Peace and Planning

Category: Car Blanche

  • We need to talk about car supremacy

    The deeper I get into my doctoral program, the more I’m reminded of how important language is. The deeper I get into my dissertation research, the more I’m reminded of how inadequate our current language is to fully grapple with the impact that cars have on society. I’ve already written…

  • So are cars…inherently violent?

    In the last post I shared my views about expanding our vocabulary to vehicular violence to encapsulate all the direct, structural, and cultural violence of cars. This characterization begs the question: are cars inherently violent? Just because this blog is titled “Peace and Planning” doesn’t mean there isn’t room for…

  • There’s more to “vehicular violence” than alliteration

    Safe streets advocates frequently talk about traffic violence – when a person dies or is grievously injured because they were involved in a car crash. Lately I’ve been weary of using this term. While in some spaces we might think of traffic as rather benign (“the store had decent foot…

  • If you’ve ever wondered what Captain Planet’s (hot)take might be on EVs (and their tech cousins)

    In the early 2010s, there was a lot of hype about companies like Lyft and Uber. Because they had a leg-up on their taxi predecessors with their ease of use and ability to pick up multiple passengers along efficient routes, they finally promised the solution to what’s called the “last…

  • Car brain is a thing, in more ways than one

    A lot of people think that cities are loud. However, a more accurate framing is that cars are loud, and most cities are filled to the gills with sounds of mufflers, horns, and screeching tires (among other unpleasant noises). One of my favorite things to do when I’m visiting a…

  • The only healthy car is a Flintstones car

    We’ve already encountered some of the physical health impacts of cars (reminder: more than 40,000 deaths and millions of injuries a year in the US alone; the global death toll is estimated at 1.3 million). First, we must recall that those deaths and injuries – particularly for pedestrians and cyclers…