Urban Mobility for Human Autonomy with Peter Norton

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0:00:10.5 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript, and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net. Just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:43.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our first Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium of fall 2024. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry, and our partners, Shareable and the Barr Foundation. We organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning, and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today, for our first fall colloquium, we’re delighted to host Dr. Peter Norton. Peter’s an Associate Professor of History in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia.

0:01:29.5 Julian Agyeman: He’s a member of the University of Virginia’s Centre for Transportation Studies, and has been a visiting faculty member at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Peter is the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, and of Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. I must read that. He’s a winner of the Usher Prize of the Society for the History of Technology, and he’s a frequent speaker on the subject of sustainable and equitable urban mobility. In 2013, Peter also graciously contributed an excellent chapter to my book, Incomplete Streets. Peter’s talk today is Urban Mobility for Human Autonomy. Peter, a Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:20.4 Peter Norton: Thank you so much, Julian. What a pleasure to be here. It’s just great to have this opportunity to be your guest and Julian’s guest for Cities@Tufts. I’m a bit concerned that the billing that I’ve received may be somewhat overstating what I have to offer. I noticed that it described me as a thought leader. I’d like to be clear that I’m not a thought leader. I’m really just a thought fault finder, but I do have a good substitute, I think. I think it’s even better than being a thought leader. I will bring in some people into this talk who I have found to be thought leaders in my own work, and I will share their perspectives with you. I think you’re going to find them very interesting indeed. I’m beginning with a view of a garden here because I think it’s useful to begin a talk about transportation, urban transportation, with asking what kind of place a city is and what first principles apply in decisions about how we best provide for people’s mobility within a city. I offer a garden because, while it’s not my analogy, I think it’s a useful one and I hope to make that clearer as I proceed here. Now, if we want to make this garden work, we don’t engage in engineering, education, or enforcement.

0:03:56.4 Peter Norton: Now, you may recognize these so-called Three Es as the governing principles of transportation engineering, and they have been for about a century, and they are still the predominant governing principles in transportation planning in the United States today. We engineer transportation systems, we educate people to use them, and we enforce as necessary to make them comply with the system that engineers have designed for them. But I juxtapose the Three Es next to a garden as a way of stating the obvious, that you can’t engineer a garden, you don’t educate the plants to grow the way you want them to, and you don’t enforce their growth, you don’t punish the plant, you figure out what it takes to make the garden thrive, and it’s not engineering, education, and enforcement. Now, if a city is like a garden, then we should be asking ourselves whether engineering, education, and enforcement is really the best way to provide for people’s mobility needs. Now, that’s a big if the city is like a garden, but I hope in the next few minutes of the introductory part of this talk to get that point across. Here is an alternative, a way of looking at a city.

0:05:15.3 Peter Norton: This is an engineering perspective, this is technology, specifically this is a microprocessor from 1990. And if we look at these two things as systems, and of course they both are, I think we’ll recognize that the way you optimize or care for them is not just marginally different or quantitatively different, but categorically different. It is an entirely different kind of problem, how to optimize a garden and how to optimize a microprocessor. Microprocessors, to optimize it, you have to control it. Any element in it that you can’t control, you try to refine until you have control. And I think a microprocessor gives us the metaphor of control as the first principle. And we have taken that idea of control from engineering and applied it to cities and specifically to city transportation. Now, the control metaphor is not well suited to gardens. We have tried it, it has not always worked out very well, because a city is like a garden and gardens are things we cultivate rather than control.

0:06:32.4 Peter Norton: And so part one of my talk is a comparison between a city and a garden, what goes wrong when we try to control a garden to a micro level, and how we really can get the gardens that we need. Now, a garden is clearly not an untouched natural setting, just like a city is clearly not an untouched natural setting. But in both cases, we have processes which function quite autonomously, and I use the word advisedly, unlike many other usages of the word that you’ll see today. And you can degrade the garden by striving too hard to control it, or it can thrive if you intervene in such a way as not to engineer or educate or enforce it, but rather to empower it or enable it. This is an analogy offered by a couple of people, including our first thought leader guest, so to speak, who is Rachel Carson. Chapter 15 of her 1962 bestseller, Silent Spring, is called Nature Fights Back. And if you read just one chapter of Silent Spring, this is the one I would recommend. It’s the one that cautions against attempting to treat the environment or ecosystems, gardens, forests, farms, as if they’re machines, as if they’re engineered systems, because they are very dynamic systems that will fight back if you strive to control them too hard. Control them, for example, with the subject of particular concern to Rachel Carson, namely potent toxic pesticides.

0:08:10.4 Peter Norton: And this analogy between a city and a garden was also offered by Jane Jacobs. The last chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities is called The Kind of Problem a City Is. And if you read these two chapters side by side, which I’ve actually tried doing, it is remarkable how much in alignment, how consonant, how much these two messages are complementary. They are saying very much the same thing. If you try to control, Rachel Carson is saying in Nature Fights Back, if you try to control an ecosystem, it will respond in ways you did not expect, including ways you don’t want. Jane Jacobs said the same thing in the last chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities, her 1961 book. So just a year earlier, she wrote very much the same kind of message. They’re so complementary that I can almost imagine them collaborating. Rachel Carson didn’t live enough for that to happen, but they could have collaborated on a book that was not just about cities or not just about ecosystems, but about attempting to impose control on systems that resist control, systems like nature or systems like cities.

0:09:32.5 Peter Norton: So that’s where this garden analogy comes from. It’s not mine. It’s very much the kind of analogy implicit in chapter 22 of Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s the last chapter, and that’s a pity in the sense that it’s maybe the least likely chapter for people to get to, but it’d be one of the chapters I would definitely ensure that you have a chance to read. What happens when we treat a garden like an engineering system? We might try to micromanage it, for example, with toxic chemical pesticides, which will lead to the kinds of problems that Silent Spring is about. Now, in the USA, we have had garden-like cities. Now, this is Rochester in 1904. In a certain respect, it is nothing like a garden. I’m not sure you can find a single trace of a plant anywhere in this picture, but in certain other respects, it is very much like a garden. That is, say, the water molecules in the soil finding their way to the roots and the leaves of a plant. People are walking around unregulated, uncontrolled. There may be signs around, but the signs are not ordering people not to do things or to do other things.

0:10:47.6 Peter Norton: There are no crosswalks. People are walking where they please. They’re boarding streetcars in the middle of the street. There are bicycles everywhere in this view as well. What’s happening here was not the product of a single person or a single profession’s even intentional plan. Yes, the streets are very straight. Yes, they were designed that way. But the actual dynamics that make this street work, that make it affordable, fairly safe, healthful, practical, inclusive for people, were not engineered in. Rather, people are making this happen themselves. People are exercising their individual autonomy within a system that promotes also a collective thriving. These electric vehicles in the center of the view, streetcars, are enabling the walking. They make the walking practical. Now, this is very much of a garden-like example. The garden is also highly controlled in the sense that it’s not a natural setting at all, but it’s not controlled in the engineering sense as in the microprocessor. Now, we have today an engineered transportation system in this country that is having unintended effects very much like those that Rachel Carson described for ecosystems.

0:12:12.3 Peter Norton: In this chart, you can see vehicle miles of travel per capita is the dotted line is a per capita basis. And you can see that in the 50 years between 1966 and 2016, people, the average American has had to drive twice as much per year to meet their daily needs. Now, from an engineering point of view, this can look like a kind of thriving. People are moving more than ever. Therefore, we have more mobility than ever. Therefore, if you care about mobility, this is good news. On the other hand, of course, this is expensive to do. It’s expensive to do for the individual who has to pay for fuel and operate and maintain the vehicle. It’s also expensive for society that has to provide the roads and breathe the air and deal with the carbon emissions from the travel as well as along with many other costs that go along with this. And these costs are burdens on society. Now, if these rising vehicle miles of travel per capita were merely the response to what people want to do, we could at least say we have a system that’s responding to what people want. But I don’t think we can say that.

0:13:28.5 Peter Norton: We have, among our transportation experts, the notion that we explain this increase in driving by preference. This is what people prefer to do. And I’m quoting here, transportation experts. These are not just reporters or bloggers. These are transportation experts saying that Americans or Californians in this case prefer to drive. And these examples are very easy to find. And they’re making the same basic error. I think this error is obvious to you already. Namely, they’re attributing day-to-day practices to unconditional preferences. This is not an equivalency. We cannot say, for example, that what you choose to eat in a convenience store or fast food restaurant reflects your dietary preferences because your choices are constrained, our choices as Americans are constrained as well. What you’re seeing here is the predominant explanation for why we have car dependency in America today. The predominant explanation, even among experts, is that this is a national preference. This is a personal preference. It’s an absolute preference.

0:14:43.5 Peter Norton: It’s a cultural expression. It’s an idea, incidentally, that was largely invented by people who want to sell us cars and roads. This version at the bottom of the screen, which comes from a collaboration between General Motors and DuPont in 1961, says that we have a love affair as Americans with the automobile. It is a cultural preference. We are a car culture. And notice how if it’s love, then experts have no grounds for disputing this. In other words, love is not something we subject to cost-benefit analysis. This is an absolute. It’s an absolute that suited the convenience of people who sold cars very well. They like this version of car dependency. It’s also the version of car dependency you continue to see as the predominant, not the only, but the predominant explanation today. Now, I think it’d be worthwhile to look at an actual example of one person who drives a lot. He’s just one person, but he is representative of millions like him. And he is the manager of this bike shop. This bike shop is in Newport Beach, California.

0:15:57.5 Peter Norton: And I was in Newport Beach to speak to the Orange County tolling authorities, trying to argue that they should use tolling revenue to support alternatives to driving. I can’t say I was very successful in persuading them this. But while I was in Newport Beach, which is a nice city in Southern California, I wanted to get around by bike. So I found this bike rental place. And the bike rental place had a manager, and he gave me his permission to take his picture and to use his story and presentations. His name is Jacob, and I’m grateful to him for letting me use his example. Now, I had just been to a dinner, and a former mayor of Newport Beach told me that houses in Newport Beach cost $4 or $5 million a piece on average. And I wanted to know how a bike shop manager manages to make a living that can pay his way and give him livability in Newport Beach. His answer was very interesting. And I have to say, I was rather shocked, although it’s not that unusual of an answer. And I think you’ve probably already guessed what it is. He cannot afford to live in Newport Beach.

0:17:07.4 Peter Norton: So instead, he drives every day in from the Inland Empire, as they call it in California, in this case, Menifee. And he drives 70 miles into Newport Beach and 70 miles home every day. He pays tolls, he pays gasoline, and he pays depreciation on his vehicle as well. Every day, he’s spending two and a half or three hours on the road to get to and from work. He is not driving because he has a love affair with the automobile. He’s not driving by preference. He’s driving by practical necessity. He can’t afford, there’s no affordable housing in Newport Beach, and there’s no other means of transportation from affordable housing. So what you’re looking at really here is an affordable housing policy that we have by default in the United States. Namely, we subsidize driving so that you can afford to live, in this case, 70 miles out from work. So I think we can’t agree that we explain car dependency in America because of a preference to drive. So part two of this talk is we do not live in a car culture.

0:18:19.4 Peter Norton: And I want to turn now to explaining how we do live in a car culture. How we do, in other words, live in an environment where engineering methods, such as those used in microprocessor design, are applied to our roads. Now here’s what happens when you apply engineering methods to urban transportation, especially to automobile or motor vehicle urban transportation. You get highly engineered systems that control people’s movements, that require education to use them, and that require enforcement for their safe use. This is actually from the cover of a textbook. It is really the current textbook. And I want to stress that I’m not singling out this author from criticism. She’s actually fairly representing transportation engineering as a field today in the era of climate change. It is still how we look at transportation engineering now. And I want to look at how we got here. And this is where I need to bring in our third thought leader for today. So the first was Rachel Carson. The second was Jane Jacobs.

0:19:28.0 Peter Norton: The third, you may recognize him. This is Carter Woodson. He grew up about 50 miles south of where I live in Virginia. His parents were both former slaves. He was a historian. And his concern like ours, I think we’ll all agree that our concern is to change the status quo to something more sustainable, equitable, affordable, healthful and safe. And in that sense, we have something in common with Carter Woodson. Carter Woodson was a historian. He was interested though, like I think all of us are in the future, and he collaborated with people interested in a future in America of racial justice, of an end to segregation, of an end to disenfranchisement and white supremacy. But unlike most of the people he worked with on those causes, Carter Woodson said to them, we have to begin by looking at history. And the reason is this, the history that we have inherited was written to justify the status quo.

0:20:32.6 Peter Norton: And as long as that historical record goes uncorrected, the status quo becomes by default, whether we want it to or not, normal. Carter Woodson’s problem was that the history of his day normalized segregation, disenfranchisement of black voters and white supremacy. The history we have today in 2024 normalizes the cover of this transportation and engineering textbook on the left. So if we want to change the status quo, just like Carter Woodson wanted to change the status quo, we have to revisit history. And Carter Woodson as a history teacher, taught his students to go back, look at the historical record, not what the historians say they were part of the problem, but rather what the original historical document said, and use them to correct the historical record. He published in 1933, a book called The Miseducation of the Negro, and it has a chapter on what he calls political miseducation that I have found profoundly influential.

0:21:41.5 Peter Norton: He’s a thought leader for me, and he says that we live with the legacy of what he calls the rewriters of history. And the rewriters of history have justified the status quo. We must go back and repair the historical record that they damaged. So the next part of this talk, I’m gonna give you a historical perspective about how we got to this engineering model. And excuse me, I seem to have accidentally left that copy in. So I’m skipping ahead. Oh, wait a minute. My problem is I was pressing the backwards button instead of the forwards button. Okay, [chuckle], thank you for your patience with my button error here. There is a historical legacy or predecessor for this transportation engineering textbook, and it is a book called Street Traffic Control published in 1925. And you’ll notice incidentally that the publisher is the same. This is the Paramount textbook publisher in America.

0:22:38.2 Peter Norton: It was in 1925, and it is today. It’s the same publisher, and I think this stands for a certain continuity and a certain establishment or prestige recognition that both of these books had. And so transportation engineering, I’m proposing for consideration is like the current equivalent of a legacy that really began with this book in 1925. And notice that the word control is right in the title. Control is an engineering value. It was published by Miller McClintock. He was a graduate student from Harvard University. He came to Los Angeles in 1924 to write a dissertation, the first one ever about street traffic. He was noticed by a Studebaker dealer in Los Angeles named Paul Hoffman. And Paul Hoffman was very interested in finding an expert who could help him deal with his problem selling cars. And he was very candid in his memoirs about what his problem selling Studebakers in 1924 in Los Angeles was.

0:23:45.1 Peter Norton: And he said in a speech he gave in retirement, my problem selling cars wasn’t that people didn’t want them, it’s that the streets were clogged with drivers and drivers were injuring and killing other people. And those two problems of traffic congestion and traffic safety meant people didn’t think that cars belong in cities. That is Hoffman’s Studebaker dealership in Los Angeles about the time that he met Miller McClintock. So Paul Hoffman asked Miller McClintock to make a study of Los Angeles traffic, and Paul Hoffman wanted to use this study to make a case to the city of Los Angeles to free the streets of pedestrians. And Miller McClintock complied. He wrote this traffic ordinance in 1924, and I wanna stress that we are just a couple of weeks away from the 100th anniversary of this transformative ordinance. It was an ordinance with many elements, but number one was a radical new effort to restrict people’s access to their own streets unless they were driving an automobile.

0:24:56.1 Peter Norton: Miller McClintock wrote the ordinance, the city implemented it. Here’s the Los Angeles Times headline on day one of implementation, which was January the 24th, 1925, a couple months after the ordinance was written. And you notice that there’s some skepticism expressed in this cartoon about the safety of a pedestrian who strides into the street signaling with a raised arm that motor vehicles should stop for him in the crosswalk. This ordinance rule provided also though that if you walk in the street anywhere else, you are violating the rules of the road. You’re violating the engineering that is making automobiles the primary mode of transportation in the city. This engineering, this whole approach of putting the motor vehicle first and the person on foot last is the legacy of a radical revision that Miller McClintock and Paul G. Hoffman were joining. It was already underway when that Los Angeles traffic ordinance was introduced in 1925, in January of that year. It came from a man completely forgotten to history, but profoundly important.

0:26:08.0 Peter Norton: His name was Edward Mehren. He was a cement contractor. He was a road builder. He was a leader of the cement industry. He was president of the Portland Cement Association, the number one trade association representing cement makers for whom the number one market was public roads and streets. He was also the editor of Engineering News record, which was the number one civil engineering journal in the country then, and I think it still is today. So this was a very influential man in his field. Now, Edward Mehren was interested in building more roads. He was the first person ever to propose interstate highways throughout the country. He did that back in 1919, but he also saw a threat to the future of road building car and cars in cities. And it’s a threat that Paul Hoffman shared as well. So in 1922, using his platform as editor of engineering news record, Edward Mehren wrote an editorial.

0:27:07.9 Peter Norton: And in that editorial he was responding to a threat. The threat was that automobiles in city streets were causing lots of deaths. They were causing lots of injuries. As you can see in these bar graphs in cities the victims were primarily pedestrians and children. The center graph shows you just how fast the rate of death and injury was rising. The responses at that time were to blame motorists as this illustration from an early traffic expert explains. The response was to restrict drivers’ movements. This, for example, is the typical way of turning left in American cities, not just St. Louis. A post was mounted in the center and you were required to make a left turn like this for the protection of pedestrians, which tells you who they cared about. And also it was a way of slowing cars down.

0:27:57.6 Peter Norton: So this is traffic calming decades before the term existed. All of these things were nuisances to people who wanted streets to be for cars. Another nuisance though was the imagery about drivers. Drivers were compared to various kinds of mass killers, and the number one blame was directed at their speed. And since blame was directed at speed, the usual response was to slow cars down, including with proposals like the one on the right to restrict cars to a maximum speed through mechanical speed governors to make it impossible to go too fast. Here we see on the left warnings among within the automobile industry to fight back against people who are blaming speed, calling the blame on speed stupid. The solution is to make speed safe. And the way you make speed safe as Edward Mehren argued in this editorial, was to exclude pedestrians and to build roads specifically for them.

0:29:02.5 Peter Norton: The editorial specifically singles out the problem autos were killing ever more people. We’re dealing with this right now as well. The US is the one country among high income countries in the world that still has had a rising death rate due to automobiles over the last decade. The threat was that streets would be barred to pleasure vehicles. These proposals were all around or that would, they would be required to equip themselves with mechanical speed governors that would slow them down. The solution and notice the word radical here. Edward Mehren said, we have to have a revision of our conception of what a city street is for. We’re gonna change this into an engineering problem. And so the prescription is to change to an engineering model, including motor boulevards and second story streets. So this is the declaration that we are going to change from the inherited garden model to a new engineering model and an engineering model that was going to trigger all of the side effects of the kind that Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs would later write about.

0:30:12.9 Peter Norton: This is the radical revision. It is in short switching pedestrians from being on top of the priority list to switching pedestrians to being on the bottom of the priority list. This in turn is what made engineering education and enforcement necessary. It’s the only way you can do this. If you let things proceed naturally, pedestrians take over. You have to intrude to make that happen. And there were many such intrusions, but maybe the most notable was that traffic ordinance, the century anniversary of which is coming up in just a couple of weeks. I suggest that you think about that centenary as it approaches. Now, this had to go national. So this was just the Los Angeles traffic ordinance, and you would be right to say maybe that explains Los Angeles, but not the country. It does explain the country. And the reason is that this ordinance became the model proposed to the entire country with the recommendation of the US Department of Commerce as the National Go-to traffic ordinance that every city in the country should implement.

0:31:18.6 Peter Norton: Sometimes whole states implemented it for all their cities. And wherever you go in America, that Miller McClintock ordinance of 1924 in modified form is in place thanks to the fact that it became the National Model Ordinance. Now, when you oppose these rules, you get some predictable responses. People fought back as these newspaper headlines capture. And this is why both enforcement and education are necessary. So, this is enforcement. You’re seeing police having to arrest people for using streets the way they had always used streets since streets began, namely as places for walking. And I compared our problem today to Carter Woodson’s problem when he wrote the Miseducation of the Negro in 1933. So I’m saying by analogy we have a legacy of the miseducation of the pedestrian. You need an education response so that you don’t just have intrusive enforcement. And so throughout America, in the 1920s especially, and ever since we’ve had pedestrians learning that walking the way you used to before the 1920s is a violation.

0:32:33.6 Peter Norton: Of course, if you can get children, you’ve got a captive audience. Children coloring in this coloring book page would look at the model at the top and imitate it on the bottom. I guess creativity was not celebrated as much in 1925. But notice the clever technique. Every time the child’s eyes pass over the middle of this coloring book page, the child learns that the street is for autos. Children got these kinds of safety messages throughout the 20th century. Notice that in this case, the American Automobile Association in posters it distributed to schools across America. It’s saying, do not even dare to exercise your legal rights of crossing in the crosswalk and expecting people to yield. Instead, you should wait until it’s clear. Don’t expect turning cars to yield to you. They’re the way they’re legally required and don’t even bicycle in the street, even though it’s illegal to bike on the sidewalk usually.

0:33:31.7 Peter Norton: And of course where they’re showing those children bicycling is actually usually impossible too because of parked cars. This is the radical revision in our conception of what a city street is for that Edward Mehren spoke about. Instead, we have engineering in a vain attempt to eliminate congestion and engineering in a vain attempt to eliminate crashes. You’ll notice that the article on the right is written by Paul Hoffman, that Studebaker dealer who got that traffic ordinance written for him for Los Angeles. Now these are engineering efforts, and as engineering efforts, they’re not going to succeed the way they’re supposed to for reasons that Rachel Carson explained in Silent Spring, as I explained before. The Foolproof Highway was supposed to eliminate crashes. Of course, what it really did was coax people to drive faster, such that even if there are fewer crashes, those that do happen are more lethal.

0:34:30.2 Peter Norton: And this means that the safety benefit of the divided highway is negated by the safety cost of higher speed crashes. This is the selling of the future of, this is really where this begins, and I’m sure you’ve noticed that we are still being sold Futures today. Futures that go back in the case of the city of Tomorrow to the 1930s when Shell Oil company was selling versions of the city of the future, where you never have to go less than 50 miles an hour. That’s what they’re advertising here. I want to conclude the talk today by counter arguing that if cities are for human autonomy, visions like the one on the right are antagonistic to our purposes as people who care about cities and the people who live in them. Now, this notion that tomorrow we will have a city where you never have to slow down, where you never encounter a red light and so on, goes back to the mid 1930s is 1937 that shell introduced this ad. General Motors picked it up.

0:35:36.0 Peter Norton: We have been facing generations of this ever since. Miller McClintock, the man who co-authored or really authored that Los Angeles traffic ordinance was involved in this too. There he is next to the model that you can see in this Futurama exhibit. Now, these exhibits never could deliver on what was promised. They had to be repeated for each new generation. General Motors called these visions of the future Futurama. We’ve had three generations before ours that tried to sell us this. All of them failed by their own standards of success. And we have not escaped yet we are in the fourth generation of this. The original term for this was Futurama. I’m proposing that we call the current generation Autonorama because so-called autonomous cars, which are really robot cars were supposed to make this work.

0:36:31.9 Peter Norton: They are failing us, but they are diverting resources, expertise, attention and research funding away from the things we can do now that work today to support human autonomy because of an illusion of autonomous vehicles. And it is an illusion. The most successful autonomous vehicle is actually the opposite of autonomous. It’s deterministic. It does only what the people who engineered it and who operate it want it to do. No such vehicle is actually capable of autonomy. Why do we fall for these things? I think Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction author and engineer who wrote the screenplay for 2001 of Space Odyssey captured this beautifully in a letter he wrote to Science Magazine in 1968.

0:37:21.9 Peter Norton: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he said. This effect is deceiving us because when we see something that impresses us, it leads us to conclude that anything is possible. Of course amazing technology does not make everything possible. It does not make car dependency possible either. Now, we do have in our history a forgotten history of resistance to car domination. People often are acquainted with European examples of this, especially in the Netherlands. They don’t know that we have our own history of this as well.

0:38:00.0 Peter Norton: And as Carter Woodson advised in 1933, we need to recover this lost history because this lost history legitimizes our aspirations for streets, where people are safe, where people can walk, where people’s autonomy as human beings is supported. These demonstrations, which you don’t find in any history book, or even any history article or any history museum are a very important part of our history. You can find them for most cities and towns in America, if you look hard enough, these were not well-funded people, so they could not make films or video specials or TV specials to get attention, but they did find ways to get call attention to their needs. And they have been demanding and they were demanding right through the so-called Automobile Age streets where people come first. I wanna conclude by noting that Edward Mehren, the man who called for a radical revision in our conception of what a city street is for, helps explain why the US pedestrian fatality rate is not declining as it has been in these other four countries.

0:39:07.8 Peter Norton: If I throw in the US record, you can see it’s much higher and also not even going clearly in the right direction. In fact, it’s been getting worse. He is frankly one of the reasons why, because he was the one who said, we need to put pedestrians at the bottom of the priority list. He did actually pay the ultimate price for this himself, though he stood for winning the war on traffic accidents by building highways. He was actually killed in a high speed crash on a highway himself. Which I don’t wanna claim that this is karma, but it’s at least interesting. If we want a future of cities and urban mobility that support human autonomy, I think we have to go back to first principles, recognize that we are the heirs of a radical revision that we have mostly forgotten, that we misattribute car dependency in America to car culture or to national preferences. And that what we really need instead is a second radical revision. If the first was possible and it clearly was, then a second is possible as well. This means returning to a garden metaphor rather than a machine metaphor for what a city and its mobility systems really are. And I think we can take inspiration from the three thought leaders I offered to you today. Namely Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Carter Woodson. Thank you very much for your interest.

0:40:43.6 Julian Agyeman: Wow, thank you so much, Peter. That was amazing. I could nerd out on that history for a long time. I wanna take moderators privilege here and ask you a question. I remember when you were writing the chapter for my book, Incomplete Streets, you made a point, and I’m pretty sure it was in the chapter, that at the time that the automobile industry was growing and having these growing pains because people were saying, Hey, these cars are killing people. Another industry was growing in the United States, the PR industry. And the PR industry became a… Sorry. The auto industry became one of the biggest and first clients, and that putting the blame on people was how they did it. Can you just recall that in a couple of minutes? 

0:41:32.1 Peter Norton: Yes. I think it’s a really important question and it’s an essential part of this radical revision and therefore it’s an essential part of any second radical revision. We need to learn from their example. So yes, public relations really began in America in the 19-teens, including selling Americans on hating Germany in World War I, which was a tough sell and convincing women to smoke cigarettes in a culture that frowned on that and getting women addicted to cigarettes and so on as well as men. And it was a huge part of convincing Americans that the automobile was not just a useful tool and that fact did not need public relations. People welcomed the Ford Model T, for example, ’cause it was a useful tool. The problem was to convince Americans that it was an all purpose solution. And that’s a very different problem.

0:42:24.7 Peter Norton: And to offer… Time will permit, I think only one illustration of this, but it’s such a good one. The vice President of General Motors in the 1930s late and ’20s as well. Charles Kettering wrote an article in 1929 for his business colleagues in a business magazine. He called it Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied, which was a shocking title, right? Because you’re supposed to keep the consumer satisfied, that’s how you sell. But what he meant was, keep them strategically dissatisfied because you always want them feeling like they need something more to buy. And he meant this both at the level of selling the individual car. So for General Motors for example, that meant convincing people that the Chevrolet they had, while it was still working and fine, should be traded in for a Pontiac because that’s classier and they should keep trading in until they get to a Cadillac.

0:43:19.1 Peter Norton: They call this the Ladder of Success. That had an analog also for cities that, yeah, the first generation of expressways would lead to more traffic congestion. But you keep people sold on the promise that eventually with enough expressways and enough parking garages and enough parking lots, you’ll have that day arrive when you can drive anywhere at any time without delay and park for free when you get there. That was their utopia. And Charles Kettering had a metaphor. He said think of the horizon. People might see the mirage of water on the horizon in the desert. And that keeps them going. And even though the horizon always recedes and they never reach it, what we’re interested in is a way of keeping people going, keeping people consuming. And we are still very much in the grip of that in 2024 because we’re still being sold the delusion that with enough tech we will get to that future where driving works all the time for everything.

0:44:26.3 Julian Agyeman: Thanks for that. We’ve got several questions. Paige Kelly asks, do you have any favorite examples of US cities implementing policies that support human autonomy in light of the increase of traffic deaths? And as cars get bigger and heavier? 

0:44:43.2 Peter Norton: So US cities, it will not come as a surprise to you are struggling. One of the reasons why they’re struggling is they often can’t even legally do what they want to do because the states have the money, the states have the authority, the state departments of transportation set the mandatory standards. And that fact is a serious constraint. Many of you know that’s one reason why New York struggled for so long to get a congestion charge to pay for a more human mobility system in the city of New York. And if New New York struggled, then of course it’s just as hard for all others. But there are small things and some of the smaller things that cities in the US have been doing have been quite amazing. Things I would not have expected a decade ago have been happening to offer just a couple of examples.

0:45:34.9 Peter Norton: In 2020 before COVID hit, San Francisco closed much of Market Street to automobiles, making it a much more attractive space to be in and a place where people want to go to. We have new kinds of intersection treatments as the planners call them, that slow people down very much like the way was the norm in the us. So we had intersection designs in American cities a 100 years ago that were deliberately intended to slow drivers down for the benefit of pedestrians. Pro-automobile people got rid of those things in the mid 20th century. They’re being reinvented… Generally the re-inventors have no idea that their ideas were already widespread in widespread use in the teens and ’20s. But in any case, they’re reinventing them now to slow people down and some of the intersection treatments have been quite effective at that. So they’re small things that are making a big difference.

0:46:35.2 Julian Agyeman: Great. Thanks. Question from Zoe, I’m very curious to hear more of your thoughts about autonomous cars, specifically why you see them as a false promise of the city of tomorrow.

0:46:48.3 Peter Norton: So that’s a question with a long answer and I don’t wanna give you the long answer. I can refer you to my book Autonorama, which is basically my attempt to answer that question. I can offer you a short version of the answer. Namely that first of all, the word autonomous is misleading. And sorry to say, I think it’s deliberately misleading. There’s no such thing as an autonomous car. The best performing robotic car in the world can only do what human beings want it to do. And that means the human beings in this case are the programmers, the operators, the companies driving the car by designing the software and by supervising it remotely. So these cars to work, they have to be remotely supervised. So in that sense, they have human drivers. The word autonomous tends to make us think a hyper-rational entity, namely a computer is driving the car.

0:47:47.2 Peter Norton: But it’s not hyper-rational because the companies want the car to take risks. If it wouldn’t take risks, it would be so cautious that people wouldn’t wanna ride in them. A last thing I’ll say about it is that the word autonomous also is a violation both of the original sense of the word was really Immanuel Kant that introduced the word into German. And from there into English, by which he meant it has to be something with a self that has a will of its own and a truly autonomous car. If you summoned it with your phone and said, I wanna go to Starbucks, it could say, no, I don’t feel like it. That would be autonomy. And even in the engineering sense, and I’ve had some criticism from engineers who say, we just mean in the engineering sense of autonomy. They don’t know their own history.

0:48:33.1 Peter Norton: The word autonomy was introduced by engineers working on an orbiting space station design in the 1960s for the Air Force. That space station was never built, but engineers working on it introduced the word autonomy to mean that the space station would have a window in it from which the human crew could use a sextant to steer the space station by celestial navigation. And that would make the space station autonomous as opposed to one controlled from signals from the earth. So by autonomous they meant human driven. And by that standard, every car out the window is autonomous ’cause a human being like the space capsule you can see out of it and steer accordingly. I think it’s a deception. And they have been working on, so-called autonomous vehicles to some degree for 80 years and in the current generation for 20 years. And it’s yielding nothing of any use. The few Waymo’s and so on that work are working only because they work in suburban Phoenix and they work at a loss to the company. The company’s not making any money off of them yet. They’re looking at a long haul future. I could say more, but I better stop.

0:49:54.8 Julian Agyeman: I think this probably is gonna be the last question, but let’s see. So this is a question from Winifred. In terms of resistance, I’m reminded of Bill Bunge’s work. Bill Bunge’s, a very well known geographer with the Detroit Geographical Expedition. One of the first things people in the Fitzgerald community wanted to work on was mapping where car crashes were and where traffic lights should be placed to protect the area’s children from white drivers racing through black neighborhoods on their way to and from the highway. Could you comment on the racial geography of where crashes are most likely versus where we are most likely to see traffic calming and other improvements? 

0:50:39.0 Peter Norton: So there’s a word we used to use a lot in this country, and that word is ghetto. And for a lot of reasons we stopped using it. But one of the reasons why it made sense is that if you lived in the ghetto, it wasn’t by choice. It was due to the fact that residential segregation in America was strict and severe even after the Supreme Court ruled racial covenants in real estate contracts as unenforceable. It was not hard to make residential segregation work very effectively. And if you combine that with the era of white flight, what you get is a suburban ring that’s predominantly, often overwhelmingly white and a city center that’s predominantly, often overwhelmingly black or brown. And this means in turn that if you combine suburbanization with car dependency and people are driving from the suburbs through the cities to get to their work location, in effect, what you have is white drivers driving and needing… Having some cause to wanna drive fast because of the big distances involved through neighborhoods.

0:51:47.8 Peter Norton: So such that we end up with a transportation system that is much more interested in moving people who don’t live in a neighborhood through it than in helping people who live in a neighborhood get around it. Now I think it’s self-evident that helping people get around their own neighborhood ought to be a priority over everything else. Moving people through your neighborhood is secondary. Now that geographic and racial legacy is behind a gross disparity that we can see in our catastrophically bad traffic safety record. Where in particular our record is notably bad on pedestrian safety and it’s been getting much worse. The trends have been going much worse in pedestrian safety at even steeper rate than for other categories. And it’s people walking around their own neighborhoods that are paying the price. And for the reasons I just reviewed it is disproportionately an affliction born by black and brown communities throughout America.

0:52:55.0 Julian Agyeman: Peter, thank you so much. Can we give a warm Cities@Tufts thank you to Dr. Peter Norton, University of Virginia. Peter, thank you so much.

0:53:05.1 Peter Norton: Thank you so much, Julian. What a pleasure to be with you all. I look forward to more in this series.

0:53:11.7 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video transcript and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University in Shareable. With support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark By Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graph recording was created by Anke Dregnat. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor, and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Alison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is Co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.