Peace and Planning

I recently applied for a writing fellowship. The application required an original piece in response to something that had been published in mainstream media. As I whittle away at a conference paper, I figured one girl’s rejected application could be fodder for the same girl’s next blog post! Below is the piece I (rage) wrote for your reading pleasure. While I’m still interested in ongoing coverage from this series (and am hopeful future installments will be less lazy and more thoughtful about how they frame these issues), I encourage you all to be critical of news articles – even if they are published out of a place that is largely recognized as a pillar of journalist integrity – and keep an eye out for how longstanding but harmful biases are perpetuated ever so subtly (or not, in this case).

More soon – in the meantime, I invite you to get curious – what comes to mind when you imagine a peaceful transportation system? ✌️🚸

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When The New York Times recently debuted their “Street Wars” series, I was intrigued. My doctoral dissertation focuses on the conflict cycles of car supremacy – the normalized bias of individuals and institutions to privilege cars at the expense of all other mobility modes – that drive fights over urban street space. As a city planner by training, I have a keen understanding of how much our built environment perpetuates the most inequitable manifestation of our existing modal hierarchy: when someone walking or rolling is killed by someone driving a car. We continue to create conditions that make fatal crashes commonplace despite knowing from physics that a large heavy object moving at high speeds is a destructive force.          

The series article Where Do Those Painted White ‘Ghost Bikes’ Come From? (June 3, 2024) began with a cursory nod to the injustices built into our transportation network that force these life-and-death conflicts countless times a day on every street in every community in the US. After sharing tragic stories and sobering statistics on the crashes that prompt the installation of these memorials after a cycler is killed in our public right of way, the author suggested “five big ideas for bike safety” (actually, only four were proposed). Imagine my shock (horror?) to read that the first one was “to inform or remind bikers of the rules.” It was disheartening to say the least that the default response of our nation’s leading newspaper reflected such an uncritical view that blames cycling victims not protected by oversized metal boxes for their own deaths given the structural, cultural, and interpersonal trauma they are increasingly subjected to every time they set out on two wheels.

Days earlier, I was in Brooklyn for field research and spoke with a parent involved in local advocacy efforts to redesign a major thoroughfare kids must cross to get to school so that it is safe for all road users. Their efforts – launched after a teacher was killed by a hit-and-run driver while walking across the street – have been thwarted at every turn by broken political promises and contentious neighborhood debates that are pitting the safety of all against the convenience of some.

Apparently, there is a cruel parallel between the laws of physics that turn a car into a dangerous weapon and the laws of culture that create a system of violence. When an object that represents the quintessential American values of exceptionalism, expression, and freedom (conveniently fortified by capitalist notions of growth, consumerism, productivity, technology, and progress) has long loomed heavy and large in our collective consciousness, it becomes a destructive force. In this case, the destruction is to the social fabric of a neighborhood, the ability of children to use their streets without fear of dying, and a core premise of what it means to share a city. I would argue the ‘big ideas’ we really need are to challenge how we think about which road users we should prioritize and to reimagine the very purpose of our streets.