor, where we welcome all kinds of different uses for these spaces on conditions. One condition being that, you don't make a nuisance out of yourself for others. And so you'll see on the sign as you enter a city park, certain rules that, list those nuisances for you in case you need that reminder, and also that you don't endanger others.
Peter Norton:And so a city street was a place where you were certainly welcome to do almost anything, depending on the street. Children might be playing in it. People might be selling things from a cart in a street. This that was very common as well. And people, of course, might be traveling, by various pre twentieth century modes of transport.
Peter Norton:But there would be no tolerance for any use that was a danger to others or that was a impediment to others. And notice that by that standard, the automobile, the passenger car, was the most dubious user of streets early on because it did both of those things. It did endanger others and it did inconvenience others. For example, when clog streets with parked cars or block a street car with motor vehicle traffic, you're violating these norms, norms that still survive today in a busy airport corridor where, know, you when those sometimes those electric transporters are traveling down a corridor, they are deferring to others because they know that the street or the corridor is for everybody. And now today, we have absolute right of way for the motor vehicle almost everywhere.
Peter Norton:And even where the pedestrian has a legal right, very often they can't exercise it safely or even defer their right because they have so adopted the driver's perspective that a pedestrian will very often not even exercise the right of way that they do have. And so that transformation is the legacy of the twentieth century that we are living with now in 2025.
David Prytherch:Yeah, I've long thought about how, by law, to exert your right to the crosswalk in many of our state statutes, you have to be in or approaching the traffic travel lane. You literally have to put your body in front of the car before you even trigger your right, which is an interesting way of thinking about rights and justice. So Mimi, looking back to that kind of moment a century ago and the things building up to you, how would you interpret that through the lens of mobility justice that Peter talks about as being kind of implicit in what would have been on the newspaper front cover in 1925?
Mimi Sheller:Well, it reminds me of that the 1920s were right in the middle of what we might call the Jim Crow era in The United States. And to think about mobility justice in The US context, you have to look at it within the history of a system of slavery, of emancipation that followed that, of Reconstruction era, followed by migration, the Great Migration, which brought populations from the southern plantations into the cities that were industrializing in the early twentieth century. And so when we talk about the struggle over streets and mobility, we have to remember that it was racialized, gendered, classed struggles that were taking place within these populations, also of many immigrants coming from around the world into the industrializing cities. So the kind of power struggles that were happening were not just about vehicular modes or use of street space. They were about race, gender and class power.
Mimi Sheller:So that would be one starting point I would think about. The other side of that, I think, would be to kind of bring it forward also to the civil rights movement, the efforts at desegregation and how central busing was to that Rosa Parks and being able to ride the bus. But those struggles actually go back to the nineteenth century and the segregation of streetcars, for example. So there's a really long history of struggles of access to streets, to mobility, to inclusion in public space. And what we see happen in a sort of later period as we come into the 1960s and 70s, you see the urban uprisings that occurred around the civil rights movement and then urban redevelopment, urban what was called urban renewal.
Mimi Sheller:And that was a moment of highway building that completely transformed the street space of of older cities that had maybe the original grid from, you know, like I grew up in Philadelphia, has the classic colonial grid system created by William Penn. But when highway building came in, it of course disrupted those traditional urban street patterns with this much higher speed automobile only roadways. And that was also a racial and class struggle around where those highways would be situated, whose neighbourhoods would be impacted, how it would affect everyone to have a right to the city, a right to the streets, a right to public space. And, you know, there's some famous examples of the struggles over highway building. There's the classic work by Jane Jacobs, if I got that right, the life and death of great American cities and preserving Greenwich Village in New York City versus the kind of highway building of Robert Moses.
Mimi Sheller:That's one of the sort of classic histories. But there were struggles over highway building in many cities and there were also many traditionally African American business districts and residential neighbourhoods that were destroyed by highway buildings. So I think for me, that's a starting point for thinking about kind of where we are now and the whole process that then occurred of suburbanization and what was called white flight and the way in which our sprawl patterns in The US and our automobile dependence are grounded in that history of racial injustice.
David Prytherch:Well, you've just really kind of highlighted one of the core relationships or dialectics that both of you have emphasized, which is that at one level, the street is a public right of way, which is kind of a distinct legal entity that's engineered kind of in isolation from urban space around it, but the roadway and its sharing has always been central to urban life and urban change, and it's been a contested space so that equity on the roadway is difficult to disentangle from all these other things. I was, in researching the book, had learned that the earliest traffic fatalities in New York City were in Harlem and they were racialized conflicts right from the very beginning and they remain so today in terms of who gets run over by cars. Think about this dialectic between the street and wider societal change. So I've been thinking a lot about orders and the passing of orders. We're probably thinking a lot about that in 2025, widely, but that there was a pretty durable order that was literally durably built into the urban landscape over the course of the twentieth century.
David Prytherch:The the engineering and design standards that that took societal ideas and materialized them literally in concrete, asphalt, retro reflective striping, marking, signage, through the kind of manuals that if you want to understand the street, you can't understand the street apart from the AASHTO Green Book and the MUTCD, Manual Uniform Traffic Control Devices. It created and reinforced a particular order that was very durable and most of us grew up just kind of, as Peter notes, assuming that's the way things are. But there were always people who we engineered the street as pipes for cars, but it was always a controversial project. And and over time, there were people who were discontented with it. But over the course of the twentieth century, towards the beginning of the twenty first century, there's been a building movement to at least accommodate the non drivers and that coalesced in the movement that has been called Complete Streets.
David Prytherch:And Complete Streets, Smurk North America defines it as an approach to planning, designing, building and operating and maintaining streets that enable safe access for all people who need to use them, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities. I was always interested because this was expressed initially, it came out of bicycle advocacy and an intersection. The original Police Streets Coalition was the AARP. It was a coalition of people. At least initially, it was not explicitly, as Peter notes in Tolkien a Century ago, about equity.
David Prytherch:That was not the language that was, but it was implicit. So let's talk about this. And what do you see as the significance of this movement to at least reclaim roadways for diverse modes of travel, which we would imagine as seeing in terms of crosswalks being striped or bicycle lanes or traffic signals prioritizing pedestrians, one might lump this all together as multimodalism. Mimi, you were already kind of moving us far to think about the twentieth century and the ongoing battles. So how would you interpret this multimodalism, Complete Streets vis a vis mobility justice?
Mimi Sheller:I have to say when I first heard about Complete Streets, I was all on board with it. I thought, perfect, this is what we need. We want access to all modes of all users of the roadway to be considered in the design specifications. And that would help us overcome the dominance of fast moving level of service, of traffic, of motorized vehicles, just kind of using it as a sort of pipeline to get from point A to point B. Sounds great.
Mimi Sheller:But over the study of mobility justice, I came to recognize that there were some deeper issues there that went beyond engineering design, the sort of furnishing of the street space. And again, it goes back to where I started in the questions of inequity and power. I learned from a group called the Ontokening about the idea that different people's bodies have a different relationship to the street space. So even what may appear as an open, accessible right of way that we can all get to, we approach it with different bodies, different experiences, different social cues and social contexts, some of which are more invisible and are not necessarily the hard design of the street, but have to do with other forms of social control, policing, gender roles, things like that, racial segregation. And all of that comes into play to mean that, as Dan Tokening put it, different bodies demand distinct social, physical and cultural supports within shared mobility environments.
Mimi Sheller:And so that adds a whole other layer of nuance to what is a complete street.
David Prytherch:Yeah, this has been really interesting to me, I'm curious to hear your perspective, Peter. And this was, I would just say, for me because that had been my frame, and that was enough of a project. To just make the street accessible for the pedestrian and bicyclist is a monumental project we've only begun to scratch at the surface of. But then to be pushed beyond to say, well perhaps there is a sense beyond the right of way. Even critiques, for example, people making the connection between transportation improvement like bike lanes and urban justice issues like gentrification.
David Prytherch:So partly my book was about wrestling with how do I make sense of that? What do we mean by justice? Particularly since there are different ways that we can talk about justice that sometimes talk past each other or seem to be in conflict? So but we'll come back to that later. Peter, how have you interpreted this through your lens?
Peter Norton:Well, it's again, it's a power struggle. And so, I mean, the good news about Complete Streets is this idea began with advocates. It didn't begin with engineers. It didn't begin with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or a state department of transportation, these official agencies adopted it under pressure. They adopted this idea of complete streets under pressure.
Peter Norton:Now, of course, the paradox of that kind of success is once it's institutionalized, you're likely to see it diluted to a point where you don't recognize the advocacy anymore in it, where it's not what you anticipated. We've seen this, for example, with the Vision Zero movement, the movement that says we should be aspiring toward mobility safety in which the only acceptable result is zero deaths and zero serious injuries. Well, vision zero begins as a idea outside of the institutional frameworks. It was adopted within institutional frameworks and then inevitably is diluted to a point where now it's often criticized as empty rhetoric. And we see this with Complete Streets as well.
Peter Norton:And yet, yeah, I think we should take some satisfaction in the fact that there was at least sufficient pressure pressure to get the, officialdom to adopt the term and at least to some extent the aspiration. Though I would emphatically agree with Mimi that in practice, it's nothing like true mobility justice. I think what we continue to find is that the expert institutions serve a purpose. I mean, they serve the explicit purpose of applying science to our problems, but unofficially, they also serve the purpose of closing off answers to social questions. For example, a century ago, the first generation of traffic engineers redefined the terms of the debate through the influence of automobile interest groups in such a way that while traffic congestion used to be defined as too many people driving cars, and that's a waste of street space, they turn that on its head into our roads are are outdated, they don't provide enough space for driving and parking.
Peter Norton:Same thing with safety. The conventional wisdom circa 1920 is that traffic safety is primarily a problem of getting drivers to slow down to a non lethal speed and to respect the rights of other street users. Institutions ostensibly applying science, but in practice, really, applying the agendas of their sponsors, and I mean their their money, transform that framing of traffic safety into one of how do we exclude people walking? How do we exclude, people who are using the street for anything other than driving? And this, of course, leads to profound inequities because the moment you're reserving streets, including every ordinary city street, you're prioritizing drivers, you're excluding majorities.
Peter Norton:I grew up hearing that car domination in The US was really whether you like it or not, it's a reflection of majority preferences. And what people don't realize when they offer that explanation and usually still agree with it is that most women of driving age in The United States didn't have a driver's license until the nineteen sixties, which means we had several decades, in which when the so called experts said, well, everybody prefers to drive, They they defined everybody as like them, I. E, male. So there was an extremely strong gender dimension to this where every time a street was redefined as a place for drivers, not only did that exclude most people, it was overwhelmingly gendered and also, of course, with big class and race implications too, since those are densely intertwined historically. So Complete Streets is a success story in the sense that the term begins in advocacy and becomes adopted, and then paradoxically, for exactly the same reason.
Peter Norton:It's also a disappointment.
David Prytherch:Yeah. It is one of those things that I struggle with conceptually and practically. My journey to this book began through the rabbit holes of trying to understand how the street became the space it was, which then leads you to traffic statutes adopted by states, to the case law that adjudicates who gets a settlement when one person collides into another person. It leads you into highway capacity analysis. It leads to engineering.
David Prytherch:It leads to marking, signalization of the roadway, what they call traffic control. And the book that I wrote in 2018, it ultimately was an indictment of how auto centric those parts of the system are to their very base of the DNA. And that still is despite the complete streets movement, the traffic statutes of most states are not that different from what was initially adopted Uni War Vehicle Code a century ago. So we shouldn't underestimate how, even at that base level, there's so much work yet to be done. But as Mimi points out, there have been rightful arguments that there are limits to multimodalism.
David Prytherch:That was partly for me trying to understand mobility justice beyond the Complete Streets model of multimodalism. But I want to shift to thinking about something even broader, and this is where it kind of stretched my brain, is what I saw going on, what was initially a frame about transportation, we've always known that streets were also places. For a long time, back to Jane Jacobs, I won't be able to quote her, but she effectively says, show me the city sidewalk and you'll show me the city. That's the first chapter after the introduction in the death and life of great American cities is the use of sidewalk safety. And there have long been complaints, but I think as you point out, Peter, they were kind of the frame of the conversation was that public space was something that happened on sidewalks.
David Prytherch:Public space, even in geography, which is a very, very robust history of talking about public space, focused on parks, those things that we understood to be public spaces. And the roadway surface itself was, in many of those conversations, kind of excluded from that. But what I saw that was really interesting as I was looking at what cities were doing is that there had been a movement beyond just thinking about livability to really thinking about and reclaiming streets as the public spaces that they are. And so in my book, I came to be really interested on this building movement that was very nascent prior to the pandemic, but accelerated so rapidly in a dizzyingly fast fashion to go beyond multimobilism to reclaim streets as public spaces. Many of us have seen this in our own cities.
David Prytherch:In my own book, looked at places like Boston, Massachusetts that were slowing their streets initially from what they called slow streets that were designed carefully with traffic calming to a citywide standard that says, Hey, the local street deserves traffic calming and expects speed humps on your local street. Cities like Oakland, California and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania threw upon initial efforts to plan bicycle boulevards that kind of calm traffic to slow cars to at least to bicycle speed to prioritize cyclists and maybe also make the street more livable for the people who live along it. That goes beyond that. Cities like New York, Denver, Los Angeles, they started out by things like Philly Free Streets or Cyclavia in Los Angeles that closed streets to through traffic, what were initially weekend closures became durable closures over the course of the pandemic where barricades were erected that said, Hey, no through traffic here. Or maybe they were open streets that excluded cars altogether and invited cafe tables onto the roadway, which is kind of a profound shift.
David Prytherch:And then even more durably, cities across The United States like San Francisco, Portland, Washington, DC, but in small towns, large towns have converted curbside parking into parklets or streeterees, and they go by different names for dining or public space uses. And in some places, closing the entire public right of way and creating the kind of plazas that we're familiar with when we visit Europe. And of course, York had done this with Times Square under the Bloomberg administration. But we start to see this in streets and alleys across The United States where it used to be car travel or parking. You might now sit and converse with someone on the asphalt surface.
David Prytherch:So these interventions are very dynamic and they're probably, in most places, reduced from pandemic peaks. But at least the programs themselves have become permanent. And they're starting to be woven into the the engineering manuals have shared streets as an option. They're, in some places, being woven into permanent street redesign. So I'm kind of curious how you both think about these recent efforts to transform roadways into more public spaces, whether just by slowing them, opening them, or reconstructing them on a semi permanent basis as parklets or plazas.
David Prytherch:So, you know, I guess what I'll do, I'm gonna keep swifting back and forth, I'm gonna start with you, Peter, from a historical perspective.
Peter Norton:Well, that's such a big question, and there's so many ways of approaching it. I think one thing we can learn about reconceiving streets is, we can find out how reconceptions have worked in the past and take lessons from them. So for example, the street of 1920 was a profoundly different place. And in fact, in 1922, an executive in Motordum wrote as an editorial, the obvious solution lies only in a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for. So this is a statement by a man interested in selling cars and roads that to pursue that agenda, he would first have to get together with his friends and industry and have what he called a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for.
Peter Norton:Now in 1922, when he wrote that editorial, it was a fanciful, farfetched, implausible ambition. And yet, over the next couple of decades, it was extraordinarily and breathtakingly successful. And I think we can learn from that success as we try to reconceive streets today. And if we look at how that transformation was pursued, while I am horrified by the ambition, I am I am admire the imagination and the ingenuity that went into making it work. And above all, it worked because they pursued, three, paths toward this transformation that were interdependent.
Peter Norton:One was changing social norms. They had to persuade people, and it was not easy that just walking wherever you wanted to walk was no longer okay, which is a pretty crazily ambitious thing to do and a substantially successful one as well. And that's that's a a whole study in itself. A second line of attack was that they had to transform law. If you transform law without social norms, you get people breaking the law.
Peter Norton:You know, this is for example, if you have prohibition in a in a community where people traditionally enjoyed social drinking, you're gonna have a lot of law breaking. Well, same thing here. They had to change law and social norms in tandem. And then, third was a transformation of engineering. And this meant establishing expert bodies that didn't exist and using, experts within those bodies to, introduce a kind of dogma that would be in the guise of science and, would include a lot of applied science that built upon dogmatic presuppositions.
Peter Norton:And those dogmatic presuppositions, in other words, points of principle that were not questionable, were that any congestion problem is a road capacity problem, not a excessive reliance on driving problem. And every safety problem is a problem of having too many people walking in the street or having road design that's antiquated. They love to talk about horse and buggy streets in a automobile age. And the and that rhetoric was designed to imply that the fault was not with the motor vehicle, because that's the modern thing, but rather with the street. And we need to build streets that are, safe for fast driving, which is very hard to do.
Peter Norton:But as early as, the late 1920s and early 1930s, in The US, there are highway projects going through cities, with the intention of making fast driving safe, and those roads which made no sense at all by the conventional, norms, even expert norms of a few years earlier, did make sense once these dogmatic positions were institutionalized, such as to, make streets safe, you have to rebuild streets for the twentieth century. In fact, the first generation of these were called by their proponents, and I quote, foolproof highways. And we know that when you make a so called foolproof highway, you certainly can prevent some kinds of crashes, for example, by having overpasses and underpasses or median strips. But then you in you deliberately encourage fast driving that makes those crashes that you still do have far more deadly. And and and at the same time, you also make lots of other modes of travel, like walking especially, much harder.
Peter Norton:So, we are the heirs of that radical revision, and that's, from my point of view, terrible news, but it comes with some very heartening news, and that is that radical revisions that seem impossible are in fact possible. We just need to pursue them through change on three fronts, each one dependent on the other, and those are social norms, laws, and engineering standards.
David Prytherch:This is really so interesting because I think that one of the things that in talking to planners and transportation advocates, one of the things that I had just been curious about, if you walked on streets, I remember being in Boston in the North End, such a tight neighborhood, and they basically converted the streets almost entirely into screeneries and the cars were just It was already difficult to drive in the North End and it just flipped the script. And so to me it was such an interesting evolution to give people access to resources that they had been excluded from for a century, which is a long time. And so most people have no memory or experience of what it's like to share the street in a different kind of way. But suddenly you could walk down the middle of the street in the North End among many other people in the car with the interloper, which flipped the script to where things had been a century prior. What I learned from talking to planners is that planners are forward thinking, but they were ready for an opportunity to begin to change the conversation.
David Prytherch:And the pandemic was as Ram Rahm Emanuele is always quoted as saying, Don't let a good crisis go to waste. And the planners jumped on it really, really, really fast. And I think what they had in mind was very much a mobility justice project that they had been thinking about. And many of the planning documents of the twenty ten's are imbued with a police street equity set of principles that led them, when given the opportunity, to carve out street for pedestrians. They did it.
David Prytherch:But what was so interesting is that in many of these places, they instantly encountered not only kind of a political it was a political move, but they encountered equity issues that were perhaps bigger than they had anticipated, Which of course, 2020 is the summer of twenty twenty will go down in history. It's a remarkable time because in addition to these national conversations about streets, we also have an incredible national conversation about equity, racial equity, a very, very dynamic, much of which literally took place on streets. And so those two very dynamic forces collide in some of these efforts that made the unfurling of slow streets, open streets, parklets, very complicated conversations. So I'm wondering, turning to you Mimi, how you would interpret some of these changes through the lens of mobility justice as it's been evolving in parallel with the street itself.
Mimi Sheller:Yeah. So first I wanna say I would interpret what happened a little bit differently. And I'll start by going a little bit back in history as well to the 1970s when Ivan Illich, who was a sort of socialist philosopher and thinker, he he noted that the road has been degraded from a commons to a simple resource for the circulation of vehicles. And in the 1970s, there was already a strong pushback happening against this kind of appropriation, almost colonization of street space away from people's everyday life and life worlds. And when we see European cities begin to push back against the automobile dominance that was coming to reshape their spaces.
Mimi Sheller:What we saw then was cities like Amsterdam, where it was families whose children were at risk now from and no longer able to play in the streets. And it was mothers in particular who started these protests against this car culture. And they began to advocate for streets to be given back as living space for everyday people. And that kind of led to what we see in Amsterdam today, the bike culture, the really famous Amsterdam bike culture, but it happened in other cities in Europe as well. What's interesting is I was living in London in the 1980s and there too, there was another wave of a movement against card dominance and it was through bicycle movements partly and something called reclaim the streets.
Mimi Sheller:And in both these cases, in sort of 1970s Amsterdam or 1980s London, there was a class politics as well as a gender politics to the idea that our everyday reproductive capacities of walking around, taking care of children and elderly people, getting food, being able to sit outdoors and being able to bicycle, those were all under threat and there was a pushback against that. What I see happening as we move into what you were describing in The United States, urban planners began to pick up on some of the nice aspects of reclaiming the streets and of placemaking and parklets and open streets movements, some of which also were adopted from Latin American cities. Justified it in The US. Ideologically, had to justify, well, why would we start planning this way? And they argued because it contributed to economic growth, job creation and raising real estate values.
Mimi Sheller:So what happened is it got co opted onto an urban growth agenda, an urban boosterism agenda as it was called. And that brought it into the more mainstream kind of urban planning and urban decision making so that when the pandemic came along, those tools, those ideas, those as you call them programs already existed and had already been considered for over a decade and all the pieces were there. And so they used the pandemic as a moment to implement this. The trouble with that is that there had already been some long standing concerns that these kinds of place making policies were leading to what some people call green gentrification. They were raising real estate values and therefore taxes and they were displacing people from more affordable housing who were no longer able to live in these newly improved walkable, lovely parklet filled urban spaces.
Mimi Sheller:And so place making became a kind of project of capitalist development or redevelopment. And it pushed people who could not afford there out to peripheries of the city where they also had poor access to public transportation, for example. And so by the time the pandemic comes, those lines had already been drawn, those kind of resentments at what was happening in terms of bike lane building and parklets and green gentrification. So the pandemic in a way exacerbated that because you also had the emergency frontline workers who had to go to work versus the people who were able to stay home and have things delivered and get food brought to them and have their entertainment online. And so it was the workers who were most put at risk.
Mimi Sheller:In The US it tended also to be racialized and ethnic minority workers who are the ones operating the public transport system, driving the buses, doing the deliveries, doing the gig economy, driving. And so they were at risk from the pandemic and they were also not benefiting in the same way from the green open streets policies. So I see those battle lines as having been drawn in the past and having been deepened during the pandemic and now continuing into our current sort of policy situation.
David Prytherch:Yeah, it's a really interesting, and I think many of us have been wrestling with this idea of the complete street being incomplete because it's limited in its ability to address wider inequalities. Your own work on mobility justice has always insisted on placing equity on the street in a wider frame. And that's an evolution that has been building, both theoretically, but I think also in transportation planning, the rise of equity matrices in which planners are trying to make decisions relative to a variety of, as a planner would put it, terms of an index and thinking about vulnerable populations and where. So that was where, in my own book, trying to resolve two different things. One is that seeing that there are arguments, for example, about green gentrification, that a bike lane could be a white lane, and that it can exacerbate injustices like gentrification.
David Prytherch:But then at the same time knowing that, well, what about the psychost whose bodily harm is experiencing injustice on a different axis in terms of their use of the transportation system. Then I try to step back and think about all the different discourses there are around equity that follow different lines of logic. So I'm in geography, and so we have many scholars who think of it in geography and planning who think about it spatially in terms of the spatial distribution of goods and bads. That's one way to think about when we would make a transportation decision. There's the multimodal perspective of what mode are you traveling?
David Prytherch:There's social justice, which is more about who you are, whether it's your identity or bodily difference, things like your gender identification or disability. But then there are the other kind of place based things, like the concern about green gentrification. But then there's also an intergenerational thing, what do we owe people in the future? So do we prohibit a bike lane today because we're worried about gentrification in 2025 where that might help decarbonize our cities, which would be a favor to our grandchildren? And then there's procedural justice on top of all of it.
David Prytherch:So my own book was trying to pull these things together because I saw the conversation sometimes going past each other or colliding with each other, which is why ultimately I was drawn to the powerful idea of intersectionality, which trying to very carefully, with utmost respect for its origins in black feminist scholarship, legal scholarship, but the idea that as individuals and also our systems, there are different axes on which privilege and disadvantage operate. And then each of us embodies a compounded nature of some combination of those different axes. And thinking about Kimberle Crenshaw who used the metaphor at the intersection, that's what a traffic signal does. To try to think about the street in a way that sought to balance these things. What I was really kind of impressed by talking to planners is that planners are thoughtful people.
David Prytherch:Biased in saying so, I train them. But your perfect example was Oakland, California, which was one of the leaders in rolling out the Slow Streets movement. In the blink of an eye, their Department of Transportation, I can't remember the acronym, who's a bicycle planner, heads that agency, which is itself kind of a change, closed all these streets. But the experience of the street closures was so different in different neighborhoods based on income and race. Almost within weeks, the program was butting up against all these other lines.
David Prytherch:And I think that's one of the reasons why some of these cities have pulled back or tried to do this. I think the work is, if you talk to the planners, to really open with how imperfect it is and how hard it is to balance these different factors. Planners, like engineers, want to rely on standards. And this is why I was interested in how some of these things have been codified in policies that just as a century ago we took emerging new social norms and tried to put them down on paper. I don't know how deeply it penetrates.
David Prytherch:So I'm kind of curious as we kind of round out this portion of the conversation, and we've been doing a good job taking turns, but I think it'd be fun to kind of open it up, is let's presume this is a really imperfect project. And the minute you codify something in a policy, you codified some balance of things which privileges someone over another person. And other angle I would put in is the planners are aware of your critique, Mimi, about the idea of agentification. But just as in the 1920s, the auto companies were a powerful force for transforming, what could possibly provide a countervailing force to the auto interest? It turns out businesses have been, in this process, turned into a countervailing political force with a lot of business improvement districts and downtowns have a lot of power.
David Prytherch:And they have embraced this agenda because they see real estate potential in the literal street. So at least the street space, hugely complicated. But the planners are often there recognizing that just like they recognize nimbyism, that they hope that nimbyism can be a force for progressive change. It's a tough game that they're messing with. And they wrestle with this in terms of what kind of lease price do we charge for the leasing of a public street space.
David Prytherch:It's really messy. I'll kick it to you, Peter, by that kind of open open ended conversation, which is how do you see this playing out in terms of the codification of of a mobility justice that we hope to be as just as it can reasonably be given the imperfections? And how do we put that stuff down on paper and then ultimately maybe in concrete? And and wonder the like what's the likelihood that that's going to approximate our idea of a just city or not?
Peter Norton:Well, I appreciated your cautions, David, about codifying policies because as your comments just indicated, they reflect a balance of power at the point of codification that will inevitably advantage some over others. And I think we can take, as another countervailing force, the tradition, which is an American tradition of activism, of vocal in the street, literally in the street politics, of free speech, of advocacy, of collective organization. We have a long tradition in this country and of this sort of thing even in streets. So I appreciated Mimi's reference to the struggle in The Netherlands, especially in the nineteen seventies, to recover streets that are safe for all. And that movement in The Netherlands, particularly under the name, stop the child murder, stop the Kinder Morad is fairly well known at least among planners in the planning community.
Peter Norton:What's far less well known is that Americans were doing stop the Kinder Morgue, stop the child murder movements in American streets decades earlier. You find, and as Mimi indicated, this was primarily, mothers or women in general, often though with allies across the demographic spectrum. And it took the form, as it did in The Netherlands, of illegal street blockades of, American cities coast to coast, large and small suburbs and downtowns, big city residential neighborhoods, and even smaller town communities. Typically, women blocking streets often with lawn chairs, demanding safer conditions. And rhetorically, these demands were often framed in terms of safer for children.
Peter Norton:I think also they intended safer for us too because invoking children was both an honest effort but also as a a rhetorical strategy. We have this tradition in America too. It is completely absent from our history books, from our museums, from our documentary films, but it is prominent in the collections of every city newspaper archive that you can find. These were common in Los Angeles, in Boston, in Philadelphia, and in Chicago, and in Seattle, and everywhere in between. And I think what this tradition, if we could give this the attention it has been due but that has been neglected, is it can reconnect us to a legitimizing story, a story that says, no.
Peter Norton:We today, in 02/2025, who want streets that are welcoming to all kinds of people, to all kinds of bodies, to all kinds of uses and users. We are within, a rich historical tradition. We are not some edgy new fringe. The end the edgy new idea of the twentieth century was to restrict streets and give them primarily to drivers. That was the edgy new fringe idea.
Peter Norton:The mainstream idea, the mainstream tradition in America was to ensure that streets, to some degree at least, serve all and serve all somewhat equitably. This was even codified into law. For example, every street railway, every streetcar company in America had to agree with the public utility commission or the public service commission. It went by various names in various states that they would provide affordable service to all, that they could not raise their fares without permission, that they could not exclude certain neighborhoods that were unprofitable. That was a recognition that to use the streets is a demand on the public.
Peter Norton:And that means that if you wanna make that demand, the public has the right to insist on equity in return. We have largely lost that tradition that says that the uses to which we put our streets must serve the public generally and not just the the interest of a private company. We saw that struggle when Cruise and Waymo demanded access to the streets of San Francisco for their robo taxis. The city said no, but the state said yes and forced, San Franciscans to put up with this over the will of San Franciscans' own local elected representatives. That's a sign that we lost that tradition that the streets belong to the people, and therefore, the purposes to which we commit them must serve the people and the public benefit generally and not just any one business.
Peter Norton:We can reconnect with that historical tradition and that will empower us to recommit our streets today toward mobility justice purposes.
David Prytherch:So Des, you mentioned San Francisco, which is a city that had innovated the idea of the parklet as a way of like the parking space. If you could put money in to store your car on the roadway, then why not put your money in and set up a greenery and sit in it? That became a permanent program, initially was entirely public. It did not permit outdoor commercial uses in the parklets. They changed that in the pandemic, but codified rules that require that the space be open after business hours or have a seat and very what they recognize being really imperfect solutions.
David Prytherch:And so I'm kinda curious, Mimi, this idea of to the degree that ultimately we have to reconcile these different perspectives, and I think like a planner, like, do you do the bike lane or not? Do you do the park lane or not? How do you do it? What do you think is the likelihood that we're going to be able to approximate mobility justice in these interventions? Where are the opportunities?
David Prytherch:Where are the challenges?
Mimi Sheller:So I have to say that the way you pose the question is from the point of view of the planner. And there is an argument in this question around what is justice, which you mentioned procedural justice, but this whole idea of how do we envision more inclusive and collaboratively governed cities? That is, who is making these decisions? Who is the one planning? There's a few things that have happened in recent years.
Mimi Sheller:One, the rise of more diverse people entering into the planning professions. And it has been a struggle. And I'll say, you know, when you would go to the major, say, transportation conference, the Transportation Research Board conference, it has traditionally been very much male dominated and there began to be a sort of women in transportation network and group within that organization. But increasingly people of color and Black, Indigenous, Latinx people have entered into planning. And I'm thinking of the people who've been part of the Ontokening and part of a group called People for Mobility Justice.
Mimi Sheller:So Adonia Lugo, Naomi Durner, Tamika Butler, Sara Rebellozzo McCullough. There's like a whole group of generational shift in who is pushing the conversation about inclusivity. And also I'll say within the field of critical disability studies, there's also been a really strong politics of who is at the table, who's making the decisions, who's doing the planning. I think in that sense, that's crucial. And so what we see happening when you look at some of the earlier movements we were talking about, there was a politics of mobility.
Mimi Sheller:When you talk about engineering, planning, investment, it's depoliticizing in a way. And what we need is to get back to a politics of mobility that is actually mobilizing people to make claims on their own self determination of their mobilities, of their dwelling, of their street space, and to be part of the decision making, the planning and the conversation. And that's something that I include within this idea that I call mobile commoning, is that we need to common not only the street itself, our mobilities through it, but also how cities are governed.
David Prytherch:And that to me has been perhaps the most profound takeaway, and I'm trying to continue to push the idea. One thing is about our bodily access to the street, but the access of people to the decision making table has in some ways really been cracked open in a way that some of these open streets and for these to be neighborhood bottom up initiatives presents a lot of equity issues, particularly not all neighborhoods have the capacity to find their way to the table. But the idea that we un black box the design of the street and we get it out of the engineering domain into the Roomba politics, way we think about a public park. You don't just engineer a public park, you have a conversation about how you want to use the public space and you include stakeholders at the table. That to me is the hopeful part of this.
David Prytherch:It changes the decision making dynamic. So we could keep going for hours talking about such a rich topic, but to try to bring this around to a close, we we kinda started to point away in the future, and I'm kinda interested in what you're thinking all this means. Is this a little experiment that will be snuffed out and will go back to the twentieth century order to solve this conversation about mobility justice and open, slowed, and and and public streets. Like, where are we going? Of course, it's 2025, so we all are doing a lot of thinking about where things are headed.
David Prytherch:So I'll open it up. Peter, where do you think we're headed?
Peter Norton:Well, as you gently implied, we're in danger. And, specifically, the danger that I see in our streets and and public spaces is the danger that comes from the people who wanna persuade us that with enough futuristic technology, we will deliver a utopia that will be a paradise for everyone. This is a message that while we constantly mistake it for being a new one is actually very old. If you wanna sell a tool, which is what technology is, don't call it a tool. Tools are not that impressive.
Peter Norton:Call it a solution. You'll notice that, within just the last couple of decades, almost, every technology you can think of has been repackaged as a solution. The fact is no technology can ever solve our problems for us. It's only people who solve our problems. The technology that we use helps us solve our problems, but that reduces the technology to a tool.
Peter Norton:It is not, and it is never the solution. And yet, we are saturated with messages. If you just look online a little bit about the future of mobility or something like that, you won't see publicly enjoyed spaces of all kinds of people of all degrees of income and so on sharing public spaces together. You'll see bizarre jetsonian futures with everybody in their own so called autonomous vehicle. And, of course, that word is is completely false.
Peter Norton:A successful so called autonomous vehicle is deterministic, and that's the opposite of autonomous. The technology is absurdly expensive. But if you're selling it, you know, that you just wanna convince people to buy it. And so we are being sold completely implausible futures that if we try to pursue them, we will only worsen our problem. And this is incidentally how we got into the jam of car dependency, namely the automobile which was introduced as a useful tool for a few people who might find it useful, like farmers and doctors and grocers delivering groceries to people, got repackaged as an all purpose mobility solution.
Peter Norton:That is something everybody has to have and it will solve all your problems, which is absolutely false. The automobile is in fact a useful tool. It is absolutely not an all purpose mobility solution. Well, now the message is that with enough futuristic state of the art amazing tech, we will turn it into the solution that has never been. And the truth is amazing technology really is amazing, but it cannot make car dependency work because that's a matter of basic geometry and basic costs.
Peter Norton:And and also basic physics, the amount of energy it takes to move a mass is proportional to the mass. And so if you want a future of electrification that's actually sustainable, that means we not only need to electrify, but we also need to reduce energy demand. Because the more we increase energy demand while we're electrifying, the harder it is to generate enough electric power for all of these ever growing and ever more intensive energy demands. So that's the scary future, and it is a grave threat, and I don't want our preference to be optimistic to deflect our attention from that disastrous threat. On the other hand, I do want to note that we do have grounds for some very cautious optimism, namely in the kinds of trends we've been talking about.
Peter Norton:There is growing interest in a more equitable, future for mobility and shared spaces. And maybe the most encouraging thing of all is that if we stop being distracted by futuristic tech, we have a chance of recognizing the fact that we have everything we need already. We have all the technology we need. We don't need any new technology at all. What we just need to do is to prioritize walking, prioritize cycling, prioritize transit.
Peter Norton:You know, The Netherlands is shows every day how this can be done realistically. People will tell me, well, The Netherlands is not The US. And my answer is no, but it's a lot like New Jersey. The Netherlands is basically two New Jerseys. That's true for income.
Peter Norton:That's true for population density. That's true for topography, and that's true for climate. And so if we can do it in New Jersey, we could do it in the rest of the country. And we have an even greater or at least a longer tradition of mobility justice here in The USA than they have in The Netherlands to draw upon to do it. So if we can resist the distracting utopian techno utopian messages and look at these practical examples, I do think we can hope for a better future than we have right now.
David Prytherch:Amy, what are you thinking?
Mimi Sheller:Oh, I would love to go along with Peter's argument, but I have to say I'm sitting at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where there's a lot of young folks very excited about new technologies, innovation, artificial intelligence, robotics, automation. There's a huge push within our STEM institutions to push that vision forward. So we're also at a point in time under the current administration where there's been a sort of re embrace of fossil fuel, of, you know, oil dominance, energy dominance, and a kind of backlash, I would say, against the kind of sustainable complete streets, walkability, bikeability vision that Peter just offered us. So I do worry about the forces that are pushing us towards other futures. And in some of the work that I've done, we look at different future scenarios and kind of look at them in an extreme way and try to tease out some of the trends that are happening.
Mimi Sheller:And I would say coming out of that work is, as Peter argued, we can't just go along with the dominant narrative that we're being sold. We have to recognize that we shape the future. People and our decisions, our politics, our efforts to be part of the conversation, part of the decision making, that's what will shape the future. And so we need to all stay alert, stay involved, advocate for the things we want. Think about ethics, think about responsibility and think about limiting our energy consumption, maybe limiting our mobility as a way towards reaching a more inclusive and just mobility system.
David Prytherch:Well, this conversation has been as interesting and robust as I and anybody who listens to this and your readers, many of whom I pretty sure would call themselves fans, could have hoped. I would say that my own journey to understand the origins of today's public street, how policy and design give them shape and their implications for mobility justice have followed a path, and forgive the pun, paved by the likes of Mimi Scheller and Peter Dorton. And I know I'm not the only person. In my own book, Reclaiming the Road, I'm trying to build on such work of so many scholars across disciplines to try to articulate an integrative, for me, intersectional understanding of mobility justice, and to try to operationalize it in order to try to plan and design a more just street. It's been really an interesting project to try to take these big picture ideas and see how they played out on the roadway literally in the cities that are trying to slow traffic down to foster more human speed transportation, to open roadways to more diverse users in public spaces, to put a lawn chair in the public street is a pretty radical move in The United States, and even more radical is to completely reconstruct roadways and pedestrianize them as the public realm.
David Prytherch:And these are really complicated topics conceptually and practical as our conversation has gone in. This is what I'm saying is like, once we start really thinking about the street as a public space, then we're out of the realm of engineering into politics, which is really where I think the streets and its future needs to be determined, not in black box processes. So thank you Peter and Mimi, to the University of Minnesota, and Maggie who's behind the production of this podcast. Thanks everybody for helping us reimagine and remake our public streets and for all the insights that shared today. This is an ongoing conversation, of course, and it's a project as interesting and as important as the future of our cities.
David Prytherch:I don't think that's an understatement. I'm firmly convinced that a more sustainable, just and convivial city can only come through reclaiming the roadways from the cars. And I think this conversation we've had today offers something of a roadmap for why we would think about doing that, how we want to think about the future of the roadway, and how we might reclaim it equitably. So thanks to everybody.
Mimi Sheller:Thank you.
Peter Norton:Thank you. What a pleasure to join you all today for conversation.
David Prytherch:Alright. Awesome. Thank you so much to the University of Minnesota Press.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Reclaiming the Road Mobility, Justice Beyond Complete Streets by David Prithurch is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.