Peace and Planning

“I fear that there is a deep crack in our union, and I’m not sure I belong here anymore. Maybe the road can convince me otherwise.”

This line was in a recent (and affecting) piece I read by a mother chronicling her 2,000-mile road trip up the US East Coast on Interstate 95 with her son – both to reconnect with him and to reconnect with fellow Americans about what it means to be part of this multiracial democratic project we call the United States. The author rightly points to various negative externalities of driving – noise, nerves frayed from looming 18-wheelers, the nuisances (not to mention needless risk) of cars of all shapes and sizes weaving at speed, noxious fumes. As someone whose childhood home was a mere 1.2 miles from I-95, I was not surprised to learn that “by the numbers, I-95 is America’s deadliest highway,” with hundreds of lives – parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues – lost every year. And the author astutely points to the harmful legacies of highway building that claimed hundreds of homes and businesses (often in communities of color) to literally pave the way for all this harm. She even goes so far as to call it all – as I have – violence.

Despite these thoughtful observations, I couldn’t help but notice the irony hiding right under the surface. I thought she might mention it after sharing a reflection from a fellow traveler: “Proximity, he’s found, is a low-tech fix for a high-volume problem.” Or perhaps following this insight from a rest-stop supervisor (I’m tempted to unpack the dynamics embedded within it, but will save you, dear reader):

“In Ladd’s telling, rest stops like his are more than breaks in a journey. They’re a kind of stage where the absurd and the ordinary collide. He calls them “the great equalizers.” A shiny new Mercedes slides into a parking space alongside a ’91 Corolla. Young and old, rich and broke, weary and restless all shuffle toward the same humming drink machines, the same toilets. For a moment, divisions fall away, and hierarchies flatten out.”

– Masha Hamilton

What goes unsaid in her piece is that all of the encounters with others that made her trip so valuable and illuminating were not found on the road she was traveling or by virtue of the hours spent in her son’s car (though, as she mused, that certainly helped restitch their relationship), but rather the stops *off* the road, the moments *outside* of the car. What can we take from the fact that the only moments of humanity to be experienced over 2,000 miles of driving can be fit into less than 1% of that journey, at the interstices of the interstate?

I grappled with this briefly in my paper on the conflict system of vehicular violence, where I posited that the separation we experience in a car-dominated world is in and of itself part and parcel of that conflict system.

Moreover, this paper’s conceptualization of vehicular violence is rooted in the notion that not only have our public rights of way been privatized by the rise of the automobile and that in turn our social fabric has been frayed but that this itself constitutes – and is evidence of – a broader system of violence (Henderson 2009; Prytherch 2022; te Brömmelstroet et al. 2022).

In every Q&A session following presentations I’ve given this year where I’ve suggested this connection and argued that driving cars severs our social fabric, people have asked me to elaborate more on the idea. In a recent talk at Temple University, I fleshed out this thinking more concretely by arguing that automobility – and its resulting social severance – is the catalyst of a feedback loop wherein: more people removed from the public realm via private vehicles -> more motonormativity -> more vehicular violence -> more people removed from the public realm via private vehicles. While I received some feedback that this causal chain is a bold claim to make without more evidence (which I take seriously and hope to investigate further in future research), what I’d like to point out is that on my slide, I referred to this as the feedback loop of automobility’s original sin, a different phrasing than what I included in my ACSP abstract where I framed it as a cardinal sin. While working on this post I wondered if I had gotten my wording wrong – should I be calling it automobility’s cardinal or original sin? Even though I’m someone who does a lot of heavy reading, I must admit the Bible has never been on my bookshelf so with a quick Google search learned that these are indeed two separate but related ideas: Original Sin is the inherited condition of fallen humanity; Cardinal Sins are the major types of actions/vices that flow from this condition and our human free will.

In other words, the Bible argues that the original sin is our inherited state whereas cardinal sins are behaviors that stem from a ‘natural’ condition. By referring to the dynamic of people driving private cars on shared streets – and thus removing themselves from the public realm – as the original sin of automobility, I had been inadvertently suggesting that this is our natural state, our inherent condition, a way of being that we will be locked into for eternity. My ACSP abstract had it right: conceptualizing the social severance of automobility as a cardinal sin gives us the ability to change our behaviors, reclaim our agency, and push back against the forces of automobility to reimagine streets as places of connection and care.

This is an idea I’ve been noodling on for years now. I think the seeds were planted for it when I wrote about intergroup contact theory and how streets could foster more interaction with “the Other” (a concept I’ve been extending in my work on the ideology of car supremacy through the belief of “modal marginalization“), but of course that interaction is only possible outside of cars. More recently, I’ve been thinking about several other implications. For one, the fact that being in cars does not only remove us from the interpersonal realm, but also from the environmental realm. Being protected from the elements and disassociated from the topography does not only disconnect us from nature (which has repercussions further explored in this book) – but, pulling a thread through the ethics of care framework I’ve been building, it also dulls our ability to attend to the needs of others. If drivers can easily coast up a hill with the slightest extra pressure on the gas, they are not attuned to the effort it takes to pedal, wheel, or walk up that same hill…and that, why yes, I *am* moving more slowly to cross the intersection at the top (you try tackling that incline on a Brompton!) and no, I don’t think it’s necessary to car-stalk me while I do so. It of course also has connections to our fascination with AVs, and indeed this is the point I often labor to make when talking about the cardinal sin of automobility – from my post on car rather than driver supremacy: “Even if you remove the “need” for drivers – say through, I dunno, autonomous vehicles – we are still left with private cars that remove people from the public right of way and in turn fundamentally alter social relations 🙄”

In another post where I examined the violence inherent in cars, I also had this to offer: Cars remove people from the public realm (streets). When you remove the ability to hear (because your windows are up) or see (because your windows are tinted or because your car is so high off the ground) people using other modes, that degrades our social fabric. While I understand people may argue that’s exactly the point, I’m positing that those conditions fundamentally change the nature of our public streets and the quality of our connections. Maybe violence is too strong of a word to describe this social condition, but I’d be interested in learning about a peaceful society where some people remove themselves from the public sphere at the same time they move through it. Seems to me when people can opt out of such practices it doesn’t inspire a lot of warm and cuddlies.

Another line of inquiry that I’m eager to investigate – to bring this back to the author’s experiences on her road trip – is the connection (in the US, at least) between this social severance of automobility, increasing cultural divides and political polarization, and democracy. There is much more to say on this, but here is one idea I pitched in a recent post-doc application:

If democracy depends on our capacity to engage across difference, then the infrastructures that organize our daily encounters – streets, sidewalks, parks – are not peripheral but foundational. Indeed, while the liberal peacebuilding paradigm hails the ceasefire agreement signed in the central plaza as the definitive sign of success, scholars studying everyday peacebuilding point to whether citizens can traverse that same plaza without fear of harm on their way to the market the following day as the true indicator of progress.

This postdoctoral fellowship would enable me to take the next step in my trajectory: investigating how embodied experience in the built environment shapes our capacity for democratic dialogue. I am designing an experimental study to test my hypothesis that not only does civic discourse shape who public spaces are designed for – and who has a voice in that process – but that how we move through the world also affects how we engage in civic debates to begin with.

The experiment would have participants employ different modes of mobility – such as simulated driving or walking – before joining a structured discussion on a salient social challenge. I would then analyze differences in cooperation and agonistic engagement across groups. My expectation is that participants whose pre-discussion activity involved direct interpersonal spatial negotiation (e.g., navigating a busy sidewalk) would demonstrate higher levels of perspective-taking and deliberative discourse than those in more isolated conditions (e.g., simulated driving). Such findings could open a new line of inquiry at the intersection of urban sociology and deliberative democracy: how the physical infrastructure of our daily mobility cultivates or corrodes the civic capacities on which democracy depends.

Car Blanche will be on pause over the holidays, but rest assured I’ll have more to say on the social severance of automobility – and other issues related to the ideology of car supremacy and the conflict system of vehicular violence – in 2026 and beyond. In the meantime, I wish you a restful winter season, perhaps filled with the types of encounters that fill your heart with hope for this world, and invite you to take a moment amidst your celebrations to ponder: what comes to mind when you imagine a peaceful transportation system? ✌️🚸