The Yellow Light: "Me against the World."
We all want to change the world, but
social change doesn't come from converting every person
one by one.
The current crop of new urbanists and champions
of active mobility don't aim to bully each
listener into a new lifestyle.
We won't expect you to defy the incentives
that make driving sensible for you.
We only ask to have the option to
safely walk, ride, and roll.
This demands new considerations in the built environment,
not in your individual choices.
If I were to sum up what I'm
going to talk about, it's basically this.
Individual choice versus social change.
The movement to make stronger towns, to have
new urbanism, what have you.
It's about what is around us and how
that shapes people's decisions.
It's not about the decisions of individuals as
a response to that environment.
Expecting better drivers, perfect drivers, perfect people, that's
exactly what we need to get away from.
I want to see fewer people needing to
drive, hopefully choosing not to drive where possible,
but not needing to drive as much because
the fewer times you drive, the fewer times
you're putting yourself and others at risk, the
less damage you're doing to the environment around
you, the less you're imposing on others, on
their space.
All of the above.
It's like cigarettes.
I don't want a healthier cigarette to avoid
lung cancer.
If I don't want lung cancer, I should
just not smoke as much.
Not everybody's going to quit instantly 100%, but
maybe instead of a pack a day, you're
only smoking one or two cigarettes a day.
Driving's similar.
We're not trying to make everybody go outside
and burn a car.
If you have a car, go outside and
burn it, take it apart.
No, that's not the point.
Cars, private cars, do serve a purpose.
Should they serve every purpose?
No.
Is a Phillips head screwdriver good?
Yes.
Should you use a Phillips head screwdriver for
everything?
You turn it around and bang it on
nails with the handle side?
No.
Should you use a Phillips head screwdriver to
repair clothing, to fix a faucet?
Probably not.
But that doesn't mean we should get rid
of the Phillips head screwdriver entirely.
For those who can do it, for those
for whom it may be a slight inconvenience
but not impossible, I would like to see
those people drive less.
Maybe if it's a short trip and it's
feasible, maybe walk or ride a bike, roll,
whatever it is.
You don't need to drive for everything.
Maybe you could drive for fewer things.
If you expect to have free parking and
the environment around us often encourages us to
expect free parking and congestion-free roadways everywhere,
it might make sense.
It may feel natural to drive everywhere.
And if you can do that less, that
would be great.
You probably can.
But we're not going to change everything by
that.
I don't want to go door to door
trying to convert everyone.
If I were to compare this to movements
to make America less racist, less discriminatory, Martin
Luther King Jr. had his eyes on the
prize.
He led the Milliman March in Washington, D
.C. Some of the greatest changes came through
the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights
Act.
This made it illegal to have discrimination at
restaurants, water fountains, to have...
It also meant for the first time in
a very long time, blacks could vote in
the South again.
After Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877,
very bad elements took power in society again
and effectively disenfranchised most black people in America.
Martin Luther King Jr., however, did not only
look at that.
He did not dismiss people as irredeemable.
At the same time, he didn't want to
redeem everybody and take his time with every
individual person.
You convert certain people in places of power,
and you try to have wide, effective changes
where possible.
One person who's fairly famous in anti-racism
efforts in recent times is Darrell Davis.
He has befriended several members of the Ku
Klux Klan, becomes friends with these people, and
these people, they stop being white supremacists.
They're friends with Darrell Davis, who's a black
guy, and he's alright.
He's good.
I like him.
Wait.
Why am I racist?
I think that's great, and it's certainly a
lot better and a lot more than 99
% of everybody is doing on this front.
It's great.
I also don't harbor delusions that this is
going to change America.
Not unless you have many, many people doing
this all the time.
You're going to need structural or social or
political changes.
That's what the movement to change the built
environment is about.
It's not trying to make every individual person
make perfect choices.
It's trying to change the system that encourages
certain behaviors or makes certain behaviors impossible.
A lot of people under this umbrella in
North America tend to have a more liberal
attitude towards crime and a more tolerant attitude
in general.
They're not going to be law and order.
They're not like that.
Unfortunately, this means that people who have some
privileges, say, being male, tall, young, able-bodied,
etc., people who can defend themselves in the
case of violent crime, they tend to dismiss
the concerns of others and tell people to
get over it.
That's not going to change the fact that
transit in North America is more dangerous than
it is in other countries.
It's not because transit in and of itself
is dangerous.
No, no, no.
It's far safer for society.
In terms of lives, major injuries, certainly, certainly
much better.
The problem is people.
We have a lot of crime in North
America, especially in the USA.
There is a lot of crime.
That's undeniable.
It's a lot less safe in, say, a
subway system in LA than it is in
Seoul, Korea.
But South Korea does not have a totalitarian
police state.
That's not because the people there are so
good or so bad.
It's because when you have transit that everybody
rides, most people everywhere, most people are good.
And the most, quote, normal people you have,
the better.
If the only people who ride transit are
those who are desperate to ride transit and
those who cannot move in any other way,
then you're going to have a lot of
good people who can do other options, pursue
those other options.
I wouldn't advocate that level of individualized security
where if you're a single mother, you have
kids and you need to protect yourself, you
need to drive a car.
And that may be what's feasible right now
for where you live.
And then expect everybody else to do the
same.
That's going to leave out many people who
will have to take transit, will have to
take buses, et cetera.
And even if everybody could get her own
SUV to protect the kids, the family themselves,
that's still going to be much less safe
than if all those people were riding transit
and trains and buses.
We shouldn't expect any person to be the
first one to completely put themselves at risk.
That's not going to change things.
If you're the one person who's doing that,
thank you.
But you are putting yourself at risk.
We don't see people take those risks and
that's to be expected.
A lot of infrastructure makes it so that
if you want to, say, ride a bike
to commute, you have to go on the
roadway.
This means that most of the people you
see on bikes will be able-bodied men,
15 to 50.
Even an old person on an e-bike,
even if that e-bike is fast, is
not going to take the lane on a
stroad where cars are going 45 miles per
hour.
You're not going to see a 10-year
-old girl on rollerblades in the middle of
downtown, in the middle of the roadway.
It's not going to happen.
I don't want people to put themselves at
risk and do daredevil things, but these acts
aren't daredevil-ish.
Rollerblading is not the most dangerous thing you
can do.
What makes it dangerous to do in public
is that you have cars.
If riding on roller skates is not safe,
if X, Y, Z is not safe for
your 12-year-old kid to do unsupervised,
then doing X, Y, Z isn't safe.
Right now, doing X, Y, Z may not
be safe.
I want to make it safe.
I want to see it as safe.
What I expect from other people is not
to stand in the way of things that
would make it safe.
If people have to drive, also please be
considerate.
I've seen it way too many times where
people get accustomed to thinking a certain way,
and it's not because these individuals are so
different, us and them.
It's the lifestyle.
I know it feels good to talk about
car brains, whatever, but nobody's irredeemable.
I used to think a certain way because
I had driven and it was the only
feasible option, and it's all I ever knew.
It's all my peers had ever known.
It makes you think a certain way.
It makes you do things that are really
quite illogical.
You may be the person who passes me.
When I'm riding my bike, if there's no
bike lane, if there were, I would take
it.
But if there's none on the path I'm
going to the place I'm going, I'm going
to have to be in the roadway.
Sometimes you might be that person who has
to go around me.
You go around, swerve back, and then slam
on the brakes because there's a red light
50 feet ahead.
It was not necessary to pass me like
that, but it's almost ingrained to do things
like that and you start seeing things in
a different way.
It's not because you are a bad person.
It's not any of that.
Any human in a certain situation will behave
a certain way because of the environment around
you.
I think that's a very important thing to
remember.
We should be looking at how the system
shapes behavior.
When it comes to, say, international relations, there
are two extremes, you could say.
Those who just see it as foreign policy,
the aggregation of foreign policy in many countries,
and those who see it as completely structural,
that the dynamics of the world condition everybody.
Everybody's going to act the same regardless of
what their citizenry, their history, perceptions are like.
I think the truth is in the middle,
but if I had to choose a side,
I would go with the structural side.
A theorist within international relations is Kenneth Waltz.
He argued that what he studied was not
foreign policy, it was international politics.
It was a different beast.
Within structural realism, you had some people who
disagreed about the best way to protect yourself,
but the fundamental thing was that war was
going to be possible and likely when you
have an environment where there's no one to
turn to, it's self-help.
You are completely on your own.
That's what every country is in the world.
It is really on its own.
There is no guarantee that your allies will
help you, that a world police will help
you.
You're on your own.
So your country, no matter what, your country
is always going to think about its own
survival.
That is going to shape a lot of
behavior.
You'll still have diversity of behavior within those
parameters.
I think that's very important, but certain actions
are going to be more likely.
Certain actions, events are going to be possible,
some impossible.
You can analogize too with sports, say with
American football, which by the way, is called
that because it's played on foot, not on
a horseback, not because foot doesn't kick.
American football, you could have the quarterback choose
to pass the ball, to run it, but
the quarterback cannot walk out of bounds, run
out of bounds, get up after being tackled
with association football or soccer.
You can kick the ball, you can do
many things.
You can trap it with your foot, you
can catch a free throw with your chest,
have it go down before you and dribble
it, move it, pass it, shoot it.
But if you're not the goalkeeper, you cannot
pick up the ball with your hands.
There are certain parameters.
What you can do is limited by the
rules of the game.
The built environment is very similar to that.
What we can do, what we cannot do
is fixed by the game itself.
To make another analogy with political studies, social
movements.
Some of the earlier literature on that from
the 1950s saw the civil rights movement in
its infancy as something of a pathology, something
that individuals did when they had nothing better
to do.
They were looking at things very individualistically.
They did not conceive of a group dynamic
or society as a whole changing in the
same way.
They saw these issues always with racism as
individual pathologies.
I would say that's an outdated, wrong, and
itself, yeah, it does border on itself racism
and in many cases goes explicitly racist.
Culture can be a good way of understanding
why people do what they do.
But culture does not exist in a vacuum.
It's the result of our environment.
Our environment itself too is part of our
culture.
Our environment too is decided by the culture.
It's a circular relationship, but we always have
to mind that structure and not make it
completely about ideas and culture because then it's
a slippery slope to thinking about the ideas
in one's head.
And then we get to talking about individuals.
Even allies within these conversations about urbanism, town
planning, they may say, "Oh, I agree with
you. We should have more bicycle riding. It
should be safe. This should be the case.
But that's a big ask of people," or
they say people should be different.
"I'm frustrated!" And maybe that person does not
ever drive and wants everybody else to make
the same virtuous decision.
That's not really going to change everything.
We still need people like that, but they
alone cannot change the whole of society.
And changing everybody to become a bike rider
might build a constituency for the new bike
lane, but that's not going to make the
bike lane happen.
You're going to have to turn those beliefs
into group action to agitate for the things
you want.
And it's not just want, it's also need.
If we're going to have a different way
of doing things, which we might have to
regardless of what we want, because the finances
of the post-World War II suburban sprawl
experiment, those costs are not sustainable.
Environmental problems, cost of oil and on and
on.
We're going to have to see a different
way of doing things.
So this is about need.
We need it to be safe to do
certain things.
We need it to be sensible to do
certain things.
If we want people's behaviors to change, we
have to change the incentives.
We cannot ignore reality.
A good thing to remember when you assess
if doing XYZ is safe or not is
to ask if you would let your 12
-year-old kid do that unsupervised.
If you do not feel comfortable with that,
then that activity is not safe.
But then you have to ask, why is
that activity unsafe?
Is walking, is riding a bike really that
dangerous compared to driving?
No.
For drivers in cars and for people on
the roadway too.
They cause 40,000 deaths per year in
America and many, many more serious injuries.
Remember, you could lose an arm and a
leg literally and still live.
Deaths alone does not come close to capturing
the amount of damage to human lives.
And if you want to get into it,
property damage.
I don't want to have a society where
a car could go crashing into a pharmacy
at any moment.
That's not a rational way to set up
your society, to have that be a thing
that happens.
It's not a fact of life.
It does not happen regularly in Europe and
Asia.
It's a very American thing.
That's not about the individuals being bad.
If that person is in his 90s and
shouldn't be driving, well, okay, how else is
this person going to get to the pharmacy?
You've built an environment where the only way
for this 90-year-old man to reach
the pharmacy to get the drugs he needs,
his heart medication, or say his wife's ankle
brace is to drive 20 miles.
Well, of course, this is going to happen.
You don't stop it by turning everybody into
a homebody.
You don't stop it by expecting everyone to
be a perfect driver.
What you're going to send that 90-year
-old to driving school again?
With all these decisions, we have to remember
that we can't just say, "Oh, well, it's
your freedom to do this or that."
Your freedom to drive wherever you want in
a 1.5, 2-ton or
3-ton vehicle is only possible because everybody
else is paying for it.
The government is building all these highways, this
free parking and saying, hey, look, this is
for you.
Of course, people are going to choose to
do that, but their choice to get the
biggest car possible affects others.
It takes space from others, it blocks the
sidewalks where people who use wheelchairs need the
space.
Oh, just go around.
Oh, just go in the grass.
No, if you're in a motorized wheelchair, that's
not an option at all.
The point is that all these decisions interact
and they affect other people and nobody is
making decisions completely alone.
If somebody is buying a too-big truck,
it's because of advertising, because of peer groups,
because of incentives, because of lanes that are
12 feet wide on the roadways instead of
eight feet wide.
A good way to remember all of this
is that no one is an island.
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