Are Americans really more "car-brained" than their peers in the UK or the Netherlands — and if they are, what can make us change?
The Brake is back from its spring hiatus with the return of two of our all-time favorite guests: researchers Ian Walker and Marco te Brömmelstroet, who teamed up for a new paper about how "motonormativity" manifests across their respective nations and the US — and made a bet over a bottle of wine about which country had the worst case of it. And along the way, they learned some fascinating insights about where our autocentric attitudes come from in all those countries, and what it would really take to change them.
Tune in now, read the original paper, or check out the innovative crowd-funding platform that fueled this research.
The following excerpt has been edited for clarity and length.
Streetsblog: As a refresher, Ian, what is "motonormativity," as you are defining it today and as that term is evolving in your understanding over time? And maybe then, Marco, you could take us through why it's so challenging to measure and how you went about measuring it in this particular study.
Ian Walker: We've used the term motonormativity to capture a kind of shared unconscious bias, or a shared unconscious assumption that transport is fundamentally a car-first activity.
And off the back of that, we've argued that a couple of things happen. So because people share this idea that "travel" equals "driving," one of the implications is that people find it very difficult to envisage alternatives, and they find it really difficult to envisage change to the current status quo. And another thing that falls out of motonormativity is this common tendency to overlook the harms of the status quo.
So people become very good at unconsciously, instinctively, almost reflexively, forgiving all the harms of motoring and viewing them as inevitable, which is something we see all the time in things like news reports, where cars crash — not drivers — and nothing is ever done to try and address the harms.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: One of the things that linguists will always tell you is that the problem with all those bottom[-level] assumptions that underlie our understanding of the world is that they're also taken for granted, so ... you cannot ask people directly, because they are they are not even reflecting on it. It's like asking two fish in the water how the water is, and then the fish will say, "What water?"
I think what we did here is similar to the work that is now piling up on motornormativity. The same logic in every paper is comparing the responses to two statements that are in all equal, except that one statement is directly referring to cars or the car system, while the opposing statement is not. If everything else is equal, we would expect people to apply the same kind of norms on these statements, but they don't, and that allows us to lay bare this bias and different assumptions.
Streetsblog: Right, but in this paper, you're also breaking apart the layers of the water in which we swim. Walk me through what these different spheres of influences are — what are the micro, meso, exo, and macro systems of motonormativity, and what that means in terms of our day to day lives. How do each of those layers tend to shape the way we think about our transportation world?
Walker: I've got to credit my collaborator, Alan Tapp, who was the co-author on the first motonormativity paper, because he was the one who really pushed this framework when we were having those conversations. And it comes all the way back to work in the 1970s by someone called Bronfenbrenner, who was doing work on child development.
So Bronfenbrenner's argument was that a child growing up in the world has these multiple influences around them. And if we start from the tightest, most close influences on you, and work out towards the biggest, the closest level is this "micro" level of influence — in other words, your friends and family, who are hugely important in shaping what we consider to be normal and what we consider to be good.
We learn our values from our parents, and our family, and our close friends, and they shape our sense of right and wrong — which is, of course, incredibly important here ... We know that kids learn to drive from the back seat of the car. There's good evidence on this. We know that if your parents are into cars, you'll probably be into cars, and so on and so on ...
Then further out from that, at this "meso" level, you've got other social influences: all the people that you observe on a day to day basis. The influence of other people is incredibly important; every time we go in the street, we see certain behaviors. We see law-breaking, we see speeding, we see aggressive driving, we see people not driving being marginalized. These things are continually reinforced throughout your entire life.
And then this all takes place within what Bronfenbrenner would have called the "exo" system: the physical world and the legal world. These behaviors happen in a place, and that place is shaped by the things that we want and the things that we don't want.
And that shaping is the final of these layers, the outermost layer, which is the "macro" layer, or culture — things that we all collectively share and think and value, that shapes the streets that we build, and shapes the legal system that we have. And those things shape what people do, and all of that shapes your everyday experience of traffic.
And so the idea is that these multiple things constantly throughout your life reinforce your sense of propriety. They reinforce your sense of how things should be, as well as your sense of how things are. And that's, we've argued, is what shapes this motonormativity phenomenon.
