Car culture has a higher body count than both World Wars combined. So why don't we think of automobility in the same way we think about the bloody and destructive global conflicts that dominate the news — and what would it take to transform our streets into a tool to make our whole society more peaceful, rather than more violent?
Today on The Brake, we sat down with PhD candidate Ashton Rohmer to talk about her fascinating new paper that looks at our transportation culture through a "peace and conflict studies" lens — and why car domination is a kind of warfare unto itself, even if claims of a counterattack are seriously overblown. And then we dig into what shifts when we approach transportation reform advocacy as a part of the larger "peacebuilding" project — and why self-proclaimed peacebuilders need to embrace ending car culture, too.
The following excerpt has an edited for clarity and length. For an automatically generated transcript (with AI typos), click here.
Streetsblog: Tell me a little bit about the genesis of this paper and how you, as a Peace and Conflict Studies scholar, came to this topic.
Ashton Rohmer: So I am a an urban planner by training; I got my masters in planning back in 2017 and spent a little bit of time in government consulting. Then I shifted hardcore to academia when I started reading really long, boring books and thought, 'maybe practice isn't where I'm supposed to be. Maybe I should be asking hard questions.'
When I got to my program, I had spent at that point a lot of time in community engagement meetings, and had been thinking a lot about how the built environment impacts our social relationships ... So I have an interest that is very different from the other folks in my program.
A lot of folks, when they think about peace and conflict, they think about what's going on basically everywhere in the world except for the US. And also they don't think about it from a transportation perspective. Or if they do, transportation is an add-on, or a piece of another conflict — [for instance] how does bridge infrastructure complicate identity conflicts in this far-flung place.
So in a self serving way, wanted to get this piece out there, because the field of peace and conflict resolution has never thought about my field of study as a site of inquiry. And so I wanted to show people in my field that thinking about transportation — and really, more specifically, car culture — would reveal a rich set of issues to think about with this peace and conflict lens.
Streetsblog: You mentioned in the paper that 'peace and conflict studies' as has 'an overwhelming focus on wars and the liberal peace building paradigm.' Say a little bit more about that. What traditionally has the peace and conflict studies been about, and what do you think it could be if it starts looking at these issues not just closer to home, but deep within the fabric of our culture, like car supremacy?
Rohmer: So I think that, generally speaking, peace and conflict studies folks do focus a lot on wars. I actually tried to submit this article to three different journals, and I got a desk rejection because it didn't have war splattered all over it.
There was an article published in 2024 by Miner et al, that cataloged all of the harms that come from driving cars. And I think what they estimated was that the number of people that we've lost to just I think it was car crashes and air pollution and maybe some lead poisoning was equal to the number of people we've lost in World Wars I and II.
And yet we don't talk about these things, certainly not as a public health epidemic the way that we talk about gun violence — even though for a long time, gun violence and car crashes ran neck and neck in terms of how many people tragically lost their lives in both of those. People in peace and conflict studies, [meanwhile,] are very focused on things like religious conflicts or ethnic conflicts in places where we see a lot of imagery across the world.
So my hope is that, in thinking about both that very concrete quantitative figure — this is how many people are impacted by car crashes annually — [we can] blow it up, to say, 'well, yes, and why is that the case? What are all of the different facets of this that reveal a much broader conflict system, [where] each of those facets actually reinforces something else?' And for that reason, it's very tangled and difficult to unpack.
From a peace-building perspective, it means that there are a lot of places where practitioners, policy makers, academics, can chunk off things to tackle and try to dismantle this larger conflict system. For example, if we think about identity conflicts from a peace and conflict studies perspective, we [tend to] think about factions of different ethnic groups in, let's say, Eastern Europe. [Well,] how do we think about modal identities? Is that a thing that should exist? I tend to think it is.
When you are using a certain vehicle, or, in the case of pedestrian not using a vehicle in our public space, other people make certain claims and assumptions about you moving throughout our built environment, and those perceptions can dictate how we treat each other, or how we think about each other in relation to both the social fabric and the built environment. So if we were to apply identity thinking to this larger conflict system that I'm talking about, we might be really critical of socially-constructed identities that are merely based on how one person moves throughout the built environment.
