The Language of our Transportation System

On the first day of class, we discussed our reactions to Jeff Speck's TED Talk based on his 2012 book, The Walkable City. In groups of two, we shared our thoughts and then as a full group reflected on what the video made us think about or what we disagreed with or found challenging.

One student, Pedrum, discussed how strange it is that we call collisions on the road "accidents." Another student questioned this: it's not like people driving intentionally hit other people, right? Pedrum qualified his statement: on a small scale, yes they are accidents, but when you step back and look at the system, are they really accidents? By calling them "accidents" we allow them to be excusable situations that simply seem to happen without any real cause.

But there is a cause, and it's the reason we're in this class in the first place. Our transportation system has biases and inequalities and inherent flaws in the way it focuses on car travel first and the people in the cars after that. I was just reading Elly Blue's Bikeonomics to find some evidence for a grant I'm writing to acquire some automated bicycle counters for Santa Cruz, and I came across a passage I had marked that directly aligns with Pedrum's sentiment that we should perhaps find other words to express the tragic crashes that happen every day involving cars. Here's how Elly Blue puts it:

"We have a very large cultural blindspot when it comes to cars. Using the roads by any means is one of the most dangerous things you will do on a daily basis; in a car, you are not very much less at risk, but you become a tremendous danger to others.

"Yet crashes are so commonplace that even when they affect us directly, we see them as flukes rather than a real and systemic threat. We call them 'accidents' and think of them as inevitable yet unlikely to happen to us. The legal system treats them the same way; unless a driver who causes a fatal crash was drunk or leaves the scene, criminal penalties are low or nonexistent. Texting and talking on the phone while driving are the functional equivalent to driving while drunk, yet the acts are so commonplace that it is difficult to either pass or enforce laws against them." (Blue, 2012, p. 101)

This example of language reinforcing the system is not the only example. Another one that I read about a few months ago (read here) which has completely altered my discourse around the subject is using "people who bike" instead of "cyclists." "People who bike" puts the human being, the person, back into the descriptor. "Cyclist" is in many people's minds a group of spandex-clad middle age men riding on Saturday mornings, rather than your typical everyday person trying to get to work by bicycle. Even if it doesn't conjure up that image, "cyclist" is still a descriptor that groups a bunch of people together based on the fact that they bike. Removing the collective aspect and saying "person on a bike" helps to distinguish in people's minds that regardless of how they're getting around, they're still first and foremost a person whose death or injuries while traveling should not be disregarded or mocked.

You might be thinking, no one would really mock the death of another person, even if they were biking, right? The fact is, many people do, and there's a clear cultural bias against "cyclists" among people who drive cars--just read the comments section of any news article about someone riding a bike who was involved in a crash. For some articles on bicycling and safety, check out the list of links under "Bicycle Laws and Issues of Safety" here.

Well, now that I've procrastinated from working on my grant application, it's time to get back to it. See you on Friday at class!


Works Cited
Blue, E. (2013). Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy. Portland: Microcosm Publishing.