Delivering Sustainable Transport

DELIVERING SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT A Social Science Perspective

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DELIVERING SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT A Social SciencePerspective

edited by

Amanda Root University of Gloucestershire, UK

2003

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page List of Tables

vii

List of Figures

viii

ix

Acknowledgements

1

Introduction

Morphing Mobility: A Methodological Critique by Amanda Root

PART ONE:

GLOBALISATION, MARKETS AND POLICY THE NEED FOR NEW PARADIGMS

Chapter 1

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation by Cathy McKenzie

17

Chapter 2

Limits of Economics by K.H. Schaeffer and Elliott Sclar

33

Chapter 3

If Public Transport is the Answer, What is the Question? by Kerry Hamilton

49

PART TWO:

POST-MODERNITY AND REFLEXIVITY

Chapter 4

Reflexivity in Transport Studies by Tom Turrentine

61

Delivering Sustainable Transport Chapter 5

Mobilising the Mobile: the Political Inclusion of the Transport User by Suzanne McDonald-Walker

77

Chapter 6

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview by Tom Turrentine

97

PART THREE:

CULTURAL STUDIES

Chapter 7

The Automobile Era: a Cultural Analysis by K.H. Schaeffer and Elliott Sclar

117

Chapter 8

Ethnography of Motor-Bike Boys by Paul Willis

127

Chapter 9

The Effects of Different Localities on Children's Play and Development by Marco Huttenmoser

141

PART FOUR:

NEW DIMENSIONS IN MOBILITY DISCOURSES

Chapter 10

What is Transport Social Exclusion? by Juliet Solomon

151

Chapter 11

Westernising Travel Policy: Rickshaw Pullers in Calcutta by John Whitelegg, Nick Williams and Jayanta Basu

157

Chapter 12

The City and the Car by Mimi Sheller and John Urry

171

About the authors

191

Index

195

vi

LIST OF TABLES Page 1.1

The costs and benefits of a light rail scheme variable demand

6

6.1

Minimum acceptable and comfortable driving range

108

6.2

Transition matrix from minimum to comfortable range

110

7.1

Typical expectations of young people's independent mobility in the 1950s

122

9.1

The length of time children play outside on a sunny day

146

9.2

What children do when their mother is busy

146

9.3

Parents' responses when asked which activities were most likely to cause their children to miss a favourite TV programme

147

10.1

Average times taken to travel one mile

152

LIST OF FIGURES Page 2.1

The demand for autos

34

2.2

Supply of autos

35

2.3

Market for autos

35

2.4

Market for transport services

39

2.5

Market for transport services with private and social demand

39

2.6

Transport costs and market demand

41

2.7

A rent-bid curve

45

2.8

Effect of transport improvement on rent-bid curve of metropolitan area

46

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks are due to the students of University of Gloucestershire's Design for Living course, who discussed with me some of the ideas that inform this book. Also I am grateful to Sue Turner, at the University of Gloucestershire's Learning Centre, for invaluable support and help. My thanks are also due to Wendy Arghyrou and Trudi James for, respectively, excellent typing and technical drawing skills. I am also grateful to numerous friends and colleagues for sharing ideas, offering timely advice, encouragement and constructive criticism. This group includes: Guy Daly; Nick Eyre, Robert Gildea; Michael Jacobs; Nick Hewlett; Peter Jones; Karen Lucas; Joseph Murphy; John Preston; Mimi Shelter; Juliet Solomon; Bridget Taylor; Riki Therivel; John Urry and John Whitelegg. Needless to say, none of these people are responsible for any shortcomings or mistakes in what follows. Special thanks are due to Eunice Schaeffer for the kind permission to use the work of her late husband, K.H. Schaeffer. Thanks are also due to Blackwells Publishers for permission to print the following edited version of 'The City and the Car' by Mimi Shelter and John Urry, which first appeared in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 24,4, (2000) 737-757. Last but not least, my partner Martin Stott and my children Nadine and Alice deserve thanks for living with me with such good grace during the times when I have appeared to be less than two removes from an anorak-clad variety of train spotter.

Amanda Root Cheltenham, 2002

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1 TRANSPORT, MODERNITY AND GLOBALISATION Cathy McKenzie, Transport Consultant, London, UK

Transport hits the core of society. It is one of the few activities which both give form to and express our turn-of-the-century European civilisation. It gives structure to space and our concept of space. It shapes and reflects our way of life and our cultures. It contributes to economic development....The functioning of society, indeed its very nature, largely depends on the quality and design of the transport system. (Group Transport 2000 Plus, 1990)

Introduction Transport is inextricably woven into modern society. Many of the transport technologies and mobility patterns that dominate our world have arisen as a consequence of the particular nature of the modernist project (Giddens, 1991 &1991a). Many of the, often worthy, critiques of transport, fail to acknowledge these cultural and economic contexts within which transport systems are embedded. This section looks at some of the characteristics of modernity (and its related economic system, capitalism) and considers the crucial role of transport in delivering its aims. It considers, as we enter a period of late modernity, and of economic globalisation, whether this relationship is itself changing and if so, what this may mean for those involved in transport provision and analysis. It suggests ways in which recent forms of capitalist accumulation may effect the role and function of the city, and hence its transport policy. The final section considers what this may mean for the role of the local state in the planning and provision of transport and for bringing about a more radical vision of the city, based more on environmental constraints and social need.

2 Delivering Sustainable Transport public about mobility and related issues. (For example, UK roads protests raised some formerly marginalised concerns (Stokes and Taylor, 1994) as does Davis, (1992) on how safety campaigns primarily cater for car users, not pedestrians or cyclists). The absence of a variety of ways of understanding the social organisation, relevance and significance of mobility and spatiality can also be argued to have contributed to transport policy being the Cinderella of government departments2, to it being frequently outside key areas of 'decision space' of political stakeholders and to the consistent failure to link progressive democratic aspirations to transport provision (Whitelegg, 1993,1997; Urry, 2001a). This book contains a range of examples of different methodologies that begin fill this gap. Each chapter explores how a particular social science methodology - such as ethnography, participant observation or discourse analysis - can be used to provide new ways of seeing transport problems and policies. In this introduction, I will consider the dominance of the exchange concept (for example, in the transport context, a situation where individuals pay a fare to get from A to B). This casts transport thinking into the mould of an individualism of approach that limits and distorts policy-relevant research. It also prevents the understanding of travel as an institutional practice, (e.g. as influenced by groupings such as legislatures, mass media, bureaucracies, political parties) and as a cultural phenomenon (i.e. seeing the meanings and demands for mobility as fashioned out of a wide range of everyday aspirations, desires, fashions and inequalities). In the rest of this Introduction, I will examine some key concepts and practices from transport studies. These are: derived demand; cost benefit analysis; predict and provide; and seeing transport demand as determined by economic growth. Alternative approaches will then be suggested using the theories of Unger and others. These theories will be used to show how mobility interests and cultures are established in institutional contexts and that they can be changed. Finally, the chapters of this book will be reviewed to show how they can provide new material for debate and policy innovation.

TRANSPORT ECONOMICS AND PLANNING Transport as derived demand The idea that transport is a derived demand, that is we do not seek travel for itself but because of what it enables us to do, is repeated in virtually every transport economics textbook ever written. However, the idea of derived demand does not explain why some people travel for sheer pleasure. For instance, it does not explain the practice of joyriding, nor does it explain the addition of extra miles to journeys just for fun, the so-called phenomenon of excess travel (Mokhtarian and Salomon, 1999, 27). Similarly, if derived demand were the only factor at play, then it would be reasonable to expect people to seek to minimize the time spent in travel. Yet, when increased speed makes reduction in journey times possible, for instance, because of the construction of a new light rail system, many people tend to reduce gains by 2 However, perhaps because of public disquiet, recent policy announcements in the UK have suggested that transport is to be given higher priority: spending is to be increased and planning procedures speeded up (Clark, 2002).

Morphing Mobility

3

making longer journeys (Ker and Tranter, 1997, 1.1). The concept of derived demand also does not explain why many people spend huge amounts of money on their cars, or invest time in personalising them, when cheaper or unadorned models would serve them equally well for getting from A to B. Personalisation and luxury in modes of transportation has been linked to identity, status, glamour, sex appeal, class, race and gender differentiation and so on, rather than the notion of transportation as a derived demand (Root, 2000). The concept of derived demand presupposes that individuals operate as rational agents, seeking to maximise their personal well being in a utilitarian and economically consistent fashion. This concept is inadequate as a model of culture, i.e. the meanings accorded to daily experience, and of consumption, choice and of social change. The premises of individual actors operating according to rational decision-making processes is fixed to one point in time, limited in its understanding of cultural and institutional contexts and reveals only part of a much more complex picture (see, for instance, the discussion of different types of choice making in Hargreaves Heap, 1997). This individualistic and rationalistic view of how people make decisions is the nucleus of another central tool of transport planning, that of 'cost benefit analysis,' to which we now turn.

Cost Benefit Analysis Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) is widely used to work out whether road building is justified or, alternatively, to cost public transport. CBA is widely used by central and local government in Europe and the UK; for example, it was used to cost the Ml motorway and the Victoria Line underground railway. Criticisms of CBA have already been voiced (e.g. Department of Transport, 1994, 21), but because these challenges are largely ignored and CBA is still widely taught and used, it is important to examine it here. CBA categorises resources committed to a project as economic costs. They are measured as a marginal cost - that is, the costs of producing another unit of output, which is, in turn, determined by economies of, or returns to, scale. CBA compares these costs and benefits, and recommends that a project be undertaken if the total economic benefit exceeds the total cost. CBA usually involves the following steps, 1. Define the appraisal case, that is the arguments for doing the project, as well as the alternatives and the base case (which might involve doing nothing or doing a minimum). 2. Determine the project life (using the relevant technical, market or economic criteria). 3. Determine the key impacts of the project. 4. Determine the main parties affected by the project. 5. Quantify the key impacts over time.

4 Delivering Sustainable Transport

6. Cost, or monetise the key impacts over time. 7. Determine the appropriate interest rate (this is usually done using social opportunity cost or social time preference methods). 8. Compare the discounted costs and benefits using an appropriate measure such as Net Present Value (that is, the discounted value of future income from a particular investment less the discounted value of expected costs) or Benefit Cost Ratio (benefits relative to costs). (Adapted from Preston, 1998) Many questions are raised by each of these stages, mainly because of the economic discourse that makes it appear possible to define the 'key impacts' of the project, point 3 and, point 4, the 'parties affected by the project' (where would the boundaries be drawn in relation to climate change or other environmental pollution?) Behind such assumptions there is often the idea of externalities, the name given to the effects of production or consumption on thirdparties. However, there is no accepted or agreed method for assessing externalities (See Bickel et al, 1997). This list, at Point 6, also contains an assumption that costs can be monetarised, an assumption that has been challenged by environmentalists (Jacobs, 1991) and others who would argue that the environmental and social dislocation and other negative impacts caused by road schemes cannot be costed (Smith et al, 1998). The idea that discounted costs and benefits can be assessed is also questionable (point 8). There is a substantial debate which discusses discount rates and a large amount of controversy about them, which I will not rehearse here (see Button, 1993), except to note that there is no agreement on how to calculate them, so the figures used in CBAs must be highly provisional. These assumption-ridden concepts are, along with other factors, marshalled into models that are used by policy-makers to determine how to spend huge amounts of transport investment funding. The three main forms of CBA appraisals practised in the UK are Social Cost Benefil Analysis, Restricted Cost Benefit Analysis and Financial Appraisal. The Restricted Cost Benefit Analysis, the latter is the same as Social Cost Benefit Analysis except that user benefits are not included. A typical formula used for Social Cost Benefit Analysis is,

Where UBia = User benefits in year i accruing agency a, NUBia = Non user transport benefits in year i accruing to agency a, Eia = External benefits in year i accruing to agency a (Preston, 1998). Here we see equally problematic concepts such as 'user benefits'. These are usually formulated in terms of 'time saved' (Button, 1993), traditionally for the motorised traveller,

Morphing Mobility

5

not for the pedestrian or cyclist. Of course, time cannot be 'saved' in the way implied by such terminology, it can only be spent in one way or another. (See Whitelegg (1993) for a discussion of the related concept of 'time pollution' and Urry, (2001a), chpt. 5, for a discussion of different concepts of time). The 'benefits' included here are rarely, if ever, formulated in terms of factors that do not feature in the modelling lexicon, such as the health benefits of non-motorised transport. Financial Appraisal works as follows:

Where Ria = revenue in year i accruing to agency a, OCia = operating cost in year i accruing to agency a, Kia = capital cost in year i accruing to agency a, r = interest rate (e.g. 0.06), N = project life (e.g. 30) (Preston, 1998). This model contains fewer non-financial variables but still begs lots of questions about how variables such as interest rates and project life will be defined for the purposes of the CBA, when neither element has a definitive or fixed value. Table 1.1 sheds some light on how the material that is usually marshalled to fill these variables. As we have seen, CBA procedures are filled with answers that assume unitary individuals giving consistent, rational answers that portray, at one moment in time, choices they make, or would make, over an extended period. This practice of making assumptions extends into many different areas of transport studies. For example, revealed and stated preference studies often contain similarly simplistic assumptions about willingness to pay or demand elasticities, derived from single research surveys. Different kinds of models for instance, logit, nested logit, probit and multinominal logit, provide an increased level of sophistication, but their economistic assumptions still limit their usefulness. For instance, the complex trading between components of some travel choices can be lost even in some nested logit models (for a critique of such approaches, see Hensher, 1998, 13). CBA models often presume a point of equilibrium, to calculate factors like reduced time of travel or reduced accidents. Yet this point is often, in practice, impossible to stipulate or arbitrarily imposed. Phil Goodwin has noted the difficulties of forecasting any point of equilibrium, 'the most widely used analytical tools have nothing to say about sequence and time scale, because they treat end-states, notional equilibrium conditions which may never apply at all, but even if they will apply, we cannot say when' (emphasis in original), (Goodwin, 1997,10).

Predict and Provide There is an adjoining sub-discipline, of transport planning approaches that has been dubbed 'predict and provide', in a phrase coined by Susan Owens (Owens, 1995). The premise of predict and provide is that the transport professionals will first forecast how much traffic there

6 Delivering Sustainable Transport will be and then that they will build enough road space to accommodate it CBA is oriented towards market-based solutions, such as road pricing. Predict and provide, by contrast, is usually based on the idea of manipulating the supply side of transport infrastructure, assuming that the demand side is fixed. Incidence group

Costs

Benefits

Light rail operator

Construction costs Operating cost

(Revenue from former bus users) Revenue from other users (Grants)

Light rail users Bus users Car users

Bus operators Local authority Central Government Householders Property owners

Increased time of travel Increased cost of travel Reduced time of travel Reduced cost of travel net of tax savings (Tax savings) Reduced accidents (Revenue from former bus operators) (Grants) (Increased subsidy) (Grants) (Tax savings) Environmental benefits Environmental costs (Higher property prices) Increased employment (Higher property prices)

Table 1.1, the Costs and Benefits of a Light Rail Scheme - Variable Demand (Preston, 1998. Brackets indicate optional costs and benefits). However, the philosophy of predict and provide has been shown to be flawed. As the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA) found (and as common sense tells the rest of us) that there is a phenomenon involving the use of additional road space to make extra trips (SACTRA, 1994). This pattern - of extra road space generating additional journeys in some circumstances - is known as 'induced traffic'. Induced traffic means that the demand for road space will almost invariably outstrip supply (Goodwin, 1996). Thus SACTRA's report on induced traffic showed that we cannot build our way out of traffic congestion (SACTRA, 1992; Goodwin, op cit.). The Government's acceptance of this report was a seismic leap forward in terms of accepting that the predict and provide era had come to an end (Department of Transport, 1994; Goodwin, 1997, Owens, 1995).

Morphing Mobility

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Transport determines economic growth Transport levels are linked to economic growth: there is evidence of a rise in the number of trips when a period of economic growth is occurring (DETR, 2001a). Conventional transport planning wisdom takes this insight further and asserts that transport infrastructure, usually roads, causes economic growth. For example in 1989 the Department of Transport stated, in Roads for Prosperity, The expanded programme will improve the inter-urban motorway and trunk road network by reducing journey times and increasing the reliability of road travel. It is a vital further boost for British industry. The measures proposed will provide the means to improve the country's economic geography, increasing opportunities for the lessfavoured areas, assisting urban regeneration and helping the more prosperous areas to cope with growth. (Quoted in Whitelegg, 1994, 7) These assertions of a causal link between economic growth and 'the reliability of road travel' have been challenged on a number of grounds and by a variety of groups and individuals. It is not my intention to rehearse these arguments here, as the curious reader can investigate these debates in depth (see, for example, Whitelegg, 1994; SACTRA, 1997, 1999 and DETR, 2000). Instead, I want to make the point that the kind of link that is assumed here is often law-like and deterministic in ways that goes beyond the evidence. There is often a belief that transport infrastructure is a necessary precondition for economic growth, which is not corroborated by the evidence (SACTRA, 1999; Whitelegg, 1994).

ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDINGS OF TRANSPORT David Hensher has developed a modelling procedure that tries to allow for a variety of different levels and complexities (Figure 1.1). Hensher's model is undoubtedly a huge step forward in terms of acknowledging complexity and sophistication, and it embodies the recognition that models are, themselves, vehicles for debate because of the assumptions that they contain. This is an example of a transport planning practice that is reflexive about the conceptual model it uses, as a prerequisite for improving modelling procedures and frameworks (Scott Armstrong, 2001). However, what is missing in this type of paradigm is the inclusion of systematic understanding of the ways in which change can happen beyond and outside the exchange model of transport. There is still a need to develop an understanding of the cultural and institutional structures that play a role in determining what is acceptable, what is 'chosen' and what can be altered. Developing such a notion depends, partly, on seeing how language or models are part of a set of practices that either represents 'the real' as if it were fixed or unambiguous, or recognises the ways in which language itself is part of cultural practices that shape meanings. If we take the latter position, we are much more likely to see how transport models can reflect only part of what exists and that there is a need to develop an

8 Delivering Sustainable Transport understanding of the context of choices as well as just describe the choices themselves. Institutionalist theorists March and Olsen also describe this: Within an institutional framework, 'choice', if it can be called that, is based more on a logic of appropriateness than on the logic of consequence that underlies conceptions of rational action. (March and Olsen, 1996, 251/2) Thus the idea of choice as part of a programme for planning what people might want from transport, but as revealed by most econometrics models, is questionable.

Figure 1.1 Functional relationships implied by complex decision-making framework (Hensher, 1998) This distinction, between language - and hence research practices - as a simple mirror of 'the real' or as part of a discursive practice, as narratives with material effects, can be seen in two philosophical revolutions developed by the Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein first outlined what later become know as logical positivism, that is the view of language as a pointer, or reference, to the real. Logical positivism suggests that the world is referred to via language which neutrally reflects objects and facts. Unsurprisingly, this is known as the picture theory of language. For example, take the following assertion from his exposition of this position, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that describes language as if it is just a tool for pointing: '4.022 A proposition shows its sense', (Wittgenstein, 1976, 21,25, emphases in original).

Morphing Mobility

9

Twenty-seven years later, Wittgenstein wrote in the Preface to a new book, Philosophical Investigations: What 'determining the length' means is not learned by learning what length and determining are; the meanings of the word 'length' is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to determine length. (Wittgenstein, 1986,225, emphases in original). Thus if meaning comes from cultural context, then transport models cannot capture all of 'the real' as if what they depict could attain objectivity and value-free status. The need is to be aware of the contexts in which particular models are applied and thus to be aware of the constraints and particular sets of meanings and practices that are implicit in them. Thus econometrics or CBA do not just describe 'real' situations, they represent a culturally specific appropriation of those situations along with assumptions generated by the modelling techniques. The information they generate is partial and relative, even given much greater levels of sophistication in the modelling techniques, not absolute. This is an important point. Some of our culture's most revered concepts such as 'objectivity', 'unbiased', 'value-free' and 'scientific' take their legitimacy from particular language games, such as the idea that facts and values are entirely separate3. In mainstream transport studies and in allied disciplines such as econometrics, it is as if Wittgenstein's second philosophical revolution has never happened. These disciplines assume that the econometric models that they build to measure transport demand are representing empirically given objectivity, with derived demand as discrete variables, separate from the desire for mobility as a social and temporal phenomenon or construct. But these transport planning and engineering practices are specific to, in Wittgenstein's terminology, certain language games, they are self-fulfilling in terms of representing certain cultural and political practices and then catering for them. If the cultural and institutional basis for models for transport is recognised, then it is easier to develop a vision for how and where transport could change4. Institutional factors describe what, in the last instance, can be changed or transcended. For instance, using a theoretical approach that could loosely be called institutionalism, and which has been developed with reference to social institutions electoral politics or property rights, Roberto Mangabeira Unger writes: 3 The argument that science is institutionally located and so its knowledge is culturally specific can be made through the use of the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy as I have done here, (e.g. Wittgenstein: 1986) or though analysing the sociology of scientific knowledge (e.g. Kuhn, 1996) or through what can loosely be called a poststructuralist approach (e.g. Latour, 1993). 4 One version of this understanding of analysing environmental, political and environmental change has the family name of ecological modernisation, although this includes a wide variety of different approaches. The popularised narrative that supports ecological modernisation broadly supports the view that economic progress and environmental protection are compatible, a reading that has been used by Prime Minister Tony Blair and others (see, for example, Blair, 2000). There are many critiques of various versions of ecological modernisation and I cannot rehearse them here, but it should be noted that its generally optimistic prognoses do not seem to apply easily to the developing world, nor do they contain a model of how transport development can be harmonised with environmental protection (e.g. Murphy, 2000).

10 Delivering Sustainable Transport

.. .a practice of social and historical explanation may fully acknowledge the tenacity of institutional orders; it need not degenerate into a voluntarist fantasy about the unlimited malleability of social arrangements. For even when we affirm the ramshackle character of institutional arrangements, we can also acknowledge how, once established, they gain a second-order necessity. The conceptions of group identity and group interest that they sustain begin to reconfirm them. Organisational and technological styles that cannot readily be changed, without risks and costs of transition, take them for granted. Influential doctrines, expounded as scientific insight in the universities of the leading powers, lend them a semblance of naturalness and necessity. Nevertheless, they remain, in the end, neither natural nor necessary. (Unger, 1998,23) In other words, it is time to move beyond the idea that interests are fixed and immutable. There are many explanations of the idea of a vision or the secular idea of transcendence in social terms, but such an approach has not been widely explored in relation to the methodology of transport studies. Conventional transport studies models do not contain a vision of what holds communities, aspirations together and what creates transformative possibilities. This question brings us back to the challenge of this book, that of posing the difficult questions of assessing what different groups want from transport using methodologies derived from the social sciences. Each of the pieces that follows poses that question in a way that includes contexts and that recognises that groups' interests are often tied to particular institutional practices, so are changeable. Using a fuller range of the social sciences to analyse transport means that complex cultural changes can be analysed and interests that may have seemed fixed and opposed can be repositioned5. The chapters that follow open up new possibilities to challenge old means of holding interests as fixed and antagonistic and they provide the chance to move beyond old patterns and antagonisms, such as that between the traveller and the non-traveller.

NEW DIMENSIONS IN MOBILITY DISCOURSES This book, perhaps unusually for one that is looking at new methods for understanding transport in the context of arguing for sustainability, is starting from the recognition that most of us reading this enjoy some aspects of consumerism and gain from the opportunities for emancipation and new identities that contemporary forms of travel, communications and trade can bring. It would be foolish to try to deny the pleasures and benefits, such as new insights into different cultures, as well as greater scope for combining domestic responsibilities and 5 The various chapters of this book show that interests are not fixed and given except at the level of institutional practice. Interests can be changed by widening popular alliances around issues that are bigger than 'quality of life' issues - whether individualised or not - (see Jacobs, 1999 for a discussion of how environmental politics can be related to individuals' aspirations) versus the conventional defence of transport as a corollary of economic growth (e.g. Department of Transport, 1989).

Morphing Mobility 11 paid work, that modern forms of travel can confer (Castells, 1997; Hewitt, 1993; Urry, 2001a; 2001b; Ward, 1991). It would be equally foolish to try to deny the negative social and environmental consequences current ground and air traffic levels (Bendixson, 1977; Illich, 1974; Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 1994; 1997; Root, 2000; Whitelegg, 1993). Transport policies, at least in industrialised North Atlantic rim countries, often have seemingly contradictory goals - involving building more roads at the time as moralistic appeals to individuals to cut down on their car journeys (DETR, 1998). Consumers of transport are also frequently contradictory - and their ambivalence needs to be given more recognition (Mcnaghten and Urry, 1998). If judged by the criteria of curbing the continuing growth in travel these policies - and some people's best intentions - are spectacularly unsuccessful, except, perhaps, amongst a tiny minority, some of whom are able to reduce the need to travel by using information technology (DETR, 2001a; DETR, 2001b). Potential alliances around sustainability are frequently stymied by technocratic debates about what the exact goals or targets should be. Hence, in what follows, sustainability will be given a relatively populist definition and used as a shorthand term for 'environmental space' which refers to 'the area that human beings can use in the natural environment without doing lasting harm to essential characteristics' (Sachs et al, 2000, 12). This covers utilisation of natural resources not being greater than regeneration rates, discharge of materials not being greater than environmental capacity to absorb them; utilisation of non-renewable resources being kept to a minimum and the time factor in human intervention being in balance with that of natural processes (op cit). Transportation is the largest end-use energy sector (see, for instance, Peake, 1994; Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) 1994; Sperling and Shaheen, 1995; von Weizsacker et al, 1998). Transport is thus one of the most important sectors that need reform if sustainability is to be achieved. The following chapters begin to build narratives and to provide material for debates that can be used to disrupt the current transport planning frameworks. The first section 'Globalisation, Markets and Regulation - the Need for New Paradigms' deals with existing transport planning paradigms, and critiques them and their limitations. The chapter by Cathy McKenzie takes a broad perspective and looks at how globalisation and other changes in economic relationships underpin transport. McKenzie argues that transport cannot be understood independently of its economic and social context, therefore it is important that transport planners and others understand the forces that drive transport demand before they start to try to influence them. The article by Kerry Hamilton focuses on policy issues and how there has been an assumption has been that mobility is to be encouraged and catered for. The chapter by Elliott Sclar and K.H. Schaeffer shows the limits of market forces. It illustrates, using economists' tools, how market forces alone cannot be relied upon to regulate transport for socially inclusive outcomes. In the second section of the book 'Post-Modernity and Reflexivity', there is a chapter by Tom Turrentine which is a theoretical overview of many of the main traditions of social theory from the twentieth century as applied to the choice of cars and travel. He looks at the work of various members of what is know as the Frankfurt School and later theorists and also looks at

12 Delivering Sustainable Transport how reflexivity, or self-awareness and reflection, enables the construction of identities and lifestyles that involve different travel and consumption choices. This is an innovative way of using these theories to explain the context of transportation choice. His article on the use of gaming interviews shows how an innovative form - the combination of use of travel diaries along with questions about changes to lifestyle - can be combined to provide insights that are radically different, but no less valid, than those derived from the more traditional survey. Suzanne MacDonald-Walker's chapter addresses the issue of the institutional framing of interests. She shows how the European Union's (EU) attempt to control bikers' behaviour allowed them to reflexively disrupt attempts at bureaucratic control. Section Three, 'Cultural Studies', contains examinations of popular culture, and focuses attention on the context of sub-cultures and the creativity of subordinate groups. For example, by immersing himself in the detail (and reproducing the swearing) of a particular sub-cultural group of motorbikers, Paul Willis identifies some of the complex issues that determine how particular forms of transport are used and what they symbolise. This analysis shows how important the meanings of mobility accorded by particular sub-groups can be, significance that obliterates policy issues such as safety and noise reduction. The article on the mobility effects of spatiality by Elliott Sclar and K. H. Schaeffer analyses how changing cultural mores can interact with land-use and transportation to produce outcomes that are socially exclusive, not inclusive. Marco Huttenmoser raises the issue of how lack of independent playspace fosters unhelpfully close and intense maternal relationships with preschool children. Starting from the premise that children develop social skills more easily if allowed independent play, his chapter challenges the view that the cost of heavy traffic can be measured by using the sorts of indicators used in most current transport studies. In the fourth section contains examples of new policy relevant discourses. Juliet Solomon explores how mobility and accessibility can be evaluated and benchmarked as a contribution to social inclusion. Analysing usually overlooked links between policies, mobility, pollution and employment, John Whitelegg, Nick Williams and Jayanta Basu challenge the idea that motorization leads to improved quality of life for rickshaw pullers and the others in inner Calcutta. They construct their argument by combining interview data and survey material to raise issues usually overlooked in discourses about Western transport policies being transplanted into non-Western societies. The chapter by Mimi Sheller and John Urry shows how mobility and technology shapes civil society and political landscapes. Their chapter opens up new theoretical perspectives by showing how mobility can be treated as the basis of identity and social life, how it changes collective experience, technologies of speed and communication, relationships to time and space. This sort of analysis provides a crucial bridge between understanding mobility as a social construct and seeing its importance in policy terms. It invites the development of a new politics of proximity, mobility and communications in a framework that has yet to be fully explored. This set of diverse methodological approaches is designed to show how the abandoning of simplistic methodologies, such as those modelling procedures based on seeing transport as an exchange relationship, is the only route to a more sustainable future. Acknowledging the ways in which debates have been constrained is probably the best way to move beyond acknowledging concerns about the social and environmental consequences of transport

Morphing Mobility 13 policies (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998; Stokes and Taylor, 1994). It is commonplace to see transport demand as affected by social and economic change. It is not yet easy to see how mobility also effects social relationships and political vision. When we learn to see transport as a morphing factor, an active force, it will become clearer how personally and politically important it is.

References Bendixson, T. (1977). Instead of Cars, Pelican Books, London. Bhabha, H. (1990). The third space: interview with Homi Bhabha. In (J. Rutherford, ed.) Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Lawrence and Wishart, London. Bickel, P., Schmid, S., Krewitt, W., Friedrich, IER Germany, et al (1997). External Costs of Transport in Externe, Publishable Report. (Contract JOS3-CT95-0004), European Commission, Non Nuclear Energy Programme, Joule III, Brussels. Blair, T. (2000). Speech to the CBI/Green Alliance on the Environment, 24th October. Web page: www.number-10.gov.uk/output/page2415.asp Button, K. (1993). Transport Economics. 2nd edn. Edward Elgar, London. Castells, M. (1997). The Power of Identity. Blackwells, Oxford. Clark, A. (2002). Pledge to Speed up Planning Process. The Guardian, p13, 16th July. Davis, R. (1992). Death on the Streets: Cars and the Mythology of Road Safety. Leading Edge Press, Hawes, North Yorkshire. DETR,(1998). A New Deal for Transport, Better for Everyone. The Stationery Office (TSO); London. DETR, (2000). The Government's Response to the SACTRA Report on 'Transport and the Economy'. Cm 4711, TSO, London. DETR, (2001a). Transport Trends, 2001 Edition. TSO, London. DETR, (2001b). Transport Statistics Great Britain, 2001 Edition. TSO, London. Department of Transport, 1994. The Government's Response to the SACTRA Report on 'Trunk Roads and the Generation of Traffic'. HMSO, London. Foucault, M. (1986). Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16,22-7'. Goodwin, P. (1996). Empirical Evidence on Induced Traffic, a Review and Synthesis. Transportation, 23, 35-54. Goodwin, P. (1997). Solving Congestion: Inaugural Lecture for the Professorship of Transport Policy University College London. 23rd October, ESRC Transport Studies Unit, University College, London. Hargreaves Heap, S., Hollis, M., Lyons, B., Sugden, R., Weale, A. (1997). The Theory of Choice, A Critical Guide. Blackwell, Oxford. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, Oxford. Hensher, D. (1998). Understanding Travel Behaviour, Some Appealing Research Directions. July 1st. Invitational Paper for Presentation at The University of Oxford RAC/TSU Seminar Series 'Whither Transport Studies? Mapping the Key Areas for Future Transport Research'. Institute of Transport Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney. Hewitt, P. (1993). About Time. Institute for Public Policy Research, London. Illich, I. (1974). Energy and Equity. Calder and Boyars, London. Jacobs, M. (1991). The Green Economy. Pluto Press, London.

14 Delivering Sustainable Transport Jacobs, M. (1999). Environmental Modernisation, The new Labour Agenda. Fabian Pamphlet 591, Fabian Society, London. Kuhn, T. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd edn. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1993). Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, London. Latour, B., (1993). The Pasteurisation of France. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell, Oxford. Macnaghten, P., Urry, J. (1998). Contested Natures. Sage, London. March, J., Olsen, J., (1996). Institutional Perspectives on Political Institutions. Governance, An International Journal of Policy and Administration, 9, 3,247-264. Massey, D. (1993). Politics and Space/Tune. In (M. Keith, and S. Pile, eds.), Place and the Politics of Identity. Routledge, London. Mokhtarian, P. and I. Salomon, (1999). Travel for the Fun of it. Access, 13,26-31. Murphy, J. (2000). Editorial: Ecological Modernisation. Geoforum, 31,1,1-8. Owens, S. (1995). Predict and Provide or Predict and Prevent? Pricing and Planning in Transport Policy. In: Transport Policy, 2,1,43-49. Peake, S. (1994). Transport in Transition: Lessons from the History of Energy. Royal Institute of International Affairs, London. Preston, J. (1998). The Economic Geography of Transport. Unpublished Course Outline and Lecture Notes. Transport Studies Unit and St. Anne's College, University of Oxford, Oxford. Root, A. (2000). Transport and Communications, In: Twentieth Century British Social Trends. Halsey, (A.H. ed. with J. Webb), 437-468. Macmillan, London. Royal Commission for Environmental Pollution, (1994). Transport and the Environment, Eighteenth Report. TSO, London. Royal Commission for Environmental Pollution, (1997). Transport and the Environment Developments since 1994, Twentieth Report. TSO, London. Sachs, W., R. Loske, M. Linz, et al. (2000). Greening the North, A Post-Industrial Blueprint for Ecology and Equity. Zed Books, London. Scott Armstrong, J. (2001). Principles of Forecasting. Kluwer, London. Smith, M., J.Whitelegg and N.Williams, 1998. Greening the Built Environment. Earthscan, London. Sperling, D. and S. Shaheen, (1995). Transportation and Energy: Strategies for a Sustainable Transport System. American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, Washington D. C. Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment, (SACTRA), (1994). Trunk Roads and the Generation of Traffic. HMSO, London. Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment (SACTRA), (1999). Transport and the Economy. Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, TSO, London. Stokes, G., Taylor, B., (1994). Where Next for Transport Policy? In: British Social Attitudes. (R. Jowell et al, ed.), Ashgate, Aldershot. Unger, R. M. (1998). Democracy Realized, the Progressive Alternative. Verso, London. Urry, J. (2001a). Sociology Beyond Societies. Routledge, London. Urry, J. (2001 b). The Tourist Gaze. Sage, London. Von Weizsacker, E., A. Lovins, and L. Lovins, (1998). Factor Four, Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. Earthscan, London. Whitelegg, J. (1993). Transport for a Sustainable Future. Belhaven Press, London.

Morphing Mobility 15 Whitelegg, J. (1994). Roads, Jobs and the Economy. Greenpeace Report, Greenpeace, London. Whitelegg, J. (1997). Critical Mass. Pluto Press, London. Wittgenstein, L. (1976). Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Routledge, London. Wittgenstein, L. (1986). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell, Oxford.

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PART ONE GLOBALISATION, MARKETS AND POLICY THE NEED FOR NEW PARADIGMS

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1 TRANSPORT, MODERNITY AND GLOBALISATION Cathy McKenzie, Transport Consultant, London, UK

Transport hits the core of society. It is one of the few activities which both give form to and express our turn-of-the-century European civilisation. It gives structure to space and our concept of space. It shapes and reflects our way of life and our cultures. It contributes to economic development....The functioning of society, indeed its very nature, largely depends on the quality and design of the transport system. (Group Transport 2000 Plus, 1990)

Introduction Transport is inextricably woven into modern society. Many of the transport technologies and mobility patterns that dominate our world have arisen as a consequence of the particular nature of the modernist project (Giddens, 1991 & 199 la). Many of the, often worthy, critiques of transport, fail to acknowledge these cultural and economic contexts within which transport systems are embedded. This section looks at some of the characteristics of modernity (and its related economic system, capitalism) and considers the crucial role of transport in delivering its aims. It considers, as we enter a period of late modernity, and of economic globalisation, whether this relationship is itself changing and if so, what this may mean for those involved in transport provision and analysis. It suggests ways in which recent forms of capitalist accumulation may effect the role and function of the city, and hence its transport policy. The final section considers what this may mean for the role of the local state in the planning and provision of transport and for bringing about a more radical vision of the city, based more on environmental constraints and social need.

18 Delivering Sustainable Transport

Transport, Globalization and Modernity At the heart of the modernist project lies a belief in nature as the Other (Gare, 1995), a threat to rational man to be brought under his [sic] control (or destroyed) using the tools that modern technology has provided. Transport technology has played a crucial role in providing the physical means by which this domination has occurred. It has allowed for the virtual annihilation of spatial/temporal barriers and has ensured that almost every corner of the globe is available for exploration and development by humankind. Improvements to transport and communications technology have given rise to the phenomenon of time/space compression, whereby greater speeds have drastically reduced the time needed to travel between locations. Trade between localities, even those at great distance to one another is not new, but the time/space compression afforded by new transport and communications technologies in the modern era has lead to a significant intensification of economic and cultural activity across time and space. This intensification, sometimes referred to as globalisation, can be seen as an inevitable consequence of modernity, being necessary for the continued expansion of capitalist markets and providing a temporary solution to the inherent problem of overaccumulation (Baskar & Glyn, 1995). Transport technology fuels the very dynamism upon which the modernist project, and indeed capitalism itself, is based. Further developments in transport technology continue to support the possibility for greater speeds over less and less time (Whitelegg, 1993a). This, coupled with the continued expansion and upgrading of transport infrastructure can be seen as having the potential to act as an important catalyst for further rounds of capitalist accumulation. Although in recent years the most marked achievements in further intensification and compression of time and space has been bought by new communications technologies, transport is still an essential component of the phenomenon of globalisation. It acts as a "back-up system" to support the increased economic and cultural activity brought about by the intensification of global communications and is essential in its own right for the everincreasing need to move raw materials, goods and people to support continued economic growth. The phenomenon of globalisation has major consequences for society in terms of economic and social relations. One particular consequence which transport technologies have allowed is what Giddens (1991) refers to as the disembedding of social and institutional relations out of their traditional localities and their reembedding across great spans of time/space. Thus institutions and individuals are no longer tied to their traditional localities. This phenomenon, coupled with the new internationalisation of the labour market, has significant consequences for transport and the role of cities which will be discussed in a later section.

Transport in the Late Modern Era Many commentators argue that in recent years modernity has been undergoing significant change, with globalisation being one of a number of important developments that suggest that

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation 19

a new phase of modernity has begun (Giddens, 1991). These changes have been interpreted in a number of different ways, with some believing that we have left modernity altogether and entered a new phase of post-modernity, others suggesting that we are in a changing but still an essentially modern society, this can be referred to as late modernity. This chapter will refer to the change as late modernity as, with regard to transport at least, it can be argued that Western society remains rooted in modernity, where transport still provides for a dynamism and speed of change that is the "engine" for continued cultural and economic development. Late modernity has, however, a number of characteristics that distinguish it from earlier periods of modernity and in the section below we will explore how, as modernity changes so too does the relationship between transport and society. Transport and our Faustian Pact Transport can be seen as encapsulating all that can be seen as good and bad with modernity, and our relationship to it reflects the paradox that lies at the heart of the modernist project. Transport, like modernity itself, can be likened to a two-edged sword, the offer of opportunity and possibility like no other age but against which is matched risk and danger. Earlier phases of modernity were characterised by the possibility and optimism that emerging transport technologies could offer. The car, in particular emerged as a powerful symbol of freedom and possibility and was emblematic of the mass consumption that characterised the Fordist era of production, symbolising both status and wealth within the capitalist system. But as transport systems have continued to develop, this has become matched with an increasing awareness of the risk and danger that a rapid expansion of travel poses both for ourselves and our environment. Modern society might be seen as having entered into a "Faustian" pact with the transport experts and expert systems: society trusts these systems to deliver the benefits of increased mobility that modernity promised: freedom to go where we want to when we want to, with all of the possibilities and opportunities for self-fulfilment that that brings. And for this, society would tolerate the considerable levels of accidents, pollution and environmental destruction in order to sustain the level of mobility that we have become accustomed to. But late modernity has seen this pact increasingly called into question: we find ourselves asking whether modernity has really kept its side of the bargain, and even if it has, has the price paid by society and the environment been too high? Breaking the Pact One characteristic of late modern society that has brought this into question has been the changing role of the individual in society. Individuals, it is argued, in this information age, have become more reflexive, constantly taking in information about a variety of social practices, examining them and, by so doing constitutively altering them. Indeed society itself has entered a period of reflecting back on itself. This reflexivity encompasses all aspects of social life, but is particularly focused on the relationship between the subject and technological intervention. It involves a "stock-take" on what it is to be modern, how we as individuals and society relate to the enormous technological developments and the associated

20 Delivering Sustainable Transport risks that modernity has thrown at us, and how, using that information, we become selfconscious about the future (Beck, 1992, Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1994). As we enter the era of late modernity, the role of technology and our relationship to it, seems to sit very precariously on its pedestal. The consequences of our ever increasing mobility, both for the environment and our quality of life, are increasingly brought into question. An increasing awareness of the negative consequences of transport (pollution, congestion, mortality, morbidity, stress and degraded local and global environments) has altered our relationship to it, particularly as the promised benefits of personal freedom seem increasingly hollow. It has brought into question the trust that has been placed in the expert systems that plan and deliver our transport systems and in particular the techno-centric vision of transport planners. On an individual level this high degree of reflexivity has the potential to radicalise our relationship to transport. Transport has become a focus for a life politics that challenges the modernist assumptions upon which mobility has unquestioningly been increased. As a result, transport has found itself at the cutting edge of the conflict between those promoting continued economic growth and those wishing to contain it. Such conflicts have arisen over the siting of particular transport projects, over the environmental impacts that they may have in terms of pollution and noise, over a transport scheme's accessibility and its social impact on a community, and also over its economic and job creation impacts. Thus, as we leave the 20th Century behind we find that transport, once one of the cornerstones of the modernist project and continued capitalist growth, has itself become the subject of a number of social protests and civil unrest, particularly by an environmental movement attempting to force more sustainable patterns of development. And it is in the city in particular, where modernist transport planning (with its over-reliance on the car) has most obviously failed to deliver its promise of freedom and opportunity, and where individuals have been brought into the closest proximity with its negative consequences. It is also the city that has become the site of most rapid change in a globalizing economy and in the next section we explore some of the tensions that arise when two phenomenon are brought together.

The Function of Cities in Late Modernity The previous section has outlined the deeply embedded relationship between transport and modernity. The application of transport technologies to provide increasing mobility has been a central plank of the modernist project. As we enter a more reflexive period of modernity this relationship, which for decades was taken for granted, has fallen under close scrutiny. This is perhaps most pertinent in many towns and cities where congestion and environmental degradation caused by traffic are at their most damaging. This has led a number of urban authorities to attempt to restrain traffic growth by applying the principles of sustainable development to the planning and management of cities, in particular to their transport policies. But just as transport is a distinctive product of the modernist era, so too is the city. The vision of a more sustainable city has to compete with strong forces which influence urban form and culture. The next section looks at the function and management of cities in late modernity. In particular it focuses on the influence of capitalism on urban form and how this

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation 21

might be running counter to any attempts to make the city, and in particular its urban transport, more sustainable. However, it also attempts to highlight the opportunities for environmental improvement that the changes to urban structure and management in the latemodern era may provide. The City, Modernity and Sustainability The form and function of the city is deeply embedded in modernity. At the beginning of the modern era the city provided, in one concentrated space, the opportunity for the realisation of the ideals of the modernists: the banishment of nature; the industrialisation of production; the application of new technologies; opportunities for consumption; the anomie of existence but also the possibility of meeting and observing others. In the city the dynamism of modernity and capitalism was heightened. In the era of late modernity, despite the advent of new technology, the city continues to provide an important arena in which the dynamic potential of capitalism can be fulfilled, leading to what Berman (1983) refers to as a 'maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal'. The sustainable cities movement makes no referral to this dynamism and, as a consequence, maybe failing to recognise what is potentially a significant hurdle in the realisation of its aims. Its suggested solutions to the unsustainability of urban form and function tend to view the city as if it were a single organism, whose actions are controllable by a central management structure and whose existence remains independent of its wider environment. Cities are expected to respond to the environmental imperative, namely, to reduce impacts to within agreed levels, as if this constant inner change did not exist and as if their environmental impacts and the forces generating this change were contained within the city boundaries. The city, however, is not static, allowing a particular environmentally sustainable form to be imposed upon it and managed over time. Urban space is constantly being reshaped and given new meanings, and who or what has power over these spaces is of great significance as to what meanings dominate the urban landscape. Harvey, for example, sees urban space as the site of contestation with specific social groups struggling for social hegemony and social and political power (in Savage & Warde, 1993). In industrialised society, where capitalist forces dominate this struggle, urban space becomes "created" space; a product of capitalist forces. How this space is then used, and the implications for transport use are the subject of the section below. The Function of Cities in the New Global Economy : A New Phase of Capitalism? The role of cities in the world economy is changing as western capitalism itself shifts from its dominant form to another form, yet to be determined. The Fordist regime of accumulation, based on scientific management techniques of mass production and mass consumption with a high degree of state intervention, has dominated western economies particularly since the end of the last world war. The Fordist "post-war settlement" was characterised by steady growth, near full employment, rising incomes and expenditure. For its part, the state provided economic stability through international agreements such as Bretton Woods, intervened to control prices and wages, provided the infrastructure necessary to ensure continued growth and presided over welfare policies which went some way to redistributing rising incomes.

22 Delivering Sustainable Transport

Around the time of the oil crisis in the mid-1970's the dominance of this regime began to change, giving way to what appears to be more flexible methods of capitalist accumulation that have come to be known by a number of terms, namely; Post-, After-or Neo-Fordism or Flexible Accumulation or Specialisation. This transitional period has been characterised by a number of significant changes in production and working practices and associated changes in patterns of consumption and the role of the state. Perhaps the most important change has taken place at the global level, with the intensification of globalisation due to the deregulation of international capitalism and labour, coupled with the development of new information technologies. This has allowed the development of production processes that cater for small, niche markets and has profoundly altered the spatial relationship between production and consumption. This has been coupled with changes in the of the role of the state, from "provider" of the conditions that allowed for stable growth to "competitor" for capital on the open global market, charged with minimising any hurdles to investment. This has led to the emergence of intercity/interregion competition for capital at a previously unknown intensity. The impact of these changes, both positive and negative, on the function and management of cities in industrialised society, is potentially immense. How, in particular, it alters the ability of the state and individual actors to achieve the ideals of the sustainable city and reduce traffic is explored in the section below. The City's Place in the New Global Disorder In the globalised market place cities fulfil different economic and cultural functions. Savage and Warde (1993) identify 5 broad categories: third world cities, global cities (largely focused on international financial services), older industrial cities, new industrial districts and socialist cities. In reality of course, cities are often a mixture of these categories at any given time (and these may often be in conflict with one another), although one category may tend to dominate. These differing functions of cities should be recognised by environmental actors and transport professionals because they have implications for the overall environmental impact of the city and the potential for mobility reduction both to and within the city. Distinctive economic roles imply very different mobility pressures points and a different analysis of the constraints and opportunities for change. In order to carve out this niche on the global market, many city authorities have found themselves in the position of trying to "reinvent" their city space; either to distance themselves from a former image which is no longer attractive to capitalist investment or to make themselves distinct from other cities competing for supremacy in a similar role. In industrialised society in particular, changes in the international labour market, corporate restructuring, new transport and communications technologies and cyclical disinvestment in the built environment, have all contributed to the deindustrialisation of many traditional manufacturing areas. These older industrial areas have been left to forge themselves a new role on the world economic stage, and thus attract new investment capital into the city. But even those cities with well established roles, London and New York for example, have had their positions threatened by competitors from newly industrialising nations (Fainstein, Gordon, & Harloe, 1992). The transitory nature of the global economy means however, that even those cities who have established a role for themselves are constantly threatened with change. The increasing

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation 23

intensity of impermanence of new global fortunes has led commentators to refer to the new global disorder that is emerging in the aftermath of Fordism (Peck & Tickell, 1994). This dynamism makes long term urban environmental planning a difficult task but does provide its own opportunities for environmental renewal, a point that will be taken up later in this section. The Re-emergence of Place Competition on the global market has increased the pressure on cities to differentiate and specialise in order to attract capital. As spatial barriers and international constraints on capital have dissolved, the importance of place within space has increased. In industrialised society the city as the primary site of production is vanishing and in its place are urban economies largely based on financial and service industries. As this change takes place the locality and liveability of cities becomes an important factor in attracting global capital and determining who wins and who loses in the global game. This has important implications for sustainable urban development and the reduction of traffic. The city whose economy is geared towards tourism, heritage, finance and/or consumption has very different environmental impacts and mobility needs to a city whose role is primarily the transformation raw materials and the production and exporting of goods. This re-emergence of the importance of place gives the local state an important incentive to improve the local environment. However, as these improvements may be designed to attract capital investment, this may not be to the benefit of all its citizens. More Time in the Same Space Cities are increasingly about consumption, whether it be of goods, entertainment, spectacles, heritage or just other people. Urban space is constantly being given over to new meanings which allow for the instantaneous gratification of individual needs and wants: the shopping mall; the multi-screen cinema complex; the food halls with their array of global fast food outlets; the all night clubs and bars, to name but a few. Not only is urban space used to encourage consumption, it is also used to increase the intensity of consumption. Recent changes in production processes have greatly accelerated production time turnover for many consumer goods and services. This has been made possible by changes in the labour processes coupled with an intensification in time-space compression in the form of improved transport and communications technology, small batch production, new dispatch techniques and "just-in-time" delivery systems (Swyngedouw, 1990). This increase in the intensity of production has required a similar acceleration in exchange and consumption. Markets with short turnover times have been greatly expanded. Fashion, in particular, and its associated cultural activities: music; dance; leisure; as well as more ephemeral services such as tourism and heritage, have become mass market activities; having much shorter turnover times than traditional fordist mass market goods such as cars and black and white goods. Although the development of these sectors may appear to be less environmentally damaging than an economy based on more traditional industries, they can also be a significant generator of traffic both within and to the city and heavily dependent on air transport.

24 Delivering Sustainable Transport

Another means by which consumption can be increased within existing urban space is to stretch out the time in which that space can be used for consumption. Thus we see a recent emergence of late night shopping, Sunday and bank holiday shopping and now moves to create the '24 hour city' in some UK city centres (The Guardian, 1996). This intensification of production and consumption has a number of implications for urban transport, some of which are at odds to the sustainable city vision. The increase in intensity of consumption alone may lead to more goods and freight being transported. The development of the "24 hour city" for example, spreads traffic over a greater time allowing for more journeys overall. Increased time-space compression has led to a marked increase in the global sourcing of products. The "global village" is easily accessed. In every high street, non-durable products such as foodstuffs and flowers are flown in from across the globe for consumption by city dwellers the next morning. And everyday products, once associated with the home market, are now frequently made thousands of miles from their point of consumption due to changes in the international labour market This heightens the importance to the city of having good air transport links but producers also need efficient means to transport these goods into the city itself by means which complement their new production processes. Increasingly stores hold fewer goods on site and demand is met by electronic point of sale technologies. This may result in a larger number of smaller deliveries being necessary due to these "just-in-time" methods of meeting in-store requirements. In order for the demand for products to be met, cities need to move people efficiently to and from these sites of consumption. In recent years, the inefficiency of city centre sites to meet demand has led retailers to develop out of town malls. This has caused city authorities to look again at ways of maximising consumption in urban centres. This can often result in attempts to restrain traffic at the actual site of consumption, be it shopping areas or historic or cultural sites, where it is felt that traffic degrades the environment to a point where it might act to restrict consumption. But access to the site must be maximised. This has often led to the expansion of the road network and parking provision around such sites. However, where congestion is seen to be inhibiting this access, opportunities may be explored to maximise access by consumers by further developing public transport. Again, these improvements may not benefit all of the city's citizens, as the improvements to public transport may, at least in part, be shaped by the type of consumer that the city wants to attract, which are most likely to be the more affluent in society. This increasing emphasis on cities as centres of consumption is clearly at odds with the sustainable city vision. Perhaps most striking of all is the contrast in temporal emphasis between the sustainable city vision and the late modem city. The city as an urban playground geared to satisfying the instantaneous whim of the individual does not sit comfortably along side the vision of the city collectively deciding to live within ecological constraints informed by the long term futurity of sustainable development. But, as we shall explore below, the late modern city is far from being a global playground for all urban dwellers. It is a city increasingly built on exclusion and social division and mobility is an important tool in the maintenance of that divide. The emphasis placed by the city authorities on providing transport systems which meet the mobility needs of business, high spending consumers,

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation 25

tourists and the fulltime employed, affects not only the environmental impact of the city, but the provision of transport services and life opportunities available to the rest of the urban population. Social Division in the City Competition between cities for international investment produces winners and losers in the global game. Capitalist development is inherently uneven. For every Glasgow, Denver and Baltimore - cities which have successfully reinvented themselves - there are numerous towns and cities that fail to attract the necessary inward investment, for which failure is likely to lead to increased poverty and social deprivation. Even in those cities that win there are conflicting social impacts. Competition, for both winners and losers, comes at a price. In order to compete successfully on the global market cities must adopt strategies for economic and cultural development which may call for the rapid restructuring of the existing industrial base. There is increasing evidence to suggest that this rapid restructuring in combination with decreasing government financial intervention, declining welfare expenditure, a shrinking tax base and an upturn in property values has lead to an increase in inequality in many urban centres. Across much of both the developed and developing world urban inequality is generally on the increase. Such growing inequality, pitched against ever more elaborate schemes to attract inward investment, can often lead to enclaves of great wealth sitting in stark contrast to adjoining areas of poverty. Evidence suggests that growth in the property development and financial sector have little impact on the economic situation of the bottom quartile of the population (Logan, Taylor-Gooby and Reuter in Fainstein, Gordon and Harloe 1992). Even seemingly benign aspects of so-called "civic boosterism" - schemes to improve architecture; cultural facilities and transport links to the city, for example - may take much needed resources away from welfare budgets or housing schemes. With such glaring inequalities, images of the modern city as a free-for-all playground of individual self-fulfilment, seem wholly misplaced. Parts of the modern city, namely its retail, business and up-market residential districts are increasingly becoming areas of highly controlled space from which certain social groups are ostracised, while other areas, such as "problem" housing estates, are abandoned. Policies of exclusion can, most obviously employ means such as policing and surveillance and pricing. But it is increasingly achieved surreptitiously by means of design and location. Emphasis has been placed on initiatives such as 'crime prevention through environmental design'. Here "normal" users are encouraged and "undesirables" are discouraged by providing spaces which, by their design or position, discourage unwanted users. High fences; entrance gates; no places to loiter; no ground floor windows; security lights and video cameras are now commonplace features of many urban street scenes, whilst the out of town shopping mall which can only be easily reached by the car and the wealthy estate with no public transport links, are no places for the homeless and the poor, whilst transport links to problem estates may remain poor, with the effect of keeping "undesirable" social groups in their place (Watson and Gibson, 1995).

26 Delivering Sustainable Transport All of this is seemingly at odds with the vision of a more sustainable city based on a reduction in the consumption of resources, the resurgence of community and a more equal society. A crucial player in this reshaping of urban space is the local state, and in the next section we look at how the role of local government has changed in an era of globalisation, and how this can affect its ability to plan and deliver a more sustainable transport system.

The Role of the State in Sustainable Urban Development: Stewards of the Local Environment versus Developers of the Economy? Whilst its influence is undoubtedly great, the city is not just a product of external global forces, shaping urban space without reference to any local context Powerful though they may be, these forces have to work through a variety of local actors; among them: the state; individuals; community groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The role of these various "urban actors" is crucial in determining the development and use of urban space. This section looks in particular at one of the most influential of these actors, the local state, and explores its ambiguous and often conflicting role in the promotion of sustainable urban development.

The Local State in the New Global Disorder As the previous sections have revealed, there appears to be a paradox in the position of the local state in the creation of a more sustainable city, and more especially, in the reduction of urban traffic. On the one hand, particularly in the UK, local government has tried to rebrand itself as steward of the local environment: monitoring its condition; prosecuting polluters; informing and educating the public; and ultimately encouraging individuals to make lifestyle choices that minimise global environmental damage. A laudable role. But how does this fit in with the other role of the local state, as a principle agent in the reproduction of conditions for capitalist accumulation? Here again, as we shall explore, there exists both conflict and the opportunity to forward the environmental agenda. Savage and Warde (1993) identify four principle functions of the local state: as provider of welfare; as regulator of the local economy; as intermediary in the formation of collective identity; and as coercive agent of social order and discipline. Jessop (1994) describes the function of the local state as it was under the Fordist regime. Then, the local state acted primarily as an extension of the central Keynesian welfare state. Regional policy was centrally managed and principally orientated to the (re)location of industry in the interests of spreading full employment and reducing inflationary pressures arising in localised areas due to uneven development. The local state was actively involved in reproducing conditions for the continuance of Fordist patterns of production and consumption. It provided local infrastructure to support increased mass consumption in the form of roads, housing, and utilities; it promoted the collective consumption of public goods and administered state welfare policies. In some cases it even actively intervened to subsidise local industry in order to attract or protect existing jobs.

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation 27

The crisis of Fordism and the prominence of the neo liberal agenda of the New Right that followed that crisis, has led to significant changes in the role of the local state. As a consequence, its role in the provision of welfare and the management of public goods and services has declined. New strategies for economic regeneration were required to meet the changing demands of a competitive global market, with limited support from the nation state, still shaken from the fiscal crisis of the 1970's. Gone was the "nanny" state. In its place was the new "entrepreneurial" state. No longer was the local state merely the provider of stable conditions for continued capitalist accumulation, it had itself become a competitor in the global free-market on behalf of its local economy, with all the consequences that can befall economic risk takers (Jessop, 1994). We have previously described the fragility of many cities' position in the new global market place and the re-emergence of the importance of place in attracting international capital, with cities competing with one another in so called, "civic boosterism" in an attempt to differentiate their urban space from their competitors, whilst providing core services and facilities to attract investment. Such "boosterism" can take many forms: from Bourdieu's idea of 'symbolic capital', such as the Millennium Dome, Canary Wharf and Disneyland; through to more prosaic schemes such as urban motorways; new tram systems; cultural and heritage festivals; and civic floral displays (Bourdieu, 1977). This culture of competitiveness also affects the policy emphasis of the local state. Local authorities are now actively involved in a wide range of public policy in support of local business and the encouragement of international investment capital. This manifests itself as: assisting in technology transfer; promoting the education and training of the workforce to meet the needs of local industry; monitoring local labour market policies; promoting the provision of local venture capital; providing the necessary infrastructure for growth in terms of business parks, science parks and of course, providing the necessary transport and communications networks for business growth and consumption (Mayer, 1994). Projects aimed at civic boosterism are often embarked upon in partnership with the local business elites (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Cox and Mair (1989) suggest that such "urban growth coalitions" are not simply dominated by those with an interest in property or land rental value, but rather more established and immobile local capitalists, who have a particular interest in the improvement of the local business environment. The importance of such coalitions to the outcome of urban transport policy is not insignificant and will be considered later in this section.

28 Delivering Sustainable Transport

Limited Solutions This resurgence of localities might lead one to conclude that local states are now generally in a more powerful position than they once were. But this resurgence must be placed within its wider political context: a broader national and international framework of neo liberal policies that have come to dominate the Anglo-Saxon world since the oil-crisis in 1973. This agenda, with its emphasis on free-market competition, has severely altered the role of the local state and its relationship to central government and the wider global markets. The exaltation of market mechanisms over previously dominant models of Keynesian social democracy has led to the implementation of quite drastic policies aimed at reducing state intervention to allow "more efficient" market mechanisms to dominate. This has led to a planned programme of privatisation (and often fragmentation) of public services and deregulation of the private sector, complemented by policies which increase social division through a combination of reduced welfare support and reduced taxation. Running parallel with the privatisation of public services has been the privatisation of public space. Urban public space is increasingly managed or owned by the private sector or arms-length trusts. Areas such as parks, shopping malls, leisure facilities, schools, hospitals and even roads, present a patchwork of urban space over which the city authorities have little control. This can have serious implications for the ability of authorities to respond to the sustainable transport agenda. Peck and Tickell (1994) believe that the changing role of the local state has reduced it to the position of "hostile brother" to its neighbouring communities, competing both for limited handouts from the nation state and on the global stage for capital investment It may appear that localities are taking control of their economic destinies but their position belies growing insecurity and growing 'global-local disorder'. The prevailing free-market orthodoxy has left local states to fend for themselves in the global jungle, giving them the responsibility for economic success without the necessary power. The local regulatory regime has been severely weakened by the neo-liberal agenda and its ability to intervene directly in the economic and social conditions in its area has been curtailed. It, like the nation state, is faced by one of the most glaring contradictions of capitalism, made even more pressing by the neo liberal hegemony of low taxation. On the one hand it needs to raise revenues through taxation to regulate and reproduce conditions of capitalist accumulation (at ever increasing cost), whilst at the same time the very beneficiaries of such regulation, the business community and those in employment resist such increases in taxation. Thus, amid this fiscal crisis, its role as both regulator and as redistributer of economic wealth is in decline. Without this ability to raise sufficient revenues to meet the growing bill of social and environmental damage caused by the market, and without the necessary powers of direct intervention in the economy, the local state is left with limited options for intervention. One consequence of which is that it increasingly operates through partnerships - often with the private sector, where it acts as enabler rather than doer in its own right, and these partnerships are often dominated by local business elites (Cox & Mair, 1989). These emerging partnerships may have a direct affect on the transport policies and priorities of the local authority, affecting the way that schemes are prioritised for investment, routing, pricing as well as general levels of expenditure on different modes. These and the other

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation 29

implications for transport suggested by the discussions in this chapter, are explored in the final section below.

Conclusion and the Implications for Transport Planning and Provision

The purpose of this chapter has been to outline some important themes of contemporary urban theory and to explore their potential effect on the ability of environmental actors to realise the vision of the sustainable city. The chapter has focused in particular on how urban form, and its associated transport infrastructure, has been greatly influenced by the particular nature of modernity and capitalism and more recently by the emergence of specific forms of capitalist accumulation such as globalisation. As we have examined in the previous three sections, the global forces that shape the city are extremely powerful. The city continues to be one of the most powerful symbols of the modernist project, fulfilling many of its aims in one concentrated space. At the same time, economic and cultural globalisation appear to be increasing intercity competition for international development capital. This has destabilised the position of many cities within the global market and as a consequence, the dynamic of urban change has intensified. Cities have responded to the new global market by finding new ways to "brand" themselves, refocusing on creating distinct urban spaces to attract new capitalist investment. Not as it once did, in relation to its locality as a producer but in terms of the quality of its urban environment and its facilities for play, shopping and tourism. Many cities are increasingly becoming sites of consumption of goods and culture, but this consumption is not for all. It is for the wealthy, not the poor, for the non-affluent are frequently excluded from this urban "playground". Transport is a key component in the rebranding and reshaping of urban space. Yet prioritising and spending on transport schemes is by no means a 'neutral' activity, undertaken by 'objective' transport professionals, responding merely to the will of the local electorate. It is a process shaped by many different forces, not all of them democratic, with environment and social consequences, which may not be obvious to the transport professionals involved. Often, these frequently contradictory forces will converge on dynamic urban space, where the economic and social need for transport is at its most intense, and where the environmental consequences may be most keenly felt. We can summarise these forces as follows: 1. Transport continues to be a key component of the modernist project and essential to assist in capitalist accumulation. 2. Yet late modernity has seen a strong backlash against the excesses of the growth in motorised transport. 3. This and the emerging sustainable development agenda has seen pressure applied to authorities to reduce traffic growth and promote less environmentally-damaging modes.

30 Delivering Sustainable Transport 4. At the same time globalisation and the free-market liberal agenda has made the local state look for new ways to attract inward investment, often focusing on creating attractive spaces for new hi-tech, financial and service industries as well as opportunities for increased leisure and consumption for the high-skilled workforce. This has created opportunities to reduce car dominance and provide high quality public transport to these new sites of employment and consumption. 5. This, however, has been countered by an inability of the local state to raise the sufficient funds to invest in public transport, due to tight fiscal constraints on public borrowing, coupled with a loss of control over sufficient public space and infrastructure to ensure that the necessary transport projects are forthcoming. 6. This has led them to form new partnerships with those groups who can provide the necessary funding or space, and who are then likely to gain through direct profit or indirectly through improved business opportunities. This can lead to less powerful groups in society being excluded from the benefits of the schemes. So how should this effect the agenda of transport professionals? To begin transport planners, professionals and even campaigners need to be more aware of the broader forces shaping the city. To approach transport planning and provision as if it is its own separate contained discipline may fail to make these important linkages between transport and other disciplines. Transport, as this chapter has identified, is often a vital 'tool' to further other agendas. Some of these may be seen as appropriate and some may not. For this reason they need to be made more explicit in the decision-making process. In particular, the often forgotten links between transport and social exclusion need to be more fully developed. In the past this might have been limited to areas of transport policy such as concessionary fares and subsidised bus routes. But the whole range of transport policy - from prioritising strategic policies, planning, consultation, decision-making and delivery and operation - all have implications for a social inclusion agenda that are often not identified or properly discussed. Indeed transport policy decisions are often loaded with assumptions about users that remain largely unchallenged by those affected by such decisions. Even a shift towards investment in more environmental forms of transport, such as heavy and light rail, park and ride, quality bus routes, may not always be appropriate for socially excluded communities, unless they are explicitly considered in the planning process. New approaches to participative decision-making and consultation need to be developed, to bring excluded groups into the decision-making process. Another area that needs significant 'unpicking' by transport professionals is the link between transport and economic development. It is often assumed that improving transport infrastructure will automatically bring economic benefits. Yet, as we have discussed, this relationship is growing increasingly complex and needs more serious analysis. In a climate of increasing public-private partnerships and emerging 'business elites' who can strongly influence public policy, it is increasingly important to take an objective look at the wider and more long-term economic implications of transport schemes, rather than responding to what may be more-short-term business demands.

Transport, Modernity and Globalisation 31

A further implication of the changes suggested in this chapter is the need to move towards a more regional approach to transport planning, to help overcome inter-urban competition between neighbouring authorities, whereby transport policies in one city might be undermined by a neighbouring city competing for inward investment. This also suggests an increasing importance for national and international frameworks and targets that identify agreed transport policy goals, particularly in the area of environmental protection. As this chapter has identified, the significant changes to society and economy seen in the period of late modernity, have great significance for transport professionals, academics and activists. Transport can no longer be seen as a largely engineering-based discipline, existing separately from considerations of economic and social development. It is indeed deeply embedded in these concerns and should be increasingly considered through academic study and professional practice, as an integral part of these agendas. As we have seen, opportunities do clearly exist to develop a more socially-inclusive and environmentally sustainable transport system - for example through the increasing importance of quality urban spaces and a more critical understanding of the limitations of ever-increasing travel, but an understanding of what factors might be working again this is essential if this vision is to be fully realised. For that reason, the transport agenda for the 21st century should increasingly recognise and confront those factors and not limit itself to the more traditional engineering approach.

References Baskar, V. and A.Glyn (eds) (1995). The North, The South and the Environment. Earthscan, London. Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society. Sage, London. Beck, U. A. Giddens and S. Lash (1994). Reflexive Modernisation: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in Modern Social Order. Polity Press, Cambridge. Berman, M. (1983). All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Verso, London. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Polity Press, Cambridge. Cox, K.R. and A. Mair (1989). Urban Growth Machines and the Politics of Local Economic Development. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 13, 1,137-46. Fainstein, S.S, I. Gordon, and M. Harloe (1992). Divided Cities - New York and London in the Contemporary World. Blackwell, Oxford. Gare, A. (1995). Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. Routledge, London. Giddens, A. (1991). The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge. Giddens, A. (1991a). Modernity and Self Identity. Polity Press, Cambridge. Group Transport 2000 Plus (1990). Unpublished Report for the European Union. Group Transport 2000 Plus, Brussels. Jessop, B. (1994). Post-Fordism and the State. In: (A.Amin, ed.), Post Fordism a Reader. Blackwell, Oxford. Jessop, B. (1994). Published Report for the European Union. Group Transport 2000 Plus, Brussels.

32 Delivering Sustainable Transport Logan, J. and H.Molotch (1987). Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. University of Califomia Press, Berkley. Mayer, M. (1994). Post-Fordist City Politics. In: (A.Amin, ed.), Post Fordism a Reader. Blackwell, Oxford. Peck, J. and A.Tickell (1994). Searching for a New Institutional Fix: the After-Fordist Crisis and the Global-Local Disorder. In: (A.Amin, ed.), Post Fordism a Reader. Blackwell, Oxford. Savage, M. and A.Warde (1993). Urban Sociology, Capitalism and Modernity. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Swyngedouw, E. (1990). In: D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, Oxford. The Guardian, (1996). 24th July. Watson, S. and K. Gibson, (1995). Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Blackwell, Oxford: Whitelegg, J. (1993). Transport for a Sustainable Future - The Case for Europe. Belhaven Press, London:

2

THE LIMITS OF ECONOMICS

K.H. Schaeffer and Elliott Sclar, Columbia University, USA

The economic crisis in urban transportation has its roots in the policy that the cost of transportation, like those of other market products, should be borne by the user. In this chapter we show that most of the benefits of urban transportation accrue not to the traveller, but to third parties such as real estate developers, retailers and employers whose land or services have become accessible through the existence of transportation. Furthermore, we contend that urban transportation cannot exist solely on fare-box income but must be subsidised, if it is to influence the location of residences, commerce, industry and public institutions. To explain these somewhat intricate relationships, we use the arguments of economic theory. Economic theory holds that in capitalist societies the 'market' is the major force that allocates resources to transportation. Even though there are policy decisions and other public 'interferences' with the market, all these activities are built around the assumption that the market is the principal determinant of transportation prices and outputs. What economic theory means by 'market' and 'market behaviour' can be seen from the simplified, yet accurate, model of the relationship between supply and demand, which is shown in Figures 2.1-2.3. Figure 2.1 represents a demand relationship. Let us assume it represents the total demand for automobiles of a certain quality. The vertical axis contains the different prices for which the automobile could sell and the horizontal axis represents the quantities of the automobile that consumers would be willing to buy at various prices. For example, the demand relationship shown in Figure 2.1 assumes that, at a price of $2,000 per automobile, consumers would purchase 100,00 automobiles. At a price of $1,000 per car, the market demand would increase to 300,000 cars. An important assumption implicit in the demand relationship is that the lower the price of the good or service in question, the more of it people will be willing to purchase, provided other factors influencing the purchase decision remain unchanged. In the

34 Delivering Sustainable Transport case of the automobile, for example, if the price were cut in half, people who had decided not to purchase automobiles because of income, taste or the availability of substitute travel modes would now find the automobile an attractive alternative. Similarly, some families or individuals who decided to purchase only one automobile might decide to purchase two. The point is simply that more will be demanded at lower prices.

Figure 2.1 The demand for autos If there are buyers to demand goods and services, there must also be sellers to supply goods and services for a market to occur. Figure 2.2 portrays a supply relationship which is the opposite of the demand relationship. At higher prices, where buyers will buy less, sellers are willing to supply more. To make the example symmetrical, we assume that at a price of $2,000 per automobile sellers are willing to supply 300,000 automobiles, and at a price of $1,000 they are only willing to supply 100,000. The crucial assumption in this supply relationship is that prices must rise to induce sellers to supply larger quantities of a good or service to the market, or that, in a competitive market, sellers will at any price bring to the market all of the goods or services they can sell at a profit. A competitive market by definition means there are many buyers and sellers, with ease of entry and exit to the market, and that no individual buyer or seller is large enough to influence the market. Thus, each seller will be able to sell all he can supply at the going price. The reason the seller does not supply more is that the cost of producing the additional supply would be more than the revenue brought in from the market at the prevailing price. Put differently, the supply relationship assumes that production occurs under conditions of diminishing returns. This means the cost of producing additional output with a given size plant is higher than the production of the preceding output. If the cost for the additional output were less than or equal to the cost of the preceding output, then the competitive seller would have produced more and brought it to the market at the going price. The reasons for diminishing returns relate to conditions of production. For example, after a certain point the capacity of a plant is so burdened that additional output generates bottlenecks and breakdowns at different points in the production process. Or the additional demand for

The Limits of Economics 35 productive factors (labour, raw materials, etc) will begin to push up the cost of these inputs and hence the cost of production.

Figure 2.2 Supply of autos

Figure 2.3 Market for autos In Figure 2.3 the supply and demand relationships shown in Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are placed on a single chart. This figure shows the market outcome where buyers and sellers behave in the manner assumed in the previous two figures. In Figure 2.3, an equilibrium market between buyers and sellers is established at point E. At point E sellers are willing to supply 200,000 automobiles at a price of $1,500. Buyers are willing to buy that number of automobiles at that price and the market is cleared. There are neither shortages nor excess inventories. To see why the market, left to its own devices, would reach this equilibrium let us assume that

36 Delivering Sustainable Transport sellers first come to market with 300,000 autos at a price of $2,000. Given the behaviour of the buyers, only 100,000 autos would be sold. In other words, if the price was above the equilibrium, the pressures of the market would begin to force it down. If, on the other hand, the price was initially below the market price at, say, $1,000, the pressures of the market would force the price upwards. At a price of $1,000 buyers would be willing to buy 300,000 autos. But sellers would bring only 100,000 to market. As a result, a shortage would exist at the price. Buyers now would begin to offer higher prices for the available supply. The increase in price in the market would induce sellers to bring more autos on the market. It is only at a price of $1,500 that buyers and sellers achieve equilibrium and there would be no tendency for further movement in either quantity or price. The example helps to explain why the concept of the market as an instrument of social decision-making has been attractive to many social theoreticians over the years. The decisions about the quantity, quality and price of the commodities which a society uses are arrived at through the interaction of buyers and sellers. The decision of the market is a reflection of the choices of those who participate in the market, not the coercion of state power. In a world that operates along the lines of our simplified auto market, one is hardpressed to advocate changes for the general good. However, the world acts only approximately like our example. The factors that do not permit the world to act as the model cause the market model to give off signals which, if not entirely incorrect, are inaccurate enough to cause problems to the urban society. In fact, these factors are so deeply intertwined in the larger social order that the market has become a totally inadequate instrument for alleviating urban transport problems. Simple market analysis of transportation runs as follows: in a market economy, sellers can sell only that which buyers seek to possess in the absence of any outside coercion. Assuming existing residential and employment patterns, consumers of urban transportation services have a choice between public transport and private automobile transport. Over the past three decades consumers have continually abandoned public transport in favour of the auto. In face of such an overwhelming choice, the policy issue for economists and planners is thus to devise methods of making the marketplace choice more meaningful by making auto transport more efficient. The naive version of this view holds that policy should be totally automobileoriented. A more sophisticated view recognises that some public transit is needed for purposes of 'balance' if automobile-based metropolitan areas are to remain operational. In either case we are not given any ground for a significant break with the automobile-based post-Second World War transportation policy which has caused highway concrete to spread from the United States to market-oriented economies around the world.1 For those who oppose coercive forms of decision-making, the above view becomes positively immobilising. Who are we to impose our particular tastes and preferences upon a society

1 While a significant increase in automobile usage in urban areas in Eastern Europe has occurred in recent years, despite the existence of good to excellent public transport, this by no means demonstrates that even East European consumers prefer the auto to public transport in urban areas. The increased auto consumption of these non-market-oriented economies has nothing to do with the work trip or other routine urban travel. Rather, the increased private transport consumption is a result of higher standards of living and the desire to have access to places such as the countryside which can't be reached by public transport, as was the case with early auto usage in the capitalist countries. To the extent that good public transport permits this pattern to continue into the future, the impact of increased auto usage in Eastern Europe will be far different from that observed in capitalist countries.

The Limits of Economics 37 which freely and uncoercively arrived at the decision to expand metropolitan areas around the automobile? On the other hand, if our observations about the damage done by the automobile to the urban form are correct, what should be done? It is our belief that this simplistic market view is only partly correct and that a more complete understanding of the urban transportation market demonstrates that significant alterations in transport policy are consistent with the need to allow consumers non-coercive choices. Simply put, we believe that those who attempt to rationalise the present transportation predicament as being in some sense the 'will of the people', as expressed through the market, malign the people and the market. The principal problem with this simplistic approach is that it does not consider that the 'externalities' of transportation outweigh the benefits to the traveller. In the economist's parlance, 'externalities' refer to those effects that result from a market transaction which are not accounted for in the costs and benefits calculated in the marketplace. For example, a manufacturer moves into a town and causes the railroad to build a spur into that town to accommodate the business the manufacturer generates. This creates an 'external economy' for others in the town who can now avail themselves of the newly instituted rail service. The manufacturer can't charge the new users for the benefit which it created for them, and consequently economists say that the manufacturer created an external benefit or economy. On the other hand, a firm whose smoke stack pollutes the air with sulphur fumes creates external diseconomies or external costs for the local householders who have to repaint their homes more frequently. In the absence of some type of payment to these householders, the firm is able to shift part of the cost of its product from its customers to a third party, the householders. Externalities in transportation exist whenever a trip is made to engage in some activity at the destination. Intrinsic or 'end in itself travel which generates no externalities was far less important that extrinsic or 'means to an end' travel which generates externalities. Furthermore, the 'transport-generated trips', that is the trips needed to maintain the transport system, are on the rise and these too generate externalities. Thus, for the transport consumer travel is generally only a means to an end, and from the point of view of the traveller the less travel involved in carrying out an activity the better. For most other goods and services the degree of intrinsic satisfaction increases with consumption - the consumption of food, clothing, shelter, recreation, etc, viewed as end products or as the satisfactions which the economic system is supposed to produce. Transportation, with the exception of a small portion of movement such as the Sunday drive, is generally useful only to the extent that it helps to attain satisfaction from some other sources. Transportation also differs in a second way from other consumer goods and services. The traveller interacts at his destination with friends, retailers, employers and others; all these people act as third parties to the marketplace transaction between the traveller and the transport provider. The degree of third-party, or external, involvement in the consumption of transportation is far higher than for any other category of consumer goods. Thus, as we approach the analysis of the transportation market, we must be aware that the degree of individual satisfaction attained from travel per se is lower than for most other consumer outputs and that the degree of external involvement is far higher. None would deny that, overall, the continual improvements in transportation technology had external impacts on the larger society. The impacts are both costs and benefits. Railroads

38 Delivering Sustainable Transport were not allowed into the nineteenth-century cities precisely because they generate external costs, they polluted. One major reason for the current advocacy of public transportation in the larger metropolitan areas is the fact that public transit generates less pollution than automobile transportation, and this presents an external benefit. Unproved urban transportation in general has benefited the urban areas by permitting them to grow beyond the size of walking cities and to take full advantage of the economies of scale which the industrial revolution and modern technologies offer. The spatial, economic and social arrangements of the tracked and rubber city in contrast to the walking city are the external benefits, or costs, of improved urban transportation. Not only urban transportation, but transportation in general creates external economies. For example, land grants were an important incentive for the development of the transcontinental railroads in the United States and Canada. Today, shipping companies that haul on consignment find that without government subsidies they cannot survive. In the 'old days', when shippers bought their goods overseas and sold them at their destination, these sales captured the external benefits of shipping and made it a profitable venture. Air travel presents a more current example of the externalities accompanying transportation service. Airline companies increasingly invest their capital in resort hotels and tourist attractions. At the same time they offer airfare discounts to those who will avail themselves of these other goods and services in the form of 'packaged tours'. Though, under most circumstances, providers of external benefits are unable to capture a return from them, in transportation the suppliers of transport services often can. A transport supplier can generate external benefits by making formerly inaccessible real estate accessible, and can capture these benefits if he owns this real estate. This was true of the land developers of the walking cities who built bridges to make land across swamps and rivers accessible to the rest of the city. It was also true of the developers who instituted ferry services, and it is most clearly true of the streetcar developers of the tracked city era. In each case the transport innovation was not profitable in and of itself, but rather was profitable because the entrepreneur captured a gam external to the transport market. The operation of the market usually requires that in order to remain in business the suppliers of goods or services need only receive a profit from the sale of their output In transportation, however, frequently the profit from capturing externalities far outweighs the profit from supplying the transport service. From this relationship arises the problem that the external benefit can usually be achieved only when passenger volumes are greater than those which would be most profitable if only transportation were supplied. This problem is illustrated in Figure 2.4, which depicts the market for some particular transport service. In that market an equilibrium is achieved at a price of $5 per ride with 8,000 rides sold. But in order for this particular service to generate external benefits either to the suppliers of the transport service, to the larger society, or to both, travel volume must reach at least 100,000 rides. Given the market demand for this particular service, this volume can be attained only at a fare of 50c per ride. Given the cost of providing the service, however, the fare would have to be $8 per ride to induce the transport supplier to invest in the necessary equipment to carry 100,000 passengers. If the profits from exploitation of an external benefit were great enough to allow an entrepreneur to subsidise the transport system and still have a larger profit than would be possible from the provision of transport alone, then he would undertake the subsidy. In many instances this has been the case. In other instances

The Limits of Economics 39 where the transport supplier cannot capture the external benefits, the external social benefit may be real and large enough to induce government to provide the necessary subsidy.

Figure 2.4 Market for transport services

Figure 2.5 Market for transport services with private and social demand To clarify this idea we redraw Figure 2.4 as 2.5. The figures are identical but for one addition. Through the point on the supply curve represented by 100,000 rides we have drawn a second demand curve labelled Ds. The original curve is Dp, indicating that it is still the total demand of all private users of that particular transport service. However, since there are wider social benefits beyond those for the individual travellers using that service, let us say

40 Delivering Sustainable Transport that a demand curve, Ds, represents the value to society of different volumes of travel on that system. As can be seen, at each and every price, the social demand is larger than the private demand. These social benefits translate into the benefits which accrue to those owning real estate made more accessible, those whose shops can now serve a wider market and those whose places of employment are now accessible to a larger labour market. Thus we would expect pressures for public subsidy from those who gam these benefits. If this were the case, subsidy sufficient to increase transport volume to 100,000 would occur. The issues of externalities are often overlooked by economists in analysing the transport market. This occurs because many analyses are limited to questions of the choice of transport mode within a pre-existing spatial context. However, as we have seen, spatial relationships themselves depend upon transport modes and relative transport availability. This is readily acknowledged by most policy makers who apply market tools to transport problems. But, the analytic tools are better suited to the more partial analyses, where either the choice of mode or the choice of spatial location are investigated, holding the other constant. The result is that studies do not investigate the ways in which urban space interacts with transport. Instead, studies of transport are discourses and policies based upon the demand and supply of various urban travel modes in a given spatial context, rather than the relationship between transportation modes and the spatial location patterns. The narrowing of the transportation problem through assuming that spatial location patterns are given has as a consequence that the problem of transport subsidies is approached with great timidity. In the narrow context, subsidies appear to lead to a wasteful misuse of scarce resources. However, if third-party benefits are considered, subsidies may in fact not be a misuse of scarce resources, but represent an efficient allocation of resources. Economists who look at transportation in the narrow context usually try to develop policy prescriptions that eliminate or at least minimise subsidies. Most commonly they try to find 'cures' for the subsidy that can be traced to the transportation capacities that are needed to handle the rush hour traffic. But a vital local economy requires that urban transportation is able to handle the rush hour work trips. To accommodation these work trips, the transport system must have the capacity to carry considerably more passengers during peak than off-peak hours. This means, however, that most of a system's capacity is idle most of the time. Since the transport industry requires considerable investment in fixed capital, the under-utilisation of this capital imposed a significant cost which must be paid one way or another. The existence of under utilised capital gives off signals which are contradictory if interpreted only in the narrow context. This situation is illustrated in Figure 2.6. That figure shows a hypothetical demand curve for transport service. It also has two cost curves, one illustrating the cost of providing the service, the other the cost of supplying additional amounts of service. The top curve represents the average total cost of providing the service. It takes into account both the operating and capital costs for the service. The bottom curve just measures the additional operating costs incurred to additional passengers. Thus, it measures the additional costs of fuel or drivers (in the case of buses) to serve the additional passengers with a given rolling stock and plant.2 The market has two criteria for successful operation. The

2

This situation is referred to as one of increasing returns to scale, in contrast to the more usual case of diminishing returns to scale previously discussed. For a further discussion of this topic in relation to

The Limits of Economics 41 first is that total costs must not exceed total revenue for any appreciable period of time. The second is that as long as the additional amount of output is more than or equal to the additional cost of providing that output, it should be provided. According to the first criterion, the fare should be at P1 and the volume of rides sold should be at Q1. However, profit maximisation also requires that as long as additional revenue from additional output is greater than additional cost, output should be expanded. In our example, then, output should be expanded to Q2 and price lowered to P2. However, at that price and output the transport provider's revenues would not cover the total cost. Thus, the need for large investments to satisfy the peak load widens the gap between the solutions offered by the two criteria of the market and consequently heightens the subsidy issue. The problem of peak and off-peak usage of facilities is not unique to transportation. Resort hotels charge more during the season when the demand for their facilities is the greatest than during the off-season. Theatres charge different rates for Saturday evenings than Wednesday matinees, reflecting the variation in demand for tickets. Restaurants which charge high prices in the evening often serve inexpensive 'businessmen's lunches' during the day. Telephone rates also vary with the time of day, reflecting the differences in demand. The idea of charging different rates for the same good or service depending upon when the buyer wishes to obtain the output is consistent with the operation of a competitive market. Since the room capacity of the hotel, the seating and cooking capacity of the restaurant, the seating capacity of the theatre and the line capacity of the telephone company are designed to serve the peak demand for these outputs, it is the peak time user of these outputs who pays the additional cost of this additional capacity.

Figure 2.6 Transport costs and market demand The off-peak user, on the other hand, contributes little or nothing to the capacity-creating cost. From the standpoint of the seller, the idea of charging the off-peak user less is just plain good

transportation see Transport (Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1968) edited by Denis Munby (especially part 2). For a more general discussion of the entire topic of peak loads and increasing returns see Turvey, ed. Public Enterprises (Penguin Books, Baltimore).

42 Delivering Sustainable Transport business sense. Fixed capital stock generates costs regardless of the quantity of the output If the lower charges induce increased use of fixed capital in off periods at least loss is being minimised. In the area of urban transportation there are many examples of capacity created for peak purposes; there is the lane capacity of urban expressways, the passenger-carrying capacity of subways and buses, the passenger capacity of commuter railroads and even the size of the taxi fleet. All of these examples have one thing in common: the creation of sufficient transport capacity to carry the rush hour passenger around the metropolitan area. However, unlike the other industries faced with problems of peak loads, the pricing mechanism in the area of urban transportation operates in what, by the standard of the narrower economic approach to transit, is usually regarded as a perverse manner. It is the peak period railroad commuter who receives a lower fare. Bridge and tunnel authorities around the United States sell books or passes which give the regular user of these facilities, the peak period commuter, a reduced toll. Even when the peak period motorist is not given special discounts, neither is the motorist charged more than off peak users. There is no charge at all on most 'freeways'. Subways and buses, too, charge a single fare. This may vary with distance but rarely, if ever, does it vary with the time of use. This situation arises partly from the difficulty of imposing differential charges on urban transport users. More importantly, the situation reflects the role of transport in creating urban external economies. The economists' standard jaundiced view of transport subsidy and peak subsidy in particular comes from analysing transport as essentially a service whose major beneficiary is the direct user. However, if the external economies are seen as the dominant outcome peak load subsidy makes sense. The movement of the workforce at the beginning and end of the workday is one of the most vital contributions of transport to supporting the spatial arrangements of the metropolitan economy. Thus subsidy to the peak user becomes an important factor in permitting the operation of that economy, and the removal of the subsidy with its attendant reduction in travel must be evaluated within the broader spatial location patterns rather than within the narrow one of direct user benefits. However, all this does not imply that peak period pricing should not be used to channel travellers from one mode to another; for instance by placing high tolls on auto access to induce commuters to use public modes. To the extent then that subsidy is a fact of life for urban transportation, the questions which we must look at are: how much subsidy, who should provide it and to which modes? The answers must be cast in terms of their effect on urban space. While it is general knowledge that public transport modes receive some form of subsidy, the extent of subsidy to the auto is less well known. Indeed one rather popular view in the United States is that auto users pay the full cost of auto facilities. It is argued that the construction and maintenance cost of highways are completely paid from sales and excise taxes on motor fuels, oils, tyres and vehicles as well as tolls. In the United States many mechanisms exist which ensure that the revenues from these sources are used for automobile- and highway-related public expenditures. In fact about 98 per cent of construction, maintenance and police costs for the primary highways do come from these sources. This does not mean, however, that the auto is not subsidised in other ways. The highway trust funds in the United States ensure that tax revenues from motor vehicles and related products are used for auto transport purposes. All revenues from motor vehicles are placed in such funds and then disbursed according to a set of guidelines which limit their use to highway-related activity. Such trust funds exist at the federal level and in most states. Even without discussing the highway-related expenditures not paid from these funds, the very

The Limits of Economics 43 existence of these funds is subsidy. Previously it was noted that the trust funds were established only after it became clear that tax revenues from highway uses were beginning to exceed expenditures on highway activity. Thus, the funds were only established after autorelated expenses no longer required financing from general tax revenues. Governments levy all sorts of taxes on all sorts of things. These taxes range from taxes on income and profits, to taxes on transactions (sales taxes) to taxes on specific products (such as tobacco and alcohol) to taxes on real estate to taxes on meals, and so forth. The point is that a principal reason for these taxes is the generation of revenue to support various projects and programs which governments undertake. As with most other things, government support is a scarce resource which must be allocated among seemingly infinite needs. To set up a special fund, in which a certain portion of government revenue is placed and spent without regard to other projects and programs on an indefinite basis and without regard to changing conditions and needs, is in fact implicitly to subsidise that particular project or programme at the expense of others which also require public funding. The fact that these funds subsidise not transport in general but only one particular mode merely accentuates the distortion. The question should be whether we need more transportation and if so what mix of modes will best serve the population, rather than where the next highway should be located. The fact that very little support is available to meet the public transport needs of society while a veritable horn of plenty exists for highways is cause for much concern. In the final analysis there is no more reason for taxes on automobiles and related products to be devoted to highway-related activities than for the proceeds of the tax on restaurant meals to be devoted to the construction and maintenance of restaurants! User-related taxes, collected under the previously described schemes, do not relate the charges to the time or place at which automobiles are used. Thus, off-peak users are paying the same amount as peak users for capacity costs generated by the peak user. This in turn implies an under pricing or subsidy to the peak user, and as a result, it acts as an incentive for excessive use of urban highways during peak periods. The indications are that the under priced capacity is expensive capacity. In 1962 William Vickery estimated that the capital cost of providing sufficient lane capacity for all the highway traffic in Washington, DC, during peak periods would come to $23,000 per peak period car.3 This means a charge of $9 per round trip, assuming 250 workdays a year and allowing a 10 per cent gross return within a comparable investment in the private sector would have to earn to cover interest, amortisation and property and corporate income taxes. These costs are over and above the costs for highway maintenance and parking. Clearly if user charges in line with these costs were imposed upon urban automobile commuters, either spatial relationships in metropolitan areas would be far different or more public transport would be used or some combination of the two would occur. It would definitely mean a significant upgrading in quality of public transport service. The subsidy is even greater than merely one from the off-peak highway user to the peak highway user. The system of taxes also ensures that those using local streets subsidise the highway user as they too pay the taxes which comprise the highway funds. Local streets and arterials receive little, if any, support from the highway funds. They are supported from locally raised revenues. Defenders of the system of highway finance are quick to argue that since local streets and roads serve the function of access to local property, they should quite properly be paid from local sources. This particular argument has its greatest validity on the

3

William Vickery, Pricing in Urban and Suburban Transport, American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 1963,452-65.

44 Delivering Sustainable Transport most under utilised rural back roads. However, it quickly loses validity as we begin to approach the denser sectors of any metropolitan area. Indeed, one would be quite hard pressed in attempting to argue that the traffic clogging almost any cross-town street of Manhattan is on that street to reach a particular piece of property on the street. There is scarcely a rush hour driver alive who does not have a favourite weave of back streets to get from home to work on any day and under any condition. Furthermore it is absurd to try and treat different parts of the transportation system as if they were in some sense different from one another. If all the exits on urban highways ended in unpaved dirt roads full of ruts and holes, automobiles would not be as integral a part of the urban scene as they are today. Blood vessels in the human body without capillaries make as much sense as major highways without the system of local streets and roads. Good inner city streets, then, act as further incentive to the user of the automobile. In the United States and many other countries the major revenue support for these streets are the local real estate taxes, perhaps the most regressive taxes for financing anything. The burden of the tax that finances city streets falls most heavily upon the lowest income segments of the metropolitan community. This burden is made worse by the income segregation patterns of metropolitan areas. The lower income groups live at and around the dense core areas and the more affluent automobile commuters tend to reside in the less dense outlying areas. Since the automobile traffic from these areas passes through the lower income communities on its way to the core areas, the costs of road maintenance and police traffic control in these communities will be higher than in the more outlying communities. In places where the metropolitan area is broken into many small cities and towns, the cost will most directly be borne by those communities around the core with the lower income populations. There are many other forms of subsidy which the automobile commuters in metropolitan areas receive. We will mention only the most obvious. The oil depletion allowance which the US government grants amounts to a windfall for oil companies and is in effect a subsidisation of gasoline costs. Oil companies are quick to point out that if the allowance is removed gasoline prices will rise. Automobile insurance rates are lower for those residing in low-density rather than high-density communities. Rates are established this way even though there is no evidence that drivers living in high-density areas are less safe drivers than those living in the low-density areas. The basis for the rate differentials is that the highdensity resident is more frequently involved in accidents than the driver residing in lowdensity areas. Most of the congested driving takes place in high-density areas. As a result of the congestion, contributed to in no small part by the auto commuter from the low-density areas, the probability of an accident in the high-density areas is increased. Since drivers living in the high-density areas are in this environment most of the time, it is natural that their accident rate will be higher. If broader geographic definitions were used in establishing insurance rates, the cost which the suburban driver is placing upon the inner-core driver would be more equally borne. Since auto insurance is one of the largest annual costs of automobile operation, this subsidy plays an important role in inducing automobile commutation from low-density communities. All these subsidies are positive incentives to urban sprawl and favour the residents of lowdensity communities who commute over long distances above the residents in high-density areas near employment centres. The depletion allowance reduces gasoline prices and with it the operating cost of automobiles. Compared to public transit modes, the out-of-pocket costs of using an automobile for any particular trip are slight indeed. The use of real estate taxes for the maintenance of urban streets generates a subsidy from the residents of the denser communities around employment centres, who have usually lower per capita auto ownership,

The Limits of Economics 45 to the residents of low-density communities with few employment opportunities, who usually have higher per capita auto ownership. The uniform charges to peak and off peak users and the insurance rate policies generate an internal subsidy from auto drivers residing in highdensity urban areas to auto drivers residing in low-density suburban and semi rural areas. All these subsidies make it far harder to persuade automobile owners to use public transport and to live in high-density areas where public transit can most effectively be maintained. The auto owners' incentives to live in low-density areas in turn lead retailers, employers and other services, to choose locations that are accessible by auto. The retailers have a special reason for this move. While they must furnish their clientele with free parking, they can recover some, if not all, of these costs because customers with cars will carry most of their major purchases, while those who must rely on public transit will require the delivery of these goods. Thus the subsidisation of the auto owners, and particularly the auto owners in lowdensity areas, becomes a reinforcing pattern for continually extending the region of urban sprawl. A further reinforcement of urban sprawl is due to land prices. Traditionally land prices at the urban fringe are lower than those near or at the core. Qualitative differences account for little of this difference in the price of land. The major variation is due to the location or closeness to those activities or phenomena which society deems either desirable or undesirable. For example, a residential location next to a noisy, dirty railroad yard is not as desirable as one on a quiet tree-lined street. It is preferable to live within walking distance of a subway, if one lives and works in an urban environment, than at a location which requires a bus trip to the subway station.

Figure 2.7 A rent-bid curve It is the collective social judgment that determines the relative desirability of various locations. Land value is thus more dependent on society's actions than the actions of the individual owner. This had led numerous observers, at least since the time of Henry George at the turn of the century, to advocate that the entire increase in the value of land due to these societal actions be taxed away by society. (This would not include the improvements made to the property by placing buildings and other capital expenditures upon the land itself). Since society and not the individual created the increase in land value, society and not the individual

46 Delivering Sustainable Transport should be entitled to the value increment. This particular insight is one of the few on which economists all along the political spectrum find much to agree. Since the increment in land values is a reflection of social priorities, it is possible to capture this increase in a tangible form through the ownership of land. The increase in land value can to some extent be considered a measure of the social gain which is maximised through the subsidised transport system of Figure 2.5. Consequently by looking at the impact of transport changes upon the metropolitan land market we can infer much about the creation of external economies and diseconomies. In cities where the central business district represents the centre of all economic and much of the social activity of the metropolitan area, the value of land at or near the centre tends to be higher than at the fringes. The relationship is shown in Figure 2.7 by straight lines, the socalled 'rent-bid curves'. The further the distance from the centre of the city, the lower is the value of the land. The term 'rent-bid' comes from the practices of measuring the value of land by the price which its service can command, the rent.

Figure 2.8 Effect of transport improvement on rent-bid curve of metropolitan area The selling price of land is nothing more than the capitalised rental value of the land. The horizontal axis in Figure 2.7 measures the distance in miles from the centre of the metropolitan area. The vertical axis measures the rental value per unit area for land at various distances from the centre. The value of land falls moving further and further from the centre until it levels off, represented by line FP. FP is the value of land as farm acreage. At some point, in this case OM distance from the metropolitan centre, the land loses its value as part of the metropolitan region. It then has value in terms of its agricultural income-producing potential only. This example is somewhat simplified, since land can also have value, and high and growing value, outside metropolitan areas for recreational purposes. In general the point at which the value of land reverts to its agricultural value depends upon the cost and time involved in reaching the centre of the region. One hour's travel time is about as much as most people will commute on a daily basis. The distance covered depends upon the average speed

The Limits of Economics 47 of the mode of travel. Cost of travel, too, is an important factor. For example, it is possible to commute a considerable distance in an hour by air, but the cost is sufficient to ensure that only the most affluent would even consider this alternative. Thus, in addition to speed, cost must be sufficiently low to permit a mass market if the travel mode is to affect land use patterns significantly. Using a graph similar to that in Figure 2.7 we can show the effect an improvement in transportation has upon the metropolitan land market. Such a situation is presented in Figure 2.8. Line AB represents the rent-bid curve before a transportation improvement, for instance, the city before the electric streetcar. As the figure indicates, the maximum feasible distance that could be travelled in conducting daily affairs in the older metropolitan era of horse cars was about three miles. The introduction of the trolley permitted people to travel longer distances in the same travel time and at about the same cost. As a result the metropolitan area increased, in this case to an outside distance of about six miles. This new distance is represented by the line CD. Figure 2.8 points out another aspect of urban transportation. In addition to extending the metropolitan area, the introduction of a transportation improvement also alters the slope of the rent-bid curve. The slope of curve CD is flatter than curve AB. This means that the price of land at different locations from the centre is no longer as sensitive to the exact distance from the centre. This is because the transport improvement makes land further from the centre of activity more accessible to the centre in terms of travel time. Land at those distances is more desirable and can command a price closer to that of land near the centre. In addition land at the centre no longer holds a monopoly position, so to speak, and its value relative to that of land at further distances falls somewhat so that the differentials are lessened. The transport improvement in and of itself explains only part of the change in slope; the other part is explained by cost. The lower the cost of using the mode, the larger will be the market for it and consequently the greater will be the demand for land at further distances from the centre. The greater the demand for land at further distances, the flatter the rent-bid curve will be. Since the transport market is a subsidised market, the slope of the curve will depend upon the extent and the method of subsidisation. The greater the subsidisation, the flatter the curve. If the burden of subsidy is such that it falls more heavily upon residents of the centre that those of the periphery, this will flatten the curve further. Thus the distribution of the burden of the subsidies directly affects the way the transport changes alter the metropolitan land use patterns. The radial development which allowed the early entrepreneurs to capture a real estate gain and hence develop land is no longer possible for operators of urban transport systems. The spatial limits of the radially structured metropolitan area have been reached for travel modes that can bring commuters into the central city in about an hour. Attempts to push development further out by public investment in highways have thus far been both ecologically and economically unsuccessful. Consequently the major concern today is to find modes which allow for more efficient movement within the built-up portion of the region. With this shift in emphasis there has also arisen a controversy around the methods of subsidising this transport. The resolution of this controversy will have important implications for the future spatial arrangement of metropolitan areas. One conclusion is exceedingly clear. The subsidy pattern today encourages automobile usage and discourages public transport. This in turn encourages sub-urbanisation of the

48 Delivering Sustainable Transport metropolitan areas to the extent of completely flattening the rent-bid curve, and making the radial city model with a central core no longer applicable. This is what happened in Los Angeles, Houston and other automobile-oriented cities which had most of their growth since the Second World War. The flattening of the rent-bid curve and with it the loss of orientation around a single core reinforces the problems of isolation and lack of access which increasingly affect metropolitan areas. With the recent resurgence of the denser communities as homes for the affluent, we are beginning to see more pressure for financing transit from public funds. The highway trust funds are becoming less the sacred cows they once were as the affluent discover the limitations of the automobile-oriented suburban communities. If we are to have healthy metropolitan areas, then good access must be available to all. However, the poor and middle class will not automatically achieve good access by the resurgence of public transport alone. Rather, they must work to achieve political power sufficient to ensure that the newly created transport routes serve their needs as well as those of the rich. It is only by affecting transport policy at the political level that transport resources, allocated either through the market or by some planning body, will be turned to the task of providing good access to all. The market is similar to a computer. A computer gives back its processed data within the limitations of the program into which the data is fed. Similarly the prices and output of the transport market will only be as good as the broad policy context in which the decisions are made. At present, transport policy is such that the 'program' gives us automobile suburbs. In the future it may give better downtown mass transit for some. However, if it is to give us all better access a new transport 'program' must be fed into the political decision-making process.

Note This is an edited version of a chapter that originally appeared in Schaeffer, K. H. and Sclar, E., (1975) Access for All: Transportation and Urban Growth, Penguin, London.

3

IF PUBLIC TRANSPORT IS THE ANSWER, WHAT IS THE QUESTION? Kerry Hamilton, University of East London, London, UK

My title is "If public transport is the answer, what is the question?" and by the end of this chapter, it is my intention to have suggested some very stimulating questions. But to begin with, I want to look at a different, but very closely related matter: "If the car was the answer, what was the question?" I shall demonstrate how very few questions there are to which the car is the answer - but an answer it certainly was, and a very powerful one indeed, as a look outside any front door will confirm. The questions which the car has answered in our society obviously cannot be ignored, and I am not going to ignore them. It is an important oddity of transport policy that, until very recently, so few questions have been asked, and many of those have not in fact been about transport. Perhaps that is because transport is often described as a derived demand. That is to say, the argument goes, transport is only there to give access to people, services and goods. It allows activities to happen, and exchange opportunities to occur—more, it can create these activities and opportunities. The activities we engage in at the end of our journeys are not necessarily the activities we intended when we started out: the experience of the journey can and sometimes does change our minds. We meet people, we read someone else's newspaper, we see a building for sale. Transport can intervene in a positive way. In this way I think it is helpful to regard it as more than a derived good. And I would suggest further that there is a significant amount of travel which is for its own sake—a spin in the car, a walk in the park. There is little research that I know of into why people want to move about, and why they do move. The assumption is that it is for an ulterior purpose; but I am not yet convinced that that explains enough. To return to my point: transport has been ignored, even as the subject of transport policy. I exaggerate only a little. The questions have not been about what is the most efficient and effective way of moving people and goods, nor about assessing and controlling the impact of

50 Delivering Sustainable Transport existing policy; rather, they have been about employment (in the motor and construction industries) and about very particular notions of progress, modernity and freedom. Let us agree, without debating the finer points, that people should not be denied reasonable access to legitimate activities and exchange opportunities. I would certainly be happy with talking about a right to decent access to not just the necessities of life (and let's not argue about what they are just now), but to the finer things in life too. Something of this sort seems to have been in the mind of governments over the years. Most transport policy documents since the 1950s have used the language of "equity" and "accessibility". The implication, even in the Thatcher years, has been that without state intervention some sectors of society would have inadequate access. (The distinction I am making here is between the ability to move—mobility—and the ability to get to where you want to go—access.) But despite the language of access, the policy has concentrated on mobility. Right up to the 1990s, movement and speed were the watchwords, not accessibility. It was an approach heavily influenced by the United States, where for example Ernest Marples, one of the few Transport Ministers whose name everyone can remember, if you're old enough, was bowled over by what he saw in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1950s. The United States is unfortunately not a good example for the UK to model itself on: they are very different countries, not least in the distances involved and in space per person. The Chicago Area Transportation Study of 1959 was typical of the time, and of what became the standard policy in this country: the dominant objective of a transport plan...is to reduce traffic friction by the construction of new facilities so that people and vehicles.. ..can move about within the area as rapidly as possible. What question was this the answer to? It is a question which appears to value the saving of time above all; or rather, because not moving at all could save you even more time, it values speed. There is no evidence of value attaching to destinations or to journey-purposes— whether you achieve them or not doesn't seem to matter; no value is attached to people who as a result of such policies find their ability to move around reduced; what matters is that the traffic is moving and moving fast. This is not an exaggeration: it is what the statement says. Why was this assertion so powerful? Not just in the United States (which I am not going to deal with here) but in Britain? As a child, in Ireland in the late fifties, I remember being required to write at the top of every page in my exercise book "This is the age of speed and progress". Progress is not as arresting a word as it used to be, but there are plenty of us around who can recall when it really was something to reckon with. Progress could not be resisted. Progress was inevitable, and you had better be on its side. This was increasingly what British policy-makers said. The Conservatives had won the 1951 election with a slogan whose appeal still lives: "Setting the people free". The collectivist ethic of the previous administration had been replaced by an emphasis on individual consumerism, which helped to pave the way for the decade's extraordinary doubling of car ownership, and for the rapid growth of the trunk road and motorway network. Ernest Marples, that well-known Minister of Transport, when he opened the first, 75-mile stretch of the Ml in 1959, was apparently in tune with the tunes:

What is the Question? 51 This motorway starts a new era in road travel. It is in keeping with the bold, exciting and scientific age in which we live. In 1963, Marples, still at the Ministry of Transport, said at the launch of a report on traffic in towns: It is fundamental to the whole report that it accepts the motor vehicle as a brilliant and beneficial invention. It is in no sense restricting the motor car. We have to face the fact, whether we like it or not, that the way we have built our towns is entirely the wrong way for motor traffic. We want an entirely different type of town. What question was this an answer to?— "What kind of towns do people want to live in?" And who replied: "towns for cars"? The road lobby did. The road lobby was an effective, wealthy and loose amalgamation of road interests, including motor manufacturers and distributors, road construction companies, road freight operators, and motoring organisations like the AA and the RAC. I say "was", because it is now a shadow of its former self: but this was then. Its heyday was in the late fifties and sixties, with the announcement of the motorway programme and the abandonment of the railway (outside London) as the major mass-transit system. I think I have time to remind you (those of you who are old enough to remember) of the Seeching Report, which, explicitly in line with the new motorway programme and at the same time, led to the closure of nearly seven thousand of the eighteen thousand route miles of railway track. The railways had emerged in 1945 battered and bankrupt. Their nationalization in 1948 had been on the cards since the 1923 amalgamation, which had reduced the number of railway companies from 120 to four. By 1955, the Conservative Government announced the Railway Modernisation Programme, which would have.spent £1200 million on electric traction and associated new infrastructure. But within four years this had been abandoned in the face not only of escalating costs, but, and more crucially, a loss of faith in the railways as the transport of the future. Four years after that, a major programme of railway line-closures was announced, based on the Report by Dr. Richard Beeching, the newly appointed Chairman of British Rail. The plan, which involved cutting the existing 18,000 miles of railway to 11,000 marked the disaster that was to overtake public transport in general. Although the Beeching prescription was initially reduced, in the end, 7,000 miles, more or less, were shut. Some have since reopened. No thought was given to the wider economic and social consequences of rail closure. A subsequent study entitled 'Losing Track' which I undertook, noted that: the lack of any clear economic or social criteria for the lavish state funding of road transport stood in marked contrast to the narrow commercial criteria for the railways. The argument that behind Beeching .. .lay nothing but political bias and the power of the road lobby has never been refuted and no satisfactory alternative explanation has ever been offered. Closely mirroring the rise of the road-lobby was the shift in power within the trade-union movement. As traditional industries declined and light manufacturing (including the car

52 Delivering Sustainable Transport industry) expanded, so the power moved towards the Transport & General Workers Union— the union to which lorry drivers and car workers belonged. And the T&G's answer to the question was also, but for slightly different reasons, 'Towns for cars". Car manufacturers, car workers' unions and car users - together with lorry manufacturers, lorry workers' unions and lorry-drivers, not to mention the road construction industry (with which, by the way, Ernest Marples was very closely associated) - were thus a new political force. The industry became increasingly important to government as the traditional industries declined. Coal mining, for instance, lost three hundred thousand jobs in the 1950s and early 60s. But I have cheated a bit. The question to which "towns for cars" was the answer was not "What kind of towns do people want to live in?" In fact, there was no such question. The questions were about, as I have noted, employment and profit, and progress, and freedom, and the need to gain speed. There is nothing wrong, by the way, with debates about employment and profit, and progress, and freedom, and the need to gain speed. They are surely necessary. But they do not add up to a real transport policy. The guiding principle from the fifties until the start of this decade was what is now called "predict and provide"; but back then policy-makers got away with calling it a transport policy. The major transport plans of this period - like the West Midlands Transport Study in 1964 and the Mersey Area Land Use Transportation Study in 1966—were based on forecasts of further steep rises in motor vehicle ownership. The consequence was, to put it less vehemently than Marples did, that cities (and their inhabitants) had to adapt to the car. Up and down the land, transport budgets had already been committed to urban motorway projects even though the economic costs of many (let alone the social costs) had not been evaluated. Roads were going to be built without anyone knowing what the bill would be. A lobby group which can get government to agree to do something with no idea of the price tag: that is real power. That is why the road lobby has remained a case study for aspiring pressure groups of today. To sum up this first part of my argument: the questions to which "the car" was the answer were seldom to do with what transport policy might reasonably be expected to concern itself with—about what is the best way to move people and goods, and how to monitor and control the impact of those movements. Instead, they have been about employment (in the motor and construction industries) and about very particular notions of progress, modernity and freedom. The attraction of the car was closely bound up with the need to recover from the ravages of war and to keep Britain at the Top Table. Again, these were important questions: but they were not transport questions. If Britain's housing policy had been, not at all about housing people, but simply about providing jobs and creating prestige projects, then we would say—I would say—that Britain did not have a housing policy. Britain did not have a transport policy. But we did have increasing numbers of cars. By 1952 (the first year for which full statistics are available), there were two million cars on Britain's roads—and still only about 14 per cent of households had a car. By 1970, 52 per cent did, and in 1994 it was 68 per cent, and one in five households had two cars. There were over ten times the number of private cars on British roads as there had been in 1952 and people travelled ten times further in them.

What is the Question? 53 And, unlikely as it may seem, there are the same number of heavy goods vehicles now as in 1952—but the average lorry is much larger and travels much further, and there are five times more light goods vehicles than there were post-war. Transport's share of energy-use has doubled since 1970 (despite oil crises); and in terms of financial cost, transport's share of the household budget has doubled since 1953, and now, at 15 per cent, is the third or fourth most important item, more or less equal to what is spent on housing (i.e. on rent and mortgage repayments).

It is a strange fact of transport statistics that car-ownership and use is counted using the household as the unit of measurement. It makes sense to count domestic refrigerators or washing machines by household, because it makes sense to assume that they are used by every member of the household. It is wholly misleading however to assume that the household car serves the transport needs of every household-member. Very often, the car is taken by the "male head of the household" to convey him to work, and it does not return until his working day is finished. Other members of the household are frequently dependent on public transport, cycling and walking for their travel needs in his absence, and often even when he and the car are there. But as car ownership has become more prevalent, planners have been increasingly apt to assume that everyone has access to a car, and to cease to make provision for those without. In 1990, across the country as a whole, 41 per cent of women and 72 per cent of men were qualified to drive. However, a study in West Yorkshire found that only 25 per cent of women who held a driving licence had full access to a car, compared to 88 per cent of male licence-holders. 25 per cent of 41 per cent is not very much: in fact it's about 10 per cent. The promotion of the car was thus at the cost of ignoring the travel needs of the majority of the population. It cannot be too often said: most people in this country do not own a car, do not drive a car and do not have untrammelled access to a car. Children, thank heaven, do not drive; nor do some disabled people; nor do many elderly people; nor do many poor people; nor do quite a few women. So if "those without a car aren't important" is the answer, what was that question? To formulate the question, I want to look in more depth at the effects of a car-based policy on just one group in society—women. As it is for everyone, transport is an essential aspect of women's lives. It determines our access to society—for example, to employment, child care, education, health and the political process. Women make as many journeys as men, but they are different journeys: they are shorter, on average, and they tend to be for different purposes. Our travel needs are as significant as men's, although they are in many respects radically different. This is best illustrated by considering how men and women use public transport. Public transport typically provides for people travelling to nine-to-five jobs in population centres; provision outside this pattern is often poor. Not only are off-peak journeys neglected, but

54 Delivering Sustainable Transport journeys which do not follow a radial route, or which link rural areas, may be ignored altogether. Moreover discounted travel (like season tickets) is typically available only to regular and frequent travellers. The clear effect of this tendency is to discriminate against (particularly) women in favour of (particularly) fully employed urban males. This is because women are less likely to be in full-time employment, are less likely to work in the centre of towns and cities, and are more likely, because of their more local jobs and their typical role as carers, to make non-radial trips - to schools, hospitals, shops and friends. At the same time, women are less likely to have a car or to be able to drive, so their dependence on public transport is in fact greater than men's. For a long time, the conventional solution was to encourage women to get a car themselves. As women's financial power has increased, and because of the failure of public transport to meet their needs (a different reaction from that of men, who in general buy and use a car because of its status-conferring power), that is precisely what they have done. For example, all the net increase in car-use in London over the last decade is attributable to the rise in numbers of women-drivers. There has been a consequent loss of revenue to public transport operators (not just in London), which makes it harder to cater for people who depend on public transport, and increases their isolation. This analysis is easy to establish, but still the typical traveller in the planners' mind remains a tall, white, well-built, middle-income man—rarely seen on my bus. This is not to argue that women are a special case. The only special thing about women is that there are more of us than men. But there are many ways in which women are different. Even after many years of Equal Pay Legislation women's pay lags far behind that of men. This economic inferiority has much to do with women's labour being less highly valued than men's. Women's jobs tend to be concentrated in the poorly paid service sector, and the scale of inequality runs deep. The dramatic increase in women in paid employment, especially women with young children, has been one of the most important structural changes in the labour market over the last twenty-five years. But while women comprise over half of all employees, almost half work part-time. Part-time workers' earnings tend to be low, not only because of the pro-rata reduction, but also because part-time workers generally are in a vulnerable position in the labour market. Why are women so badly paid and why do they work part-time when the rewards are so low? Apart from the low valuation of women's labour, apart from the domestic responsibilities which heavily restrict women's choice of employment, what is overlooked is that transport options also have a strong bearing on whether a women can take up a job or not. Where women live is often determined by the workplace of the male partner, who is routinely defined as the main bread-winner. Such are the restrictions on employment opportunities for women it is common for a woman returning to work after a period of full-time child care to take a less skilled and more poorly paid job that she originally had. Home-working, mainly done by women and one of the lowest paid of all types of employment, is probably the

What is the Question? 55 clearest and most extreme example of the way in which women's bargaining position in the labour market is reduced by transport and child-care constraints. Despite the movement of women into the paid employment market, the sexual division of labour within the household persists. The result has been an expansion of women's roles rather than the achievement of gender role equality. Women's activities may reflect any combination of role, as for example, paid employee, student, unpaid domestic labourer, carer of children, or of sick or elderly adults. There are now more old people who need to be looked after, and the carers, whether paid or unpaid, are almost exclusively women. The aspect of women's multiple roles which I want to concentrate on now is that of shopping for food. Another development linked to rising car-use has been the siting of large retail and leisure outlets on the edge of cities and towns, to the detriment of existing town-centres and local neighbourhood facilities. When out-of-town shops open, high street shops shut. And these urban-edge supermarkets mean that cars have become more and more necessary for shopping journeys. These huge new retail developments are often not only virtually inaccessible without a car, they are specifically aimed at car-users. The average distance travelled by individuals has increased dramatically over the last ten years, all of it accounted for by cars and much of that accounted for by shopping. This shift has changed retailing in Britain out of all recognition. Food shopping is now dominated by large multi-outlet firms. By the close of the 1980s just five major retailers controlled 50 per cent of the UK food market; at the same time, small food retailers have decreased by a third, so that in urban areas they now account for only 10 per cent of UK sales. Nationally, a tiered system of food retailing has been created with well stocked shelves in superstores contrasting with such of the High Street stores, in the main poorly stocked, that have survived. In rural areas, independent village shops and the smaller supermarkets have virtually disappeared. The major retailers—those who control fifty per cent of the U.K. food market—are geared to attracting the socio-economic categories A, B and C1. They are not interested in the remaining 30 per cent of the population, which only accounts for 12 per cent of consumer spending. Not surprisingly, these people are also in the proportion of the population which is least likely to have a car. They are the people whom desertification of high street and local shopping facilities has especially hit. For them, it has been, as a doctor working in nutrition has put it, "the food equivalent of disconnecting the water-supply". There are some stores returning to the High Street, like Tesco Metro Stores, but few if any are sited in low-income neighbourhoods. The poor have to pay more for their food - there can be up to a 60 per cent mark-up: this is not new, but my point is that it is transport policy (or the lack of it) which has caused much of the current version of the problem. As we all know, food in small independent local shops is more expensive than the food sold in supermarkets. Brown bread is more expensive than white bread, and is not likely to be available at all in local independent shops in deprived areas. A third of Kwik Save stores do not sell any fresh fruit or vegetables and other discounters, such as Netto, frequently only sell fresh fruit in large pre-packed bags rather than loose.

56 Delivering Sustainable Transport

I repeat -I chose women as a particularly vivid example of the social exclusion effected by the car, and because it is an example which I have studied in some depth over the years. I could have talked about children, for example, or retired people. All of them, taken as groups, lack economic and political power. Their voicelessness in transport is a sign of this, and a ramification. People without cars do not count in our society. It is not just that they are also likely to be poor: not having a car or access to one increases the disadvantage and neglect they suffer. But policy-makers do not see it that way: they see people whose poverty already makes them a burden increasing the burden by needing public transport I am generalizing - the attitude of London Transport in particular has been rather different, not least because of the far wider cross-section of society which uses its services - but the old Department of Transport, for example, was very much of the view that public transport subsidy was a Bad Thing. So what I want to suggest is that the question which gave rise to the answer "non-car-users aren't important" was "Since users of public transport do not pay their way, unlike car-users, what should we do about them?" I want to highlight the assumption that because public transport requires a subsidy, its users are in some sense a burden. Public transport, in this country as elsewhere, certainly does need financial support; but then so does private transport. My point is how easy it is to stigmatize those—women and others, like the elderly and ethnic minorities—whose low economic and social status excludes them from what is seen as normal—not to mention those who for other reasons (like environmental concern or dislike of driving) choose not to have a car. The support that their transport attracts is called a subsidy; the support which the car-user attracts is called—nothing. It is invisible for most purposes, and even now rarely features in policy discussions. However, roads are extremely expensive to build and pretty expensive to maintain; their policing is a major cost-item and the associated health bill, only now becoming fully apparent, is huge. Motorized traffic creates 88 per cent of the air pollution in this country, and air pollution causes four times more deaths each year than do car crashes. Roads are nonetheless very dangerous: the extent of death and injury on UK roads is staggering. In 1997, more than 120 people per day were killed or seriously injured on our roads. The numbers seriously injured (included in that 120 per day) are ten times more numerous than the dead, and they are often left damaged for the rest of their lives. Our roads are in truth dangerous places—far more dangerous than rail: calculated as casualties per billion kilometres travelled, a train-passenger is five times safer than someone in a car, calculated per billion journeys, the train-passenger is still more than twice as safe. All the same, road casualty figures have been falling significantly for some years. This was a result of conscious policy by governments and, to a degree, vehicle-manufacturers, and, as far as it goes, it must count as a success. However, close analysis of the statistics shows that the decline in death and injury is confined to the occupants of motor-vehicles: other road-users have not enjoyed this improvement —pedestrians and cyclists in particular now have higher rates of death and injury than they did. The number of child pedestrians killed is among the highest in Europe with 1.9 deaths per 100,000 of the population. Car-users' safety has been won at the very

What is the Question? 57 specific cost of the safety of the rest of us. So if we are talking the language of costs—about paying one's way—then there are some hefty costs to take into the private-vehicle account. Nor is that all. Marples said back in 1963 "We want an entirely different type of town" so that they were fit for cars—and we got them. The transformation in the structure of British towns and cities over the last twenty to thirty years has been extraordinary: the movement of economic and social activity out of the centre to the edge, where land is cheaper and cars can easily reach them. The downside to this includes the loss of centre facilities, and the exclusion of people without ready access to cars. Within towns, the re-building has usually meant the segregation of pedestrians behind fences and barriers, into underpasses and over-bridges, shepherded by the traffic-lights. Not only do those on foot often have to wait disproportionately longer than cars at the lights, but they probably have to walk further to cross at the designated place; and it is only comparatively recently that the cost-benefit methodology for road schemes allowed any value at all to be attached to pedestrians' and cyclists' time. More recently we have seen attempts to improve the experience of pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users. Traffic-calming solutions, like speed-humps and building out from the pavement into the road; cycle-paths; bus-lanes: these all cost money and are needed purely and simply because of the primacy ceded to the car. These costs should be set against the car, as should the hours we spend waiting for buses which are held up in the traffic, trapped by illegal cars in the bus lane, or by crashes and breakdowns. This litany should make us pause before talking about the "subsidy" to public transport as though it was a favour to the poor. The subsidy to the car-owner, and lorry-owner, is far greater, even after taking account of the Vehicle Excise Duty. Thus, the question to which the answer was "non-car-users aren't really important"—i.e. "Since users of public transport do not pay their way, unlike car-users, what should we do about them?"—is flawed. Better to have asked: "Since car-users do not pay their way, what should we do about them!" But no one did ask; or rather, those of us who did were dismissed as cranks or mere polemicists. I am aware that what I am saying, what I have spent the last twenty years saying, has been seen as polemical: a rather unacademic stirring of a regrettably controversial pot. All I can say is that the sort of thing that I am saying, and which a few other people have been saying too— Mayer Hillman, John Adams, the late John Roberts, Stephen Plowden, Transport 2000 down the years, John Whitelegg, the old Greater London Council - is merely a plea that transport policy should be about policy. Not about engineering, not about speed and shorter travelling times, but about the environmental, social and economic transport needs of the whole community, and the assessment and control of its impact. If you look for books that take this holistic view of transport, you will only find the work of people like those I have mentioned. The controversy appears to be that they are there at all, not about their details. In this country, you may be surprised to learn, there is no "mainstream" literature on the social consequences of transport. To return to my argument: the formulation "Since car-users do not pay their way, what should we do about them?" arose because I was looking at the treatment of the public

58 Delivering Sustainable Transport transport user, pedestrian and cyclist. It is however a mean question—no less mean than the to all intents and purposes real one about subsidized public transport users—but mean all the same. Transport policy is not, or should not be, just about cost. The cheapest transport system is none at all. Effectiveness is at least as important as efficiency. The questions that should be asked are about the most efficient and effective ways to move people and goods where they need or want to go, and about how to assess and control transport's impact. Perhaps I should repeat that there is everything to be said about government policy taking account of jobs, and economic viability, and what people actually want. All I want to insist on is that transport policy should also, and pre-eminently, look at transport—and in a context which recognizes its symbiotic links with land-use planning and environmental considerations. By integration with land-use planning, I mean the mutual impact of transport and housing, jobs, health, education, leisure facilities, shops, and everything else that makes up the community. By integration with environmental considerations, I mean the recognition of two things: first, the vast consumption of non-renewable resources. The second need for recognition is the terrible environmental price the world is starting to pay for the West's favoured transport: local and global air pollution and the concomitant increase in global temperatures, in sea levels and in unstable weather systems. Significant increases in terrestrial temperature have unpredictable but profound effects on the ecological balance of the Earth, and this, amongst other things, affects our ability to feed ourselves. Transport accounts for more than a quarter of the world's total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and is the largest single source: four-fifths of that comes from road traffic and one-sixth from aeroplanes, which have very high emission rates per passenger. The amounts of CO2 emitted in the UK by transport have more than doubled since 1970, and if nothing intervenes, are predicted to double again by 2020. In the late 1990s Honduras and Nicaragua were suffering, with hurricanes and tornadoes ascribed to climate change, and that is because of the car, and the truck, and the aeroplane. So the car is a problem. So what do we do? Is life possible without a car? I readily admit that for a great many families, life without a car is unthinkable, and would certainly be less rich in opportunity and enjoyment. This unthinkability is not because of a lack of imagination: it is because, for most people who now have a car, to give it up would involve profound changes in life-style. If people have chosen where they live, where they work, where their children go to school, all on the basis of having cars, then the short-term alternatives to having and using cars are truly hard to see. Freedom of choice is also part of it. Notoriously, one person's freedom can confine someone else. Public transport is not the answer here. And that is a big problem. For excellent reasons, we resist governments telling us how to live. Marples however was not greatly worried by resistance when in the early 1960s he casually announced: "We want an entirely different type of town". Which, of course, we got. And here we are. The UK Government's White Paper on the future of transport, entitled A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone, produced in 1998, suggested that if we each made one less

What is the Question? 59 car-journey a week, the decrease in pollution would be significant. Of course, we don't do that. I should add that the White Paper doesn't for a moment suggest that this kind of publicspiritedness will solve the whole problem. The White Paper also suggests—and again it doesn't for a moment suggest that this will solve the whole problem—that road pricing might help. However the issue is not whether we can raise the finance to buy our way out of the mess: we can't buy a new atmosphere. The issue is, quite simply, stopping doing what we are doing. Goods and services have to be brought nearer to people, we have to travel far less far, and when we do travel it must rarely be by car. And by the way, electric cars are not the answer: their manufacture involves the same environmental costs as diesel and petrol-driven cars. Burning the fuel at a power station rather than under the car-bonnet helps global warming not at all: not to mention its complete irrelevance to social exclusion problems. Public transport is not the answer. It will of course have its part to play, but if we are to move on from the individuated, socially divisive and environmentally damaging way of life that accompanies car dependence, then we are simply going to have to travel less.

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PART Two POST-MODERNITY AND REFLEXIVITY

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4

REFLEXIVITYIN TRANSPORT STUDIES

Tom Turrentine, University of California, Davis, USA

In an oft quoted phrase, Roland Barthes proposes that, Cars today are the exact equivalent of the great Gothic Cathedrals...the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as.. .purely magical objects. (Durning 1992, 81) Wolfgang Sachs expands on Barthes' comparison, explaining that, .. .automobiles, like cathedrals, are symbols of a culture. One would be blind who stood before a cathedral and saw nothing more than a shelter from wind and weather for the faithful. And one would be just as blind who stood before a shimmering automobile with its engine humming and saw only a vehicle for transporting people and their goods. As the cathedral is not merely a shelter, so the automobile is more than a means of transport; automobiles are, indeed, the material representation of a culture. (Sachs 1992,91) Barthes and Sachs wish to convey to us the power of cultural desire in the arrival of the automobile; both argue against those that would see the automobiles as a simple convenience, an obvious progress of democracy. Their argument is worthy, but they mislead by omission. The comparison with cathedrals is a mistake, it leads us to misinterpret the place of the auto in modernity and to underestimate pervasive impact of automobiles. While the cathedral loomed over the countryside and the minds of Europeans, it left much of daily life intact. The

62 Delivering Sustainable Transport automobile by comparison has helped the complete disassembly of tradition, enabling lifestyle. While the cathedral employed an itinerant band of engineers and artisans, the automobile industry comprises the central industrial core of the economy.

Speed, glamour, mastery of space and time create desire for the auto, but ultimately, the auto is a lifestyle technology of modernity. We think of the car's destiny as being under the control of either drivers or the automobile industry. But like Giddens' image of modernity, automobiliry is more of a juggernaut; the ability of automobiles to expand lifestyle choices creates demand which may overwhelm us.

The Seduction Theory of Automobiles Some critics of the auto have proposed that the original attraction to cars was not of practical dimensions or emancipation but rather seduction by the automobile industry, that our automobility is the result of blind "love" for the power and looks of the car or the "prestige" of a fancy set of wheels. Furthermore, these critics add that nowadays we are "addicted" to the auto; love got us into autos; we rearrange our lives and cities around the auto; now we are stuck in congested concrete suburbs and can't get back to a simpler way of life. This is the seduction model of automobility, and it parallels the proposals by John Galbraith, Vance Packard and the Frankfurt theorists about the creation of false needs for consumption in advanced capitalism. It could have been otherwise if we had been wiser and less blinded by the auto. There are several varieties of this viewpoint. Social class trickle down theories of values focus upon the fact that autos were a plaything of the rich, that whatever the rich have, the rest of us will eventually want. Other theories have focused upon the persuasive power of automobile manufacturers (Ewe, 1988), the role of the personal agendas of important historical figures in the auto industry such as Ford and Sloan (Flink, 1988); the role of political movements to build roads and desire in the working population for automobiles, such as with populism in America (Ling 1992); or Nazism in Germany (Sachs, 1992); or the impersonal forces of capitalism to create false images of consumption (Gartman, 1986). Seduction theories have focused upon conspicuous consumption of luxury cars; observations of how cars were advertised; the desire of young people for cars; the conspicuous leisure use of autos; the links of cars to sexual activity; the links of auto-styling to the fashion industry. As further support, it is often noted that the auto industry initiated much of the instalment credit in the United States; that families went into debt to fulfil their desire for an auto, that in the depression of the 1930's families did anything to hang on to the family auto (Flink, 1988). Unfortunately, these studies of desire are supported by little ethnographic material about car users. Too often the supporting evidence is advertisements from old billboards and magazines, civic boosterism and articles by moral critics of the auto. The response of consumers is assumed to flow directly from the persuasions of advertisements. Attention to

Reflexivity in Transport Studies 63 the role of design is similar. There is little if any ethnographic material to assess the role of design in purchase and use of automobiles. Most authors depend upon expert criticism of the role of design rather than actual studies of response to design. The relative paucity of ethnographic material is obvious in the repetitive dependence in social history of the auto on the Lynds' work on Muncie, Indiana (Lynd and Lynd 1937). While of high quality, the Lynd study is quoted often by those using seduction theory, because the Lynds were convinced that the auto was undermining family life and made many observations about how car use affected the use of family time. In addition, the Lynd study is considered of great importance because it was done in the midst of rapid social change linked to auto use. Since the Lynd study, there seems to be no similar ethnographic study which examines the continuing effect of automobiles on household decisions. Sach's study of the history of desire for the auto in Germany is more sophisticated than most histories of desire for the car. He links together multiple arenas in which desire was created; speed, conveniences, novelty and conquest of space and time. The auto industry becomes integrated with the desires of the Nazi state to provide highways for the people. The result is that "the automobile is much more than a means of transportation; rather it is wholly imbued with feelings and desires that raise it to the level of cultural symbol" (Sachs 1992, vii). Sach's study is a convincing indictment of the effort of Nazi boosters and German auto companies to increase sales of autos, but it remains a narrow history of the construction of an apparatus of desire not a careful study of what people are doing with cars. Without a careful ethnographic account, it is uncertain whether the Nazi's created or merely appropriated a sweeping technological transformation in human activity.

Gartman and Reification Gartman (1986), working from an approach derived from Lukacs' theory of reification, views this symbolic process in the auto industry more directly as a repressive process which undermines the class-consciousness of workers. "The privileged are distinguished not by class power but by their objects: automobiles, houses, electronic equipment, food, toiletries. The underprivileged take on the appearance not of an exploited class but of simply lesser consumers. The contradiction of class is redefined as a continuum of consumption" (pg. 172). Gartman's argument centres on the success of General Motor's product marketing strategy over that of Henry Ford. Until the mid-twenties, Ford had dominated the auto market with its emphasis upon a simple vehicle for every household. Ford offered a single model car, manufactured as cheaply as possible - "you can get a Ford in any colour you want, as long as it's black" (black dried faster, thus saving assembly time). Ford's strategy had made the Ford Model T accessible to many middle class and rural persons, as well as the emerging "aristocracy" of labour in Ford's own assembly plants. Following the writings of Frederick Taylor, Ford had developed a highly paternalistic, social engineering view of the benefits of automobiles for workers, based on controlling workers' moral development. He offered unprecedented high wages to unskilled immigrant workers. Ford's ideas on autos and worker control were well received by fascist leaders in Europe. Hitler awarded Ford a medal of

64 Delivering Sustainable Transport honour for providing a people's car (Ford was long suspected of being a Nazi Sympathiser and wrote anti-Semitic essays as well) (Flink, 1988). As the auto market turned to urban sales in the mid-twenties, General Motors took a distinct marketing turn from Ford to focus upon the marketing and styling of vehicles. General Motors, under the leadership of Alfred Sloan, offered a line of upgrades in models; "a car for every man" (sic). (Gartman 1986). This emphasis on styling and status symbols was well received and led to rapid growth. In the late twenties, Ford was forced to concede victory to General Motors and diversified its models. David Gartman sees General Motors' strategy as a case of what Lukacs had identified as reified consumption in capitalism. The upgrades, as well as fantasy images sold with autos, obfuscated class distinctions between auto-workers and capitalist owners. Gartman also proposes that General Motors' "futuristic" styling of the fifties and sixties as reification of the idea of progress and escapist consumerism, primarily through the use of design elements from airplanes and rockets such as fins and fuselage elements. Gartman states, "the extent to which history could be and was shaped by human struggle was obscured by a vision of an inevitable future realised by natural technological progress" (pg. 182). But Gartman's idea of reified production process comes undone in the social upheaval of the 1960's. He notes that the automobile industry abandoned the standardised flight fantasy for a greater range of styles aimed at specific lifestyles, among them the youth subcultures, women and economy vehicles (pg. 183). Today, one might add pickup trucks, four wheel drive sport utility vehicles, minivans and luxury sport sedans to the list. The consumer continuum has come undone. Instead, households seem to have abandoned the upgrading of the family car for diversified household fleets instead, with a car for each activity. It is Gartman's assumption that real human needs are not being met by the reified consumption processes, but he brushes casually over certain areas of cultural production, such as the customisation of autos by youth for hot rods, or the values revolution of the sixties which contributed to the decline of oversized and stylised vehicles, or the growth of the market research industry, which bases its design advice on direct input from consumer opinions and analysis of sales data. We are in a period in which alternative fuelled vehicles and other personal vehicle technologies are further challenging the hegemony of the auto industry. The failure of the auto industry to dictate design indicates greater control by consumers over the meaning and use of objects than assumed in Gartman's study.

Connectivity and Accessibility Melvin Webber (1991) argues that car demand stems from the fact that the auto represents the best ground transport system; the most convenient, fastest and relatively cheapest way to get from here to there and back. He states that cars and telephones are similar technologies which have revolutionised connectivity. If you have a car, everywhere is connected to everywhere and everyone is connected to every one. He goes on to state that despite the problems cars have caused, the benefits of this potential connectivity should be extended to greater numbers

Reflexivity in Transport Studies 65 of persons. Webber's approach is straight ahead economic determinism - that successful innovations are those which best fill a need; the need here being connectivity (or access). But connectivity for what purpose? In Webber's view, the demand for autos and the services it provides existed when the auto arrived; people wanted to move to less dense patterns - the auto made it possible; people wanted to expand their leisure - the auto made it possible. The argument for economic determinism is supported by closer looks at the uses of autos for work, education, visiting and other practical applications to which the auto apparently has done a better job than previous transport systems (Corn 1991). But this naturalistic viewpoint assumes latent demand. One would have to believe that the present spatial arrangements in so called "edge" cities is also the form of our natural wants given the connectivity which cars created rather than a specific intersection of culture and technology. The activities of households which underlie auto use are very different from the activities of households a century before. Fifty per cent of women work full-time, a high percentage of meals are taken in restaurants, family's camp on vacations. Cars are an end unto themselves to many young persons, the primary reason for employment, the primary activity and the focus of creative energy. Youth growing up today have a set of uses for the auto which have no analogies in turn of the century America. Dating, cruising, joy riding are a few of the activities which cannot be assumed to be latent. Webber assumes that the ultimate end of transport systems is connectivity - but what is connectivity outside of the specific cultural formation of lifestyle capitalism, with its ethos for choice? We must examine more closely the feedback between specific technological forms and culture.

A Lifestyle Tool The process which has drawn most attention to the historical role of the auto was its effect upon the activities of everyday life. Progressive boosters in the United States at the turn of the century promoted the idea that the auto would revitalise the rural sector by improving its links to markets and improve city conditions by encouraging workers to move out of the tenements to suburbs, extending middle class hygiene to all Americans (Ling 1992). But along with the boosters came the critics who were concerned about the excessive freedom the car gave individuals. The Lynds and many other critics of the auto were concerned about the effects of the car to erode family values; after all, the car took teens and adults further away from home and the values therein. Men worked further away, not returning for lunch. Moral critics also worried that the auto encouraged casual sex, especially among teens. Religious Americans saw Sunday drives as a dangerous solvent of church attendance (Ling 1992). Kenneth Jackson (1985) notes that the car affected all six areas of social life in Muncie getting a living, making a home, raising the young, using leisure, engaging in religious practices and participating in community activities. Michael Berger (1991) offers this list of major effects: (1) the auto served as a rolling parlour of bedroom moving leisure activities out of the home (2) the auto offers the fastest way between two places, not limited by fixed route. As a result impromptu visits of shorter duration ensued (3) time and geography ceased to be social barriers they once were, thus the number and range of acquaintances increased and (4)

66 Delivering Sustainable Transport the car allowed individual members of families to have lives of their own (5) and finally, the car increased the number of inputs to family life over which parents had no control, thus loosening parental authority. Thus, while personal freedom may have been increasingly constrained at work, where often workers were being disciplined under scientific management, the car increased lifestyle choices. The experience of these increasing choices reinforced the sense and role of choice in the construction of the self. Even while new choices were explored, kinship and previous affiliations could be maintained by the informal visiting autos allowed. Berger proposes that the connotations and strengths of friendship may have become more casual. He also quotes Jesse Steiner (Berger 1992, 73) who found that the auto multiplied friendships based upon age, sex, or common interests rather than kinship and proximity. This coincides with Brilliant's (1989) findings during the 1920's in Los Angeles, the car allowed greater choice in friendships across the space of the city; that neighbours ignored. Brilliant notes that families ended affiliating with neighbours, instead driving to their friends of choice. One commentator of the time noted that the car increased the psycho-social range of humans (pg. 33), affecting the range of where families spent their vacations, bought groceries and sought clients. Children learned to distribute their activities and friendships across space early in life by being chauffeured to multiple activities outside the home (Rosenbloom, 1991, 41) and became socialised to times and distances for reasonable afternoon, day trips, weekend and extended driving vacations in which travel time is constantly balanced against sleep and entertainment. Youth took quickly to the freedom the automobile created; it put distance between them and parental authority. The car also put status pressures upon youth; creating new patterns of dating in which automobiles were central to dating; therefore a pre-requisite to adulthood (Brilliant, 1989, 35). For youth without vehicles, joy riding and hitchhiking became popular activities. Parents encouraged young adults to seek employment, often with the known goal of supporting payments or maintenance of an auto (as an apprenticeship to the production of consumption). Licensing and ownership of autos became rites of passage to adulthood.

Women and Cars Giddens' offers the women's movement as opening the realm of life politics Unking selfactualisation to political process. Women gained the right to drive before voting and used the auto to expand their range of activities. The automobile has been a central technology in this movement, contributing both to new forms of lifestyle options for women and at the same time drawing attention to structural differences in women's and men's life chances (Giddens 1993). Virginia Scharf (1991) has focused upon the role of automobiles in women's identity, particularly the collision between Victorian notions of proper feminine conduct and automobiles. She chronicles how the gasoline powered auto became a gendered object, both extending traditional categories of conduct, that is, driving was viewed by many as a male

Reflexivity in Transport Studies 67 territory, but also unleashing a new technology that was attractive to women and one which eventually drew the attention of automobile companies for new markets. Early in the development of the auto industry, a few wealthy women celebrated the car, sometimes making headlines with their exploits, even participating in races. At the same time, cultural critics questioned women's ability to drive and suggested women should remain passengers only, or limit their use of cars to electric vehicles, which at the tune remained under powered and constrained to a small radius from home compared to the rapid development of gasoline vehicles. Car companies noted however that sales among women were growing and responded also by making cars more convenient for women, with starter motors and enclosed cabs. Designers also began focusing upon the attractiveness of cars, linking them to fashion. Scharf notes that women took to the road for many reasons, to prove they could master cars, to make a point for the women's movement, personal pleasure and during the First World War for patriotic duty in the Nurses Corp. The auto allowed women to travel through urban areas and at times which were considered previously unsafe on public transit. At the same time gender boundaries remained, with men doing all of the driving in many households. Eventually, the transformation of space created by the auto and the movement of the auto companies into car markets for women, contributed to the obsolescence of gender classifications. The car offered easy access to the public realm for women and contributed to whole new ways of organising family and domestic life. While women's access to the car in the period following World War Two consisted of expansion of the domestic sphere, women's access to the auto and the expansion of their routine activity space preceded entry to the workforce and much of the women's movement in the 1970's. Despite former ideals of motoring and gender, in the past few decades driving has become universal among the sexes. Wachs (1992) notes that 70 per cent of men over seventy years of age have Driving Licenses, while only 30 per cent of women over seventy have Driving Licenses. Yet, over 90% of men and women now have licences and there are no differences between genders in licensing rates among the young and middle-age groups. Yet, despite those licensing similarities, Martin Wachs maintains that the spatial organisation of cities and suburbs represents gendered organisation of space as much as increases in mobility. He notes that Sandra Rosenbloom finds women continue making most household shopping and family business trips, while men continue to make more work and recreational trips (Rosenbloom, 1992). The national Transportation Survey of 1983 found that male drivers drove 13,962 miles on an average while females drove only 6,381 miles. Women make commutes which are one-half to two-thirds the average man's journey to work (Hanson and Johnson 1985). Wachs proposes that we should expect such patterns to continue for some time, that the suburban planning created protected suburbs which separated the masculine public realm of work and cities from the domesticated and feminised suburbs (pg. 99). And yet, despite such continuing distinctions, a tension exists between both the lifestyle opportunities of the road and women's responsibilities to children and family roles. Writers in the early women's movement criticised suburbs heavily for the isolation and feminised space (Friedan, 1965). As both Garreau and Wachs note, women must often settle for work

68 Delivering Sustainable Transport which is in close proximity to home, so that they can meet childcare and other household responsibilities. The massive development of low wage service industry jobs in the suburban areas is the result of companies taking advantage of lower cost, part and full-time female labour force which is available in suburban areas. Giddens notes the tension such spatial organisation of lives creates. He discusses the lifestyle choices of women who must access balance between wages, job location and childcare opportunities (Giddens 1984 pg. 115).

Giddens: Modernity, the Ascent of Lifestyle and the Emergence of Life Politics Giddens offers the most ambitious reworking of social theory to understand the processes of modernity and its linked reflexivity that can be applied to autos. While interested in process, Giddens is not an evolutionist: he views modernity as an episode (epoch), not a developmental stage. Modernity is a break with previous epochs. Within modernity Giddens is interested in extending much of the work of historical materialists to identifying processes related to four institutional clusters - surveillance, capitalist enterprise, industrial production and control of violence (Giddens 1991, 15). But in modernity, these processes are not exclusive to the domain of the state, as imaged in historical materialism. Indeed, following on the heels of Wallerstein, Giddens sees modernity to be a post-tradition epoch in which globalisation is a central process. But in addition to Wallerstein, Giddens draws on McLuhan's image of a global village to view the overall effects of media to stretch social systems over time and space (1991,24). While previous theorists such as Adorno or Baudrillard have focused upon the commodification of experience through the media, Giddens is concerned with a much broader range of processes and institutions in modernity, which transform the content of self, processes which have increasingly disembedded individuals from traditional contexts. Compared to historical materialists, post-modernists and Habermas, Giddens sees modernity as a process which intrudes more deeply in the formation of the self. Giddens notes: A universe of social activity in which electronic media have a central and constitutive role, nevertheless, is not one of 'hyper-reality' in Baudrillard's sense. Such an idea confused the pervasive impact of mediated experience with the internal referentiality of social systems of modernity - the fact that these systems become largely autonomous and determined by their own constitutive influences (1991,5). Giddens' concept of the media is much closer to McLuhan's idea of a global village; a unitary framework of mediated experience, but is distinct from McLuhan and Baudrillard in that Giddens is focused more on the way in which the pervasive impact of mediated experience in modernity is received. Whereas post-modernists view mediated experience as essentially a constraint on identity, a new form of social power invested in the capitalist enterprise over individuals, Giddens sees constraints but also enabling aspects of mediated experience.

Reflexivity in Transport Studies 69 Giddens sees something new in modernity, what he calls the reflexive project of the self. This is not however, the untrammelled self, sought by enlightenment philosophers, but rather an ontological demand created in the cultural vacuum of post-traditional society. Against new forms of mediated experience, self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour. The reflexive project of the self, which consists in the sustaining of coherent, yet continuously revised, biographical narratives, takes place in the context of multiple choice as filtered through abstract systems. In modern social life, the notion of lifestyle takes on a particular significance. The more tradition loses its hold, and the more daily life is reconstituted in terms of the dialectical interplay of the local and global, the more individuals are forced to negotiate lifestyle choices among a diversity of options (Giddens 1991, 5). Thus, Giddens, rather than constrain the cultural field to language, as Habermas and those following Levi Strauss and de Saussure have done, enlarges the cultural field to ontological issues - thus carving out a new place for the individual in cultural production - the new responsibility of individuals in modernity is to construct themselves, mediated however through abstract systems, in turn filtered by markets. It is a less familiar landscape than found in even Baudrillard, where underneath it all one might still hope to find a real Frenchman. In Giddens' high modernity, local disappears, what is French becomes an identity process as opposed to custom. Structuration Giddens offers Structuration as an approach (not a theory) to analysis of the processes of modernity. The primary notion, says Giddens, is contained in Marx's often quoted phrase that "men make their own history, but not under conditions of their choice" (from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) (Giddens, 1984, xxi). As one reader jests, Giddens has rewritten Marx to say, "men make their own structures, but not within structures of their own choosing". Structuration theory, as it were, is an approach not to the opposition of modernity to tradition, as might be represented in Ferdinand Tonnies, but rather an attempt to understand the ongoing dynamism of modernity, as traditions are disembedded for use in lifestyle. The main goal of Giddens in his Structuration approach is to get away from an objectified notion of society or evolution found in structural approaches and the view in those approaches of humans as docile bodies. In Giddens' view, the structures are not things, but only exist "as forms of social conduct reproduced chronologically across time and space. The Structuration of institutions can be understood in terms of how it comes about that social activities become 'stretched' across wide spans of time and space" (Giddens, 1984, xxi). The primary processes of modernity are disembedding mechanisms which cut loose individuals from the traditions of their communities and restructure them across time and space (1984, 21). Giddens discusses two mechanisms, symbolic tokens and expert systems. The central symbolic token has been money which he relates to work by Georg Simmel who drew attention to the spatial (and Giddens adds temporal) distancing which money allows to occur between an individual and his products, thus allowing for greater mobility. The second disembedding mechanism is expert systems. The growth of expert systems allows for

70 Delivering Sustainable Transport removing social relations from localised context; one relies upon devices constructed and operated by impersonal contacts (1991,18). Expert systems employ technologies to disembedded individuals from tradition. Giddens notes that the primary effect of calendars, clocks as well as maps and surveying devices has been the creation of zones of time and space which are empty, dislocated from specific activities, thus open to new designations. This allowed for the insertion of new things into abstract time and space. For example, calendars allow the worldwide designation of certain days and hours as workdays for years yet in the future. Also, standard dating allows for a unitary frame of world-historical framework of action and experience (Giddens 1990,21). Two aspects of modernisation result from these technologies, the colonisation of night and time space convergence. Following the work of McLuhan, Giddens notes that electricity, through use of lighting has set off a major process of colonisation of the night for the pluralisation of life-worlds. Time-space convergence includes physical media, such as automobiles and air travel, which increase co-presence and electronic media which make nonpresent others central to lifestyle (Giddens 1991, 23). Like the market, which commodities labour, goods and symbols, colonisation of the night and time-space convergence contribute further to the disembedding of life-worlds from local context. The study of lifestyle, however, does not end with understanding the mere disembedding of individuals from local meaning, but rather takes up the task of understanding how life trajectories are constituted across time and space (Giddens, 1991,75-77).

Reflexivity and Knowledge Ability Finally, refiexivity is itself a mechanism of modernity. Social practices are examined and reformed constantly in the light of new information about those very same practices. To paraphrase Giddens, modernity isn't just the embracing of the new, but a general condition of allowing for the re-examination of everything, constantly (Giddens 1991, 39). Reflexivity, says Giddens, is the "monitored character of the ongoing flow of social life" (Giddens 1984, 3). It is an ongoing process of the rationalisation of social practices, on a daily basis. He says "actors - also routinely and for the most part without fuss - maintain a continuing 'theoretical understanding' of the grounds of their activity", which to some extent they could explain (Giddens, 1984, 5). Humans, in Giddens' work are knowledgeable agents. Giddens refers to this knowledge ability as practical consciousness and finds it is the part of human life to which structural approaches have been blind. The role of knowledge is a critical arena in modernity. Giddens and Bourdieu have emphasised in their analysis of class relations in advance capitalism that a technocratic class trained in the university forms a new social class in competition with the bourgeoisie. As discussed earlier, Bourdieu (1984), Douglas and Isherwood (1979) show how respectively in England and France that knowledge ability has become a specific sensibility of these new classes. In Bourdieu's France, objects serve as grounds for discourse, and display of competency - although the sense of what constitutes competency varies between social sectors. In England, the education system reproduces class structure more precisely. In that

Reflexivity in Transport Studies 71 system, information, says Douglas and Isherwood, is a boundary feature of exclusion as much as a performance. The upper classes in England use information to identify members (Douglas and Isherwood 1979,182). While Bourdieu and Douglas emphasise the strategic aspects of consumptive knowledge in class membership, Giddens emphasises late modernity's reflexive structure of social relations resulting in knowledgeable subjects. Giddens proposes that the ontological task of selfcreation (not social class) forces subjects to be more knowledgeable, in order to navigate markets. To deal with the problem of knowledge ability, expert systems are employed to help with the task of self-actualisation; for example the therapy industry, but also many institutions are tuned to this task, such as schools and even the military.

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Lifestyle Giddens makes the lifestyle a central concept in self-identity. Giddens notes that lifestyle is an interesting case of institutional reflexivity (1991, 81). The earliest uses of the term lifestyle, in social science, date to Max Weber and Alfred Adler. It was Adler who was most influential in bringing the idea of lifestyle to popular use as a guiding line to which individuals adhere. Adler's ideas were taken up by the alternative lifestyle movement of the 1960's and the advertising industry at the same time. Social scientists have sparingly used the term lifestyle, perhaps put off by its popular use among advertisers and market researchers. Market researchers, says McCracken (1988) have sought for some time to use the lifestyle concept to get at class driven and personality driven consumption patterns, hoping to identify market segments for product targeting. But McCracken concludes that the effort has been largely unfruitful. He notes that the most compelling aspect of their attempts was "the lifestyle concept permitted the observer to draw together data that were normally treated desperately and to glimpse patterns of interrelationship otherwise unseen. It seemed to capture everything about consumption". He concludes that the failure of lifestyle research is that "we do not have the necessary theory to capture the inter-related nature of lifestyle phenomena" (1988,121-122). Giddens suggests: "Lifestyle involves a cluster of habits and orientations, and hence has certain unity - important to a continuing sense of ontological security - that connects options in a more or less ordered pattern (1991, 82). Giddens sees stylistic unity as an issue for the individual to maintain coherence, much like Bourdieu does with class and cultural performance. There are a limited number of lifestyle patterns to follow, but the individual nevertheless makes choices within this framework, sometimes altering its content. Stylistic coherence is a tension in biography and the self. More must be said about style because a number of culture theorists have a specific meaning of lifestyle related to what they call the increasing aestheticisation of modem consumer society. In its most direct meaning, they propose the choices consumers make are patterned through conscious artistry or aesthetics - either on the part of industry or consumers. Style is associated with fashion cycles as well as movements in architecture. Its association with these movements in the art world suggests a systematic process of change, especially one which is highly commodified. Stuart Ewen (1988) finds this systematic change as an arena for politics, especially as he views style as a surface condition. He discusses three arenas of style. First, style is a politics of the self. He states, "as one falls into encounters with other people - intimates and strangers alike - style is a way of stating who one is: politically, sexually, in terms of status and class". Also, "it is worn on the surfaces of our bodies; it organises the space in which we live; it permeates the objects of our daily lives". Second, "style places an aura around the world as it is, and offers an influential rendition of what many see as 'social change', as history". Third, "style has come to comprise a basic form of information within our society" (Ewen, 1988,43).

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Ewen's proposal for the content of style fits well with Giddens' idea of structuration. Thus, for example, today's youth inherit the sixties movement as a period of global stylistic unity from which they can draw to express political sentiment and lifestyle choices. In this way, the relationship between media and lifestyle is less deterministic than Frankfurt theorists would have it; choosers appropriate mediated cultural materials. This notion of cultural appropriation is central to understanding lifestyle, otherwise common errors are made in interpreting globalized cultural activities. For example, Westerners have often interpreted Japanese appropriation of North American culture as imitation. This is not to overstate choice; Japanese have made these choices in the context of American domination of media and worldwide politics.

Emancipatory and Life Politics Of course not all options are available to all persons. Work conditions, life chances - in Weber's sense - providing variable option sets, as do the resources which one receives according to birth. The labour movement has worked to redistribute life chances, what Giddens calls emancipatory politics. But additionally, the 20th century has brought new types of social movements, based upon what Giddens has called life politics (Giddens 1991, 9). Essentially these movements call for access to all the materials necessary for selfactualisation. These life politics, while built on emancipatory politics, are nevertheless as significant, or more significant within regions of poverty where tradition may be less intact. Giddens agrees with Bourdieu that lifestyle variations are important features of stratified social classes; part of the ongoing structuration of social strata. Yet, the politics of social class takes place within the larger historical context of life politics. Whereas emancipatory politics flows from opposing the fixity of tradition, life politics emerge under conditions of freedom. While emancipatory politics concerns problems of distribution, life politics are more concerned with ontological problems of a global community - how are we to live? Emancipatory politics concerns life chances, life politics concerns lifestyle. Life politics requires emancipatory politics, but under conditions of reflexivity, life politics is about revising lifestyles to colonise the future (1991, 214). Giddens considers the women's movement as opening up the sphere of life politics, of making the personal political. He notes that in her book, the Feminine Mystique, Berry Friedan concludes with a discussion of life planning to help women create identities in the new public domain emerging for women. Giddens finds this pattern of life planning and politics throughout contemporary politics (1991, 216). Giddens also views the ecological movement as linked to life politics. Grappling with the threats of the earth's ecosystems is bound to demand coordinated global responses on levels far removed from individual action. On the other hand, these threats will not be effectively countered unless there is reaction and adaptation on the part of every individual.

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He adds: In a complicated interweaving of reflexivity, widespread reflexive awareness of the reflexive nature of systems currently transforming ecological patterns is both necessary and likely to occur (1991,222). This last observation of Giddens offers one of the primary complexities of the environmental movement which has potentially radical effects on society - that its politics permeates both world politics and life politics; the two are directly linked in consumer societies. Action is required of government, industry and individuals. As Melucci (1989) notes, it is well understood throughout society that there are limits to the political effectiveness of political parties to create change. In direct terms, the tragedy of the commons is well understood by all members of society. The environmental agenda, through deeply reflexive projects, affecting every area of consumer life, challenges the practical consciousness of householder's daily, iterating the environmental consumerism dilemma. It is not surprising that opinion polls, like those of the Roper Foundation, find consistently that most Americans consider themselves environmentalists; environmentalism is a consideration of identity which does not tie individuals to a specific set of political or environmentally sensitive activities (for which there is not consensus on the content) but rather an open ended account of the biographical sensibilities of individuals. The environmental movement produces a deep life politics, through its thorough critique of consumer society, its focus on the minutia of consumer decisions and its critique of material goods as part of the construction of the self. Additionally, the environmental movement, by its links to a philosophy of wild lands, leads to the creation of specific lifestyle locales parks, recreation areas, wilderness areas, shores, lakes and other "natural habitats". These lifestyle locales heighten the reflexivity of environmentalism; self-actualisation is intrinsically linked to the protection and management of public water, air and land resources. Thus, the auto stands at a reflexive crossroads, it is at once the central technology of lifestyle, and yet a leading cause of environmental degradation, which threatens lifestyle meanings. Automobiles may increasingly engender a radical life politics. As alternative automotive technologies are developed, households and individuals are offered new options sets, which impact the central technology of lifestyle production.

Conclusions The automobile is an axial location in the development of the logic of lifestyle production in advance capitalism, with the rearrangement of urban space, markets and social relationships. During the 20th century no single consumer item, of such budget proportions has entered into household budgets, as has the automobile. To individuals, the auto was a multi-purpose consumer good, which offered relatively cheap mobility, new status for workers, expanded the market of goods, the scope of business, the patterns of friendship and leisure activities, in abstract terms the automobile both expanded personal space, but also expanded the potential connectivity of persons to places and people. Despite the structural inadequacies of cities and

Reflexivity in Transport Studies 75 suburban planning, the auto nevertheless offers optional transportation planning to compress space, to make possible alternative lifestyle plans, which incorporate wider sets of resources. As a particular lifestyle technology, the auto creates alternative possibilities in individual option sets, which challenge individuals to reconsider their current trajectory. Thus, what can be read is a greater notion of self in choice of affiliation - choosing to be with those like one's self. The car served as an agent to shift greater cultural attention to the processes of self, away from local community reproduction, by increasing the sources for the stuff of selfformation. Giddens' structuration approach provides a distinct agenda for an analysis of consumer life. One cannot rely upon a cursory visit to the products of the culture industry, be that art, ad copy or entertainment. Structuration of society takes place in daily events, in locales, in the life planning of individuals. Given the routine of those events, much of the practical knowledge of individuals is often unconscious, while consciousness is given to reflexive tasks, to the creation of self. The reflexive ability of individuals in regards to that structuration is considerable, but not unbounded. Finding out the bounds of knowledge becomes a goal of the researcher together with the subject.

References Berger, M. (1991). The Car's Impact on the American Family. In: The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life. (M. Wachs, and M. Crawford, eds.), 57-74. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Brilliant, A. (1989). The Great Car Craze; How Southern California collided with the Automobile in the 1920's. Woodbridge Press, Santa Barbara. Corn, J. (1991). Work and Vehicle: A Comment and a Note. In: The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life. (M. Wachs, and M. Crawford, eds.), 25-34. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Douglas, M. and Isherwood, B. (1979). The World of Goods. W.W. Norton and Co, New York. Durning, A. (1992). How Much is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth. W.W. North and Co, New York. Ewen, S. (1988). All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture. Basic Books Inc., New York. Flink, J. (1988). The Automobile Age. The MIT Press, Cambridge. Frieden, B. (1965). The Feminine Mystique. Pelican, New York. Gartman, D. (1986). Reification of Consumer Products: A General History Illustrated by the Case of the American Automobile. Sociological Theory, 4,167-185. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California Press, Berkeley. Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

76 Delivering Sustainable Transport Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Giddens, A. (1993). The Transformation of Intimacy. Polity Press, Cambridge UK. Hanson, S. and I. Johnson, (1985). Gender Differences in Work-Trip Length: Explanations and Implications. Urban Geography 6, 3,193-219. Jackson, K. (1985). Crabgrass Frontier: The Sub-Urbanisation of the United States. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ling, P. (1992). America and the Automobile: Technology, Reform and Social Change, 18931923. Manchester University Press, New York. Lynd, R. and Lynd, H. (1929). Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace. Lynd, R. and H. Lynd, (1937). Middletown in Transition. Harcourt Brace, New York. McCracken, G. (1988). Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present. Hutchinson Radius, London. Rosenbloom, S. (1992). Why Working Families Need a Car. In The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life. (M. Wachs, and M. Crawford, ed.), 39-56. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Sachs, W. (1992). For Love of the Auto: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires. University of California Press, Berkeley. Scharf, V. (1991). Taking the Wheel. The Free Press, New York. Wachs, M (1992). Men, Women and Urban Travel in The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life. (M. Wachs, and M. Crawford, ed.), 86-100. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Webber, M. (1991). The Joys of Automobility in The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life. (M. Wachs, and M. Crawford, ed.), 274-284. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.

5

MOBILISING THE MOBILE: THE POLITICAL INCLUSION OF THE TRANSPORT USER

Suzanne McDonald-Walker, University College, Northampton, UK

Introduction1 In 1997, the European Union's (EU) Framework Type Approval Directive was defeated after extensive lobbying by the Federation of European Motorcyclists (FEM), which had been established in 1988 to serve as a lobbying presence for the national riders-rights organisations of Europe; that is, organisations aimed at serving the political interests of motorcyclists. Commonly referred to as 'the Multi-Directive', the legislation was primarily concerned with restrictions on motorcycles that were viewed as an invasion of bikers' civil rights to choose their own types of vehicle and riding behaviour. The arrival of European bikers into European politics surprised existing political actors. For MEPs, as one British MEP argued, 'the first reaction was shock', to see bikers lobbying the European Parliament. Motorcycling manufacturers were also wrong-footed by the campaign for, not expecting a European-wide campaign to defeat the Multi-Directive on the part of their own consumers, they had already pre-complied with the Multi-Directive on the issue of noise limits, the only part of the legislation upon which the lobby was ultimately to be defeated, and that due only to the aforementioned pre-compliance.

1 This research is based upon five years participant observation among the motorcycling community and British, European and international riders'-rights and motorcycling organisations. Additionally, forty in-depth interviews were conducted with British and European riders-rights activists and questionnaires were carried out with a control group of model club members from the RG500 Club. Statistical information comes from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, Automobile Association, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, EMAP National Publications, MINTEL, the Motor Cycle Industry Association and the National Readership Survey.

78 Delivering Sustainable Transport What is of interest in this case is that motorcyclists were unanticipated entrants into the lists of political engagement. Indeed, as Willis had argued in the 1970s, bikers had seemed unable to undertake 'any kind of political activity or power struggle' (1978, 6). Consequently, this transition from sub-cultural grouping to political activists in recent years appears to require explanation. As such, we need to understand the 'why' and the "how' of mobilisation. The first part of this is, in many ways, easily answered: the legislative proposals of the European Union galvinised the community into action. What, therefore, is of more interest is the 'how' of mobilisation. In order to explore this, we shall take as a starting point, Melucci's observation that the 'political level is just one of the possible fields for collective action' (1995,113); that is, that the move to political action cannot be seen to spring inevitably from communal grievance but is something which is, Melucci argues, 'a fact to be explained, rather than assumed' (1989, 26). Consequently, we shall attempt to explore the social milieu within which bikers live and come to their identities and beliefs in order to uncover whether the everyday experience of bikers may help account for those later actions. Further, we shall also examine the British motorcycling community itself in order to uncover those mechanisms which facilitated political action. What is of concern, therefore, is not the political activities against the Multi-Directive as such but, rather, the habitus of British bikers. Clearly, the British community may not be strictly analogous to that in other European member states in that, for example, historical or legislative conditions may differ. However, it is believed that both the experiential nature of motorcycling itself and the common threat of EU legislation provide sufficient common ground to enable us to uncover fundamental patterns which may provide useful indicators for subsequent research elsewhere. The significance of such an examination, it is believed, is twofold. Firstly, and generally, it may help us understand more fully arguments surrounding 'postmodern' politics; that is, the muchdebated emergence of 'new' political voices in the contemporary period. Secondly, and more specifically, it may highlight how transport research may be enriched through the Inclusion of the user in methodological parameters through the perception of consumers as active participants in decision-making in the arena of transportation policy. The Biking Experience In order to understand the mobilisation potential among British bikers it is necessary to understand the cognitive frames which underlie riders' perceptions of the world: to know what they 'know'. Such understandings come from the cultural world they inhabit in that, as della Porta and Diani inform us, 'culture provides the cognitive apparatus which people need to orient themselves in the world.... The vision of culture as a set of instruments according to which social actors make sense of their own life experiences' (1999, 68). Thus we need to form an understanding of the context within which British riders live in order to determine those factors held as salient to the community. Consequently, it is first necessary to briefly outline the main historical developments within the community as these may carry important consequences for contemporary riders. The major point to be made in regard to the history of motorcycling within the UK is that it has gone through three distinct phases since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first phase may be characterised as the period up until World War Two. Prior to

Mobilising the Mobile 79 this, motorcycling was considered the prerogative of elites. The cost of vehicles was such that it remained the privilege either of the wealthy and/or members of the armed services. This sense of the past can be found among contemporary bikers: ... in the very early days of motorcycling, it really was a gentleman's thing. It was what people like Lawrence of Arabia did. I mean, they were quite expensive, I guess, the really performance motorcycles. What you've got to remember is that the army used dispatch riders in both wars and, you know, dispatch riders were very much courageous people. Lawrence of Arabia was into motorbikes and, in fact, he was killed on a Brough Superior. However, after the war, as the middle classes moved to the car, the motorcycle became the main form of transport for the working classes and/or young people, with the aspiration that a car could be purchased if future circumstances were more affluent (McDonald-Walker, 2000). Two riders, in their fifties and forties respectively, reflect on both aspects of this period: In the '50s... motorcycling, to a large extent, was regarded as a working-class activity. Which means that the movers and shakers tended to look down their nose at it, in that, when cars weren't readily affordable, and motorcycles were cheap transport, you would tend to have a bike. If you got married and you had a family, you'd attach a sidecar on it, and maybe then, later on, you might be able to afford a car, or you might go on forever with the sidecar outfit. Well, they were getting a bad image because of the 'ton-up boy' days, because they used to have ton-up races in between the cafes and things like that, and the famous chicken runs. As indicated in the above quotations, these two historical periods were accompanied by differing types of imagery. The first period was associated with the glamour, danger and excitement of elitist and military associations whilst the latter period, despite the pragmatic reasons for which the working-class majority bought motorcycles, was to become associated with the various negative connotations of youth culture which came in the wake of the activities of the 'ton-up' boys, (that is, that they went at speeds over l00mph), in the 1950s and the 'mods and rockers' in the 1960s (Cohen, 1980). Motorcycling had consequently become downwardly mobile as it became associated with the dangerous and rebellious activities of a deviant sub-culture (McDonald-Walker, 2000). The third, contemporary, period is witnessing an upturn in motorcycling's fortunes. Declining from the late 1960s, the numbers of motorcycles dropped to below one million in 1987 for the first time since 1953 before beginning a resurgence which continues to the present. However, there is a change in focus from the post-war period in that, as the car has become the primary transport choice for the British public, motorcycling has re-emerged as a leisure activity associated with those who buy expensive, powerful 'superbikes' as a secondary form of transport used primarily for enjoyment; although also, in congested cities such as London, for commuting (MINTEL Report, 1993; Automobile Association, 1995; Motor Cycle Industry

80 Delivering Sustainable Transport Association, 1995,1998,1999). Consequently, the motorcycle is now predominantly a toy for both the famous and for higher income, older, though still predominantly male sectors of the population; a trend also witnessed in the United States at Harley Davidson (McDonaldWalker, 2000). A founder member of MAG UK, and Harley Davidson enthusiast, reflects: ... the social profile of the biker has changed. To take an extreme example, HOG members are typically middle-aged, successful business men or people in, how shall we say, aspiring forms of employment. They're not stuck in dead-end jobs as a rule. They're people who command their own destinies. You've got a lot of rock stars getting on them. You've got a lot of professional people getting on them, mostly for fun, but increasingly I see them using them to get to work, certainly in London anyway. You see more people getting off bikes and they've got suits on than ever in the past. The history of motorcycling in the UK, therefore, is a dynamic one; passing through stages of social acceptance, into marginalisation and, currently, undergoing a renaissance. However, this history only tells us about processes rather than understandings. As such, it is also necessary to examine the experience of motorcycling in order to assess whether factors informing, or resulting from, the choice to ride carry ramifications for political mobilisation. Clearly, the motorcycle is a consumer object. Just as clearly, both the vehicle itself and its associated activity cannot be reduced merely to the level of the material for, as Bauman argues, consumption 'is not just a matter if satisfying material greed, of filling your stomach. It is a question of manipulating symbols for all sorts of purposes. On the level of the lifeworld, it is for the purpose of constructing identity, constructing the self, and constructing relations with others' (1992, 223). It is in this sense that we can understand how, as we shall discover later, the variety of marques and types of vehicle available on the market carry important symbolic associations to bikers, who form an understanding of other bikers dependant upon the type of bike they ride, as indeed, they do by the types of clothing, helmet and other accessories, whether on the person or the vehicle. For the moment, what needs to be addressed is how motorcycling is viewed not merely as a form of transportation but as an activity which carries strong resonances on the experiential level. Motorcyclists attest that there is a sense of exhilaration in riding, a 'being in the world' that is more intense than is found in other forms of transportation: You are part of the bike, whereas you're in a car, and you have a screen in front of you, and I always think, when I'm driving the car, I could just have been looking at a video game. You've got no contact with it. Whereas, with a bike, you've got full feeling of what's going on around you. You've got a lot more perception of what's happening. That feeling of being out there, and you're moving, and you can go from one place to another, completely uninhibited, and the tarmac is six inches under your feet, and you're there, you're in it.... it's interactive with the world around you in a way that isn't achievable through any other mode of transport.

Mobilising the Mobile 81 However, beyond this immediate level of gratification it can be found that meanings attributed by bikers to their riding also relate to the history of British motorcycling, in that we may identify how riders understand motorcycling in a way which refers back to the first two phases outlined earlier. From the first period of the earliest years of the motorcycle, we can see a continuance of the idea of motorcycling as an exciting, romantic and dangerous activity, as one rider explains: I think, certainly, there is a bit of romantic in everybody that rides a motorcycle. Danger and romance are inseparable. And when people show you something awful, like the consequences of a fatal accident, and ask, "Where is the pleasure in that, and the excitement, and the romance?," it's in the exhilaration of a form of propulsion that's so personalised, so you. In this quotation, we can clearly see how the way in which the intensity of the experience is linked to the danger of riding, that, as one rider argued, that there is a 'risk factor you're introducing, aware that there is a risk to your own mortality, but needing desperately to be near the edge of it.' Yet whilst this may be in accord with debates about the hedonism of recent cultural developments (Roche, 1995), this statement must be qualified, in that it may be argued that the difference between riders and the general public is not so much that one group values hedonism to an extent that fails to perceive a danger that the other sees, but that, for riders, the risks of riding are understood in a context that takes into account the positive rewards of riding. As another rider explained, 'once you've discovered it, the pleasure of doing it far outweighs the possibilities of being injured.' Risk, therefore, means something different to the biking community than the way it is usually portrayed. It is not something remote or inevitable over which we have no control (Giddens, 1990; Beck, 1992). Within motorcycling culture, what may be perceived as sheer lunacy by members of the general public is regarded as a rational assessment of the dangers involved undertaken by a willing participant. Risk, therefore, is not an absolute but a perception. As Adams argues, 'risk is culturally constructed.... (People) construct reality out of their experience of it. They see the world differently and behave differently; they tend to associate with kindred spirits, who reinforce their distinctive perspectives on reality in general and risk in particular' (1995, 9). However, that said, riders would not deny the danger of riding but would, rather, argue that an everpresent potential risk means that riders have to be able to make swift, possibly life-saving, decisions. This is expressed clearly by the Chair of MAG UK: ... you've got to be a bit of a gambler as well, I think, to be a biker. I think it takes a certain amount of tough-mindedness to gamble for high stakes as well. You see, again, most motorcyclists are smart enough to know what the accident statistics are. So being a biker is a gamble to start with. I know it, I accept it. As far as I'm concerned it's a gamble that's worth it. I wouldn't enjoy life as much if I didn't ride a motorcycle anyway, so I don't see the point of not taking the chance. You take the chance, the gamble makes it better. And I don't want someone to take away my right to gamble. I'm not talking about a stupid gamble, I'm not talking about riding up the road with your eyes shut and hoping that you don't hit (anything). What you do is you try and improve the odds in your favour. You're trying to improve the odds, so you

82 Delivering Sustainable Transport leave yourself a good stopping distance. You see somebody at a junction, you weighup what they're doing. You watch them. You figure out your escape route if they pull out, all this kind of thing. Well, that's all part of it as well. In this sense, riders tend to perceive themselves as having particularistic mental qualities which stress both decision-making and individual responsibility in action: I think that there are certain mental characteristics that are more common amongst motorcyclists... I think bikers tends to be more, what I would call, tough-minded than a non-biker. I think bikers... are capable of making hard decisions and sticking by them, and putting-up with the consequences of them. Bikers thus see themselves as 'heirs' to the first phase in certain respects; in that their pursuits are associated with danger and romance. Yet if, from the above, we can see how the earliest phase of British motorcycling history is still manifest in riders' understandings, it is also the case that the second phase carries continued resonance; that is, that the rebellious hedonism of the 1950s and 1960s, imagery that was strongly influenced also by American portrayals of motorcycling in such movies as The Wild One and Easy Rider, is also part of motorcyclists' understandings. Three quotations capture this feeling: .. .there's got to be, among motorcyclists, or at least some of them, the underlying hooligan, rebel trend as well.... Motorcycling's a really easy way of not conforming. Maybe that's why a lot of people do ride bikes, because they see a little bit of the rebel in themselves coming out. Even if they don't speed. Even if they dont do hairraising things. People who drive down the road on a Harley at thirty miles an hour can imagine that they're Marlon Brando. And the devil is coming out of them even though they're doing absolutely nothing wrong. And they'll have the biggest grin on their face that you can imagine. People do like to live-up to the image as well, it's part of the fun, in a way, to do it. To rev. the bike loudly at traffic lights, or to overtake somebody on one wheel. You know, that sort of thing. As we shall see later, this rebellious legacy carried a downside in that it was during the 1960s that motorcyclists became excluded from the dominant culture (Bauman, 1991) in a way which still crucially affects bikers' understandings of their relationships with the general public. For the moment, what concerns us is how, from the above, it is possible to identify a particularistic world view that encapsulates both the experience of riding a motorcycle and Britain's motorcycling past. Within it are contained a variety perceptions, sometimes conflicting, of both elitism and, as we shall explore more later, social denigration; of danger and romance, and of a mental decisiveness and confidence in riders' own abilities which together may be held to inform the biking 'habitus'; that is, 'the modes of conduct, taste and feeling which predominate among members of particular groups' (Mennell, 1994, 177) and which potentially carry ramifications for both identity construction and mobilisation.

Mobilising the Mobile 83 Yet it must be borne in mind that the historical accuracy of these understandings is less important than their role in forming a 'significant history' which encapsulates the key events and understandings of a group in a way which provides meaning and identity (Najam, 1988, 1990; McDonald-Walker, 1998). In this sense, the significant history of a group acts as a legacy which allow group members to classify experience and act into the future. What needs to be explored, therefore, is how these understandings of both the history and experience of riding may underpin key beliefs amongst Britain's bikers which may influence political action. Individualistic Collectivism The first major understanding held by riders has already been raised in an implicit sense in earlier quotations; namely, individualism, the valorisation of which is central to communal understandings. The solo nature of riding, (even with a pillion, one can hardly hold a conversation), and the necessity of making ones own decisions means that bikers tend to view themselves as highly individualistic. This is manifested both materially, through the type of vehicle ridden, and through subjective orientation. Two bikers, one in his forties and the other in his thirties, capture this: Every person is an individual, and motorcycling brings out that individuality.... As a motorcyclist, you can bring out your individuality with your bike and your clothing and your style of life. I tend to think that motorcyclists are individualists, as far as they can be. In my experience, there's something about them that sets them apart. In other words, I think that everyone I know as a motorcyclist can also drive a car. So it's a real choice. It's not through necessity that they've got a motorbike. They actually prefer this motorbike for whatever reason it is. Whether it's the performance of the thing, whether it's being out in the fresh air, whether it's mobility, whether it's posing; whatever the hell it happens to be. Their preferred mode of transport is a motorcycle. Now, I think it does say something about the person as an individual, that they're not part of the herd. They either want to be seen to be different, or they're prepared to be seen to be different. In the latter quotation, we can identify an assertive individualism that Rustin associates with 'the Thatcherite insistence on the rights of individuals and "consumers'", and which may be held to underlie an emphasise on Values of individualism, difference, autonomy and choice' (1994, 89-90). In accord with this argument, we can see how this sense of individuality is often expressed by bikers in relation to the concept of freedom, which is drawn upon on two inter-related levels. Firstly, motorcyclists see the activity of riding as one which enables them to feel a freedom in action but, secondly, this is associated with the concept of freedom in a social and political sense. Both of these understandings are encapsulated below: In urban areas you don't get stuck in the traffic, and when you're out in the country, I remember a few years ago going to Scotland and riding along this road like a ribbon across the landscape. There were just two of us on our bikes, didn't see a car for

84 Delivering Sustainable Transport miles. Absolutely wonderful. Yes, you get a marvellous feeling of freedom on a bike. You're sort of exposed to the elements, it's a total experience. I mean, all this I'm saying is probably a cliehe which everybody else says about it but, yes, that's a very positive thing about it. The freedom, both from constraints in urban areas and when you're out on the open road. They're individuals, and I dont think they're into collective things.... It's a very big generalisation, but it's about as close as you can come to it, is that motorcyclists want to be able to do what they want, it's almost tending towards an anarchist view. They don't want anyone to tell them what to do. They just want to go out and do it, and want to be trusted to be able to make decisions for their lives. Providing it doesn't affect anyone else adversely, they just want to be left to their own devices, and they believe they can be trusted to do that. It is this latter understanding, of a 'freedom from' (Giddens, 1990), that provides the basis for potential political mobilisation in that it is the intense personal and individual experience of motorcycling which underlies bikers' attitudes to political intervention; they desire freedom from legislators in order to be free to pursue their own goals. It is possible from an analysis of the biking community, therefore, to agree with arguments emphasising that new social movements are concerned both with the affirmation of identities, communities and lifestyles (Seidman, 1992) and the launching of political challenges in defence of'models of behaviour and moral codes' (della Porta and Diani, 1999, 42). As one rider succinctly argues, 'if you're looking for one word that sums-up biker politics, or biker attitudes, it's "freedom".' Another rider explains more fully: It's a physical freedom that intuitively translates to a political freedom. It translates if you're willing to do something about it. There's a condition to it, really, of recognising that it's something that's worth doing and that it's something that won't always be there if you get Safety Nazis in the way, and you get bureaucrats in the way, and people who sit in grey buildings and wear grey suits and live grey lives and have grey wives and write with grey pens on grey bits of paper. They just don't see any of the colour of it. Yet whilst individualistic orientations play a large part in the providing the basis for the mobilisation potential of bikers, through the provision of a sense of hostility to potential interference, on its own this is not sufficient to explain collective action for, instead, it may lead to individualistic solutions to questions of self-realisation (Calhoun, 1994). Rather, an additional ingredient also plays an important role; namely, a defensive collectivism. As outlined earlier, the second phase of biking history in Britain witnessed the growth of a rebellious, deviant imagery associated with motorcycles which led to bikers being seen as 'folk devils' (S. Cohen, 1980). Social concern surrounding the activities of, particularly, mods and rockers, meant bikers saw their community ostracised and marginalised by the wider society. As a consequence of this, biking can therefore be understood as having undergone a process of stigmatisation (Goffman, 1963) from the late 1950s and early 1960s, precisely at that time when is was mostly associated with the working-class and youths; that is, at that

Mobilising the Mobile 85 period when motorcycling was most common among socially powerless groups (Mennell, 1994; Seidman, 1992). This stigmatisation held important consequences for British bikers for, as Diani informs us, 'social identity consists of two components, self definition and external definition' (1992, 122). Thus whilst bikers identify themselves, at a very crude level, as anyone riding a powered two-wheeler over l00cc, there is another, more complex way, in which the community 'derives its sense of self from contrasting its self with others' (A Cohen, 1985, 116). In this case, due to the exclusivity of the biking identity (della Porta and Diani, 1999) - one is either a biker or one is not - and, consequently, the harshness of the contrast between the two categories (Hogg and Abraham, 1988; Lash, 1990), British bikers developed dichotomous and conflictual understandings of their relationship with non-bikers as motorcycling came increasingly under attack. This feeling among riders, that they are accorded treatment which is discriminatory, can be seen from the following: There's still very much (the image of) the incredibly uneducated, greasy, dirty, skuzzy biker with no respect of society or anything else. That one hasn't existed ever, really.... But the media jumped on it, and that was that. "I'm sorry. That's bikers. That's the way you are. You're all exactly the same. Tarred with the same brush. We don't really want you in our establishment. You are going to start fights. Nobody could possibly have a conversation with you because you're all ill-read, and probably just completely illiterate. Yeah, you might be able to strip a bike down at the side of the road, but why do you never wash afterwards?" There's still a tremendous fear. I mean, the media struck fear into the hearts of individuals. I can walk down the street and get the usual intimidation that I would do from a lot of people, for whatever reason. But if I walk down the street in my leathers, people cross the road. ... you can still go to pubs where they can't discriminate against people going into a pub because of the colour of their skin, but you still get signs outside them saying 'no bikers'.... We're often viewed in a similar way as so-called football hooligans. You know, you get 'no football coaches'. It's illegal to discriminate because of race, colour and creed but there's nothing to stop them discriminating because of the form of transport you decide to use at the time. I know of friends, who've been to a pub on their bike and been turned away, so they've gone home, got the car and gone back again, and been let in. I mean, that's inherently wrong. I get very annoyed. It annoys me that people can have that attitude.... They may dislike me because of my appearance, but people should look past that. People should look past what you're wearing, and what you're riding and what you look like. From these observations we can identify how bikers may come to form resistance identities as a consequence of social denigration (Castells, 1997). Thus whilst such stigmatisation is held to be partially in decline as biking becomes more 'respectable', such attitudes on the part of non-bikers have helped generate a feeling of 'us and them'; that riders are different from, and seen as less than, the general public.

86 Delivering Sustainable Transport It is possible to argue, therefore, that the experience of riding a motorcycle would appear to generate a basic sense of recognition between bikers; that they are a beleaguered minority bound together in one particular kind of activity. Yet, as Blasius (1994) informs us, whilst sub-cultures may be negatively defined by an external, hostile culture which perceives the minority as deviating from the norm, and bonds may form between members based on this oppression, a negative community cannot survive merely as a reaction to outside threats. A community must instead be a voluntary association based on shared norms, values, collective action and shared history. Earlier we explored the former of these, what needs to be explored further is whether the 'immanent' sense of self-recognition based on stigmatisation that we have discovered above is affirmed more overtly among British motorcyclists in terms of a positive understanding of community.

The Motorcycling Community Questions of shared community are related to concerns over collective identity which, Melucci argues: ... is an achieved definition of a situation, constructed and negotiated through the constitution of social networks which then connect the members of a group or movement. This process of definition implies the presence of cognitive frames, of dense interactions, of emotional and affective exchanges.... The important question then becomes how "we" becomes we (1992,44). Consequently, we need to understand the ways in which the biking community is produced and reproduced across time and space. Above we have seen how the shared historical experience of biking in Britain has helped crystallise a negative sense of the community. However, there are also more positive aspects. Riders constantly refer to the ways in which bikers affirm a general sense of recognition and support for other bikers. One way in which this may be seen is through the action of salutation. When on the road, it is common practice that bikers greet all motorcycles they pass; whether through nodding, waving or flashing lights. The other often cited practice is that of mutual aid on the road. Both of these are summed-up below: The catalyst is that you're sitting there on two wheels, you're out in the open, you go past another biker and nine times out often they wave. Bikers are individuals but they're part of the tribe. The big thing you notice is, a car is sat at the side of the road, it's broken down. It's a bloke in his mid-twenties, midthirties, he's broken down at the side of the road. What's the chances of another car stopping to help him? Pretty slim. Same bloke, motorbike broken down. What's the chances of another motorbike stopping? Very good. That's the difference. Because they can relate to each other. From this we can see a basic level of 'identity and sense of belonginess' (Diani, 1992, 111) resultant from shared tastes and practices (Koopmans, 1995). Yet although, as noted earlier, at

Mobilising the Mobile 87 a very basic level a motorcycle is a powered two-wheeler with over 100 cubic capacity and, thus, a motorcyclist is easy to define and identify, the issue is not, of course, as simple as that. To take, for example, the action of salutation, motorcyclists do not salute small l00cc motorcycles. This is not merely a matter of engine capacity in that neither would they salute a moped or scooter even if it has a larger engine size. As such, an immediate categorisation of what is to count as a 'valid' or 'authentic' motorcycle enters riders' classifications of other twowheeled riders. Consequently, whilst scooter and moped riders may affiliate through their particular clubs to riders'-rights organisation, on the road, a motorcycle is usually perceived as a two-wheeled vehicle over, at least, 250 cubic capacity that is straddled; that is, ridden as a bicycle, not a step-through. This issue of classification is further complicated by differentiation within riders determined by marque; that is, by the brand. As mentioned earlier, bikers classify each other dependant upon the type of machine owned. One member of the British Motorcyclists' Federation (BMF), one of Britain's two riders'-rights organisations illustrates this: ... if you look at the sort of clubs that belong to the BMF, they range from the Brit, bikes, you've got the vintage owners that have very old bikes and their hobby is restoring, you've got people that ride off-road, you've got the national one-make clubs, which can be older British older machinery, Italian machinery, more modern Japanese bikes. I mean, there's even a vintage Japanese club, which specialises in looking at the older Japanese bikes, and that type of thing. Further, there is not necessarily a sense of acceptance for the various types of machinery but, rather, a negative evaluation made by riders about the motorcycles ridden; that is, that bikers make judgements based upon the associations made about particular vehicles: ... there's definitely snobbery. The local MC (motorcycle) club down here will look down on all other bikers.... The local vintage motorcycle guy, who's got his Thruxton 3-speed, wobbly back axle thingy, thinks it's pointless riding these Jap. bike because "You don't need all that. We didn't need them when I was a kid." And he looks down on you! And the guy with the £24,000 Ducati, with gold wheels or something like that, thinks we're all oiks. You make a certain number of probably correct assessments on the type of bike somebody's got. If they've got a Harley, there's certain very strong images attached to Harleys that must have drawn them to them in the first place. And it's the same with, like, a Goldwing, or a chop. You know, all these things. I think some are more nebulous, some types of bike, but there's definitely very strong lines drawn between the different types. And you can assume a lot about somebody from the type of bike they have. And that's what people do. Sometimes they're mistaken, but often they're not. A further differentiation is made about function and use. Motorcyclists ride for different reasons and in different ways, which creates a further division among the community:

88 Delivering Sustainable Transport There are those who enjoy doing forty or fifty miles an hour as long as the bike looks astounding, it's quite loud, everybody has to turn and look. There are those who get it purely from the buzz, going out on a nice, twisty piece of road on nice, sticky racetyres and having a fine time. There are people who, like myself, enjoy putting a bike on a bench in the garage, ripping it apart, fixing it if it's broken, and putting it back together and then riding it.... There are other people who have no inclination whatsoever to take an engine apart, they just want to run it into a garage, throw some money at the bloke running the garage and pick it up in three hours fixed. What such comments indicate is that there is great complexity amongst British bikers and that, rather than one homogeneous community, there are a series of differentiated ones; subcommunities that are not always in accord: There's as much resentment and controversy and bitching in biking as there is outside of it. And the idea that bikers are all part of one big, happy family, that we're all singing from the same song sheet, is an illusion. And if we like to tell ourselves that it is so, then we're deceiving ourselves. Bikers, therefore, view themselves as forming a complex and variegated conglomerate. Further, this is not a matter of 'a difference between bikers, it's that there are different types of people.' Bikers are not, therefore, a monolithic group but one within which there is considerable 'internal subdivision' (Calhoun, 1994, 27) based upon 'diverging orientations' (Diani, 1992, 112). Yet whilst the above data indicate diversity, there are, however, two different ways in which one can talk of a motorcycling community; on a material and an affective level. Materially, as can be seen from the above quotations, the British biking community is a series of inter-related sub-communities. Riders, for example, may join local motorcycle clubs based on geographical proximity and which, therefore, contain internal differentiation by vehicle and type of riding (for example, Rossendale MCC). Alternatively they may join one-make clubs, based on the manufacturer, (for example, Suzuki), or specific model, (for example, Suzuki RG500), or clubs dedicated to function, such as touring (for example, the Sober Moto Touring Club), off-road riding (for example, the Trail Riders Fellowship) or display riding (for example Cunning Stunts MCC). There are also clubs dedicated to specific types of people such as the Christian Motorcyclists' Association or Cambridge University MCC and, lastly, there are clubs which defy categorisation; such as the Wigan Pie Eaters MCC. Over 300 of such clubs are affiliated to the BMF and MAG and thus tied in to the lobbying arm of the community. On another level, there is a wide variety of events and venues which riders may attend. The BMF Show, held annually in Peterborough, for example, is the largest rally in the motorcycling calendar. There are separate days for individual members and associated clubs, like those mentioned above, and for the general biking public. In 1999, for example, some 89,000 people are estimated to have attended over the course of the weekend. There are also

Mobilising the Mobile 89 national events such as the industry's Bike Show held in Birmingham each year and rallies around the country either for the general riding public or specific clubs and organisations. Further, there are biking venues around the country, such as the Waterman in Warwickshire (McDonald-Walker, 1998) where bikers gather in large numbers on a weekly basis, specific roads where bikers like to ride, such as the A44 in Wales, motorcycle racing events and regular rides organised either by clubs or by groups of friends. As such, we can see a variety of venues and events linking bikers which are organised either informally, through friendship networks, or formally, through either specific motorcycling clubs or riders'-rights organisations. Another important factor in potential mobilisation is that of the motorcycling press. Figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation for 1999 show that Britain's largest newspaper, Motor Cycle News, has weekly sales of some 149,129 copies each week, which the National Readership Survey, that calculates the numbers of people who read each copy, raises to some 556,000. The combined figures for the three largest monthly magazines published by EMAP National Publications, Britain's largest motorcycling publishing company, for the July to December 1999 period are some 227,230 copies per issue; the total readership of which NRS calculates at 1,195,000. These publications, in addition to news on the latest models, results of testing on machines, parts, helmets or whatever, also carry information on legislative proposals, and campaign and other information from the riders'-rights organisations. However, readership figures can only give us crude estimations about the total penetration of the motorcycling community, given the fact that we cannot know how many people buy many different magazines although, to counteract this, there are many more motorcycling magazines for which we do not have circulation figures. Clearly, such figures as we do have need also to be put into context. Whilst there are difficulties about accessing accurate data about the numbers of motorcyclists in Britain, due to the ways in which statistics are calculated by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, wherein bikers with a car license are classified as car drivers only, we can broadly say that, in February 2000, there were 171,297 full motorcycle licenses held in Britain, that is, people who only have a motorcycle license, with a further 413,024 provisional licenses with motorcycling entitlement held, making a combined total of 585,121; although motorcycling entitlement on a provisional license does not necessarily mean that part of the license is being used. These figures can be clarified slightly by the total number of vehicles licensed, which was 454,138 vehicles over 125cc in December 1998; the latest date for which the DVLA has statistics. However, it must be borne in mind that, with vehicles licensed, we have no way of knowing how many vehicles are currently off the road, for restoration or whatever, nor does this tell us about multiple motorbike ownership. With all of these reservations in mind, it is still possible to argue, albeit very tentatively, that the motorcycling literature appears to have a broad circulation among the community. The last type of evidence for a variety of overlapping arenas in which British motorcyclists interact is, whilst perhaps the predominant form of interaction, the most difficult to assess; namely, the informal relationships formed by bikers. Clearly, it is easy for bikers to interact with other riders simply due to the fact that they are easily identifiable by virtue of both their vehicle and apparel and also the kinds of places they frequent; whether race events, rallies,

90 Delivering Sustainable Transport the many pubs in which bikers congregate or local bike shops. Thus, for example, at Baines Racing, located at Silverstone race circuit in Northamptonshire, bikers gather at weekends for social purposes, not merely to buy vehicles or have them mended; a trend approved, and furthered by Baines Racing, which provides free coffee all day for riders. Put together, these overlapping sites of biker activity, networks submerged within the everyday life of riders (Melucci, 1989), provide the biking community with a material structure for interaction. These provide the 'concrete interactions and social relationships within which identities are constantly renegotiated' (Calhoun, 1994, 26) by drawing together 'individuals, informal groups and more formal organisations' (Diani and Eyerman, 1992, 9) . We can thus understand the motorcycling network, following Elias (1991), as the whole relationship between individual riders and the community in an ongoing dynamic movement of shifting patterns and inter-relationships that change over time and, given the mobility of bikers, space. These networks embody 'a whole range of social processes, actors and forms of actions' (Melucci, 1995, 111) that 'facilitate communication and exchange' (Diani, 1992, 110) and draw together riders, riders'-rights activists and organisational activities into what we may call one 'meta-community'. Further, the connectedness of the riders'-rights organisations to these networks provides the basis for the activation of collective action (Tarrow, 1994) through the connectedness of activists to the community and the educational functions they serve in keeping campaigning issues at the attention of riders. Yet these networks also facilitate the establishment of affective ties based on a sense of communal identity. Bikers attest to the ease with which riders can create new relationships due to the fact that they are easily identifiable; that, unlike other social movements, even when not engaged 'visibly' in public behaviour, the distinctiveness of bikers allows them to be visible even in 'latent', everyday, private actions (Melucci, 1989): ... when you pull up, I mean, motorcyclists are interested in what they and other motorcyclists ride. Even if they would never ride it, they will still go across and look, and ask questions about it and that sort of thing. It's nice to be around other bikers. It's a nice, comfy feeling, and you know you've all got something you can have a good yarn about to each other without any real effort at all. You can walk into a pub full of bikers, and you can sit down with any of them and strike up a conversation. So we've got a sort of ability to announce ourselves to other people as who we are, to make that first step of breaking down any sort of social barriers. So you know it's another biker, so you know you can talk to them. It's not a problem. You can sit down and get on with them at whatever level. Whereas if you're just in ordinary clothes in a pub, you're surrounded by other people in ordinary clothes, and you've got no means of measuring where to make the mark to begin with to strike up something. So it's a little bit more difficult to get a conversation going, because you've got nothing you can obviously key it in with. It's quite a nice hang to get a conversation going. And you strike up a friendship normally quite quickly. You know, you can get a really nice, easy attitude going. A nice conversation.

Mobilising the Mobile 91 At a fundamental level, therefore, bikers have something in common with which to begin to forge potential relationships; that is, one can 'get though that initial contact barrier so much more easily' and, due to the necessity of protective clothing, can easily identify others with whom to interact. In many ways, this can be understood as a demonstration of Bauman's argument that in tribal politics, affective allegiance 'is composed of the ritually manifested support for positive tribal tokens' (1992, 199), in this instance motorcycles, in that merely to be seen riding, or dressed for riding, serves as affirmation of group allegiance established in 'face-to-face networks' (Milner, 1994, 155). Overall, therefore, although riders argue that bikers are a disparate group divided by vehicle, riding styles and attitudes, at the same time, they also maintain that there is a fundamental bond between them. As one rider argues: We do not have much in common other than the machines we ride, but that is a significant bond.... What you get from riding a motorbike, what you have with you when you come to riding a motorbike, is, I think, a real bond. The picture that emerges from the data is thus a complex one. The internal differentiation of the biking community indicates a diversity that belies understandings of social movements as homogeneous in any convincing way and yet, cut across this, it is possible to detect a variety of intersecting networks which may be seen to generate a 'community of affect' (Hebdige, 1990). As one rider sums it up: Bikers are individuals but they're part of the tribe.... Because they can relate to each other.... I think it's because they know that (another biker is) going to be on the same level as them. The guy is going to talk a similar, if not the same, language. The fact that the guy might need a hand. The fact that they have a little bit of paranoia, in a manner of speaking. Everybody else is out to get us so we've got to help each other. Conclusion In this paper an attempt has been made to uncover those immanent, proto-political qualities among the British motorcycling community which may have provided the basis for mobilisation from the late 1980s, when the first European legislative proposals for motorcycles were introduced, through an examination of the social milieu of British riders. Thus, whilst the instigation of legislation gives us the 'when' (Tarrow, 1994, 17), we also needed to know the 'why'; the 'processes through which individuals recognise that they share certain orientations in common and on that basis decide to act together' (Melucci, 1989, 30). In furtherance of this aim, various factors were explored. The first factor underlying bikers' understandings of the world is the experiential side of motorcycling; both on historical and personal levels. From both of these we can see how the experience of riding and the historical understandings of British biking provide a foundation for the creation of a sense of group orientations, identity and shared beliefs based on a series of shared reference points relating to a common pursuit. The collective identity resultant upon participation within the community (della Porta, 1992) contains immanent properties which facilitate action for, as Melucci argues, it formulates cognitive frameworks, activates relationships between actors and involves emotional investments enabling group recognition

92 Delivering Sustainable Transport (1989); all of which factors we can see among riders. These are important for subsequent collective action which, as Tilly argues, depends both on the 'shared interests' of a group and 'the extent of common identity and unifying structure among its members' (1978,84). The shared beliefs of bikers were seen to centre around the tension between two particular beliefs; those of individualism and collectivism. The concept of freedom, both experientially and politically, is crucial to the potential mobilisation of bikers in that it encapsulates both a 'freedom from' and a 'freedom to'. As Calhoun argues, the 'pursuits labeled "identity politics" are collective, nor merely individual, and public, not only private.... They involve seeking recognition, legitimacy... not only expression or autonomy' (1994, 21). Yet in addition to the idea of collectivism in pursuit of individualism, we can also identify a defensive collectivism which is crucially rooted within the experience of marginalisation and difference from wider society which strengthens the exclusivity of the biking identity and thus potentially enhances mobilisation potential (Castells, 1997; della Porta and Diani, 1999). Thus whilst, on one level, bikers are part of the wider society in that, as individuals, 'they belong to many different social categories and thus potentially have a repertoire of many different identities to draw upon' (Hogg and Abrams, 1988, 19), the distinctiveness of bikers, when acting as such, distances them from their 'normal' identifications and draw them into sub-cultural orientations. Here, the historical and, to some extent, ongoing experience of stigmatisation strengthens communal understandings. As Tarrow argues, 'meanings and values are partly inherited and partly constructed in the act of confronting opponents' (1994,189). On another level, we explored more fully the nature of the community itself and, again, uncovered two differing qualities. The first was a sense of diversity and differentiation based on personal tastes and sub-group networks. The motorcycling community, rather than forming one monolithic whole, is comprised on a wide variety of differing types of activity, friendship networks, venues and degrees of political involvement. However, this need not be regarded as a weakness in the community but a factor which can enhance group solidarity through the interpersonal interaction of bikers' relations and activities (Klandermans, 1997) and lead to active participation (della Porta and Diani, 1999) or, on a more prosaic level, provide a wide skill base to be mobilised in any political actions (McDonald-Walker, 2000). Further, if, as Diani (1992) argues, personal networks can keep individuals' identities alive during nonpublic periods, it may also be possible to argue that pre-existing identities may lie dormant until the first incidence of collective action occurs. Yet running alongside communal diversity, we also found feelings of commonality, group identification and shared beliefs within the larger network that is 'British bikers'. That is, that underneath differences lies an awareness of bikers as one group with interests and beliefs in common. Again, it is possible to argue from these findings that the motorcycling community contains within it various qualities which assisted later mobilisation. Kriesi, for example, argues that mobilisation potential depends on people's willingness to participate based on both their sympathy and support for action and also their 'groupness'; that is, the extent to which the group shares characteristics and mutual links, including informal networks (1992, 25). As such, over and above sub-identifications, we can see a 'loose, inclusive collective identity' (Diani, 1992, 113) which enables mutual identification. These understandings enable a

Mobilising the Mobile 93 consensus to be 'built around common meanings and values' that strengthens solidarity (Tarrow, 1994,189). Clearly, we must treat these conclusions with some reservation, for we must take account of differences in time and space. In temporal terms, as we have argued, the community has undergone changes which mean that, currently, the community is changing its demographic profile to reflect a more affluent member. However, whilst we may agree with Somers and Gibson (1994) that identities change in time/space, it is held that, firstly, the ongoing historical legacy of British biking and continuing, though declining, marginalisation of bikers means that new, more wealthy riders still access the same experiential conditions as formerly and, secondly, that, indeed, it may be that it is the very affluence and greater social power of the modern biker, with a higher level of social integration and, consequently, social expectation, which enables collective action (Mennells, 1994). Spatially, we must also bear in mind that there may be differences between British bikers and their colleagues within the European Union. The most important reservation here is the particularity of British biking history; where the role of class and access to American culture may serve to differentiate British from European bikers. On the other hand, however, two main factors may serve to mitigate against this. Firstly, whilst Britain's history differs, the experiential aspect of biking is a constant. Thus whilst British bikers have differences from their colleagues in Europe, there are also important similarities in outlook and concerns which act to unite them. Secondly, we must consider the effects of the much-vaunted globalisation, wherein Elias (1991), for example, argues that people are beginnings to look beyond state boundaries. Here, the expansion of electronic technologies (Tarrow, 1994) and the drawing together of social-movement activities (della Porta and Diani, 1999) may act to undermine any pre-existing differences and draw riders into coalition across national boundaries; as, for example, may be witnessed by the establishment and subsequent continuance of the FEM. However, with these reservations in mind, it is believed that certain conclusions may tentatively be made. We have sought to explore those factors which may have led to political mobilisation in the late 1980s. Crucial to this, it is believed, are the experiential, historical and communal conditions found among the motorcycling community. In a sense, one may argue that the conditions were right for action. All that was necessary was for an issue to draw the latent potentiality for action into actuality. The Framework Type Approval Directive was such an issue. As a British MEP argued: ... the award for maximum contribution to the development of bikers'-rights culture should go to Martin Bangemann, who had put up the stupid proposal in the first place to ban super bikes. Unwittingly, he unified them in a way that nobody had managed to achieve before. Lastly, whilst circumstances have already served to both to mobilise the biking community and make policy-makers and manufacturers aware of the motorcycle user as political participant, we must also acknowledge the possibility that other types of transport user may also engage in more sustained political activity as the EU conies increasingly to harmonise

94 Delivering Sustainable Transport legislation under the Common Transport Policy. Indeed, British bikers would appear to be giving other users a helping hand: It begins to really wake people when... you start to put these ideas through to them, and they go, "Yeah. That could be us. If they're doing it to motorcycle tyres, why can't they do it to car tyres? They're reducing decibels on this, they can do it on cars as well." The penny drops. I think Europe as a whole has become much more the issue for everyday life... (although) I think it became more of an issue for bikes before it came to the public's attention as a whole. But, I would hope, because of our publicity and ... our leaflets to folk explaining what it's all about... I would hope we've brought it to the attention of a few car drivers what's heading their way.

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Mobilising the Mobile 95 Koopmans, R. (1995). Democracy from Below: New Social Movements and the Political System in West Germany. Westview Press, Boulder. Kriesi, H. (1992). Support and Mobilisation for New Social Movements: Concepts, Operationalisations and Illustrations from the Netherlands. In: Studying Collective Action (M. Diani and R. Eyerman, eds.), pp. 22-55. Sage, London. Lash, S. (1990). Sociology of Postmodernism. Routledge, London. McDonald-Walker, S. (1998). Fighting the Legacy: British Bikers in the 1990s. Sociology 32, (2), 379-396. McDonald-Walker, S. (2000). Bikers: Culture, Politics and Power. Berg, Oxford. Melucci, A. (1989). Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. Hutchison Radius, London. Melucci, A. (1992). Frontier Land: Collective Action between Actors and Systems. In: Studying Collective Action (M. Diani and R. Eyerman, eds.), pp. 238-259. Sage, London. Melucci, A. (1995). The New Social Movements Revisited: Reflections on a Sociological Misunderstanding. In: Social Movements and Social Classes: The Future of Collective Action (L. Maheu, ed.), pp. 107-120. Sage, London. Mennell, S. (1994). The Formation of We-Images: A Process Theory. In: Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (C. Calhoun, ed.), pp. 175-197. Blackwell, Oxford. Milner, A. (1994). Contemporary Cultural Theory. UCL Press Ltd, London. Najarn, S. (1988). A Radical Past: The Legacy of the Fife Miners. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Edinburgh. Najam, S. (1990). Aye tae the Fore: The Fife Miners in the 1984-85 Strike. In: Interpreting the Past, Understanding the Present (S. Kendrick, P. Straw and D. McCrone, eds.), pp. 142165. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Roche, M. (1995). Rethinking Citizenship and Social Movements: Themes in Contemporary Sociology and Neoconservative Ideology. In: Social Movements and Social Classes: The Future of Collective Action (L. Maheu, ed.), pp. 186-220. Sage, London. Rustin, M. (1994). Unfinished Business - From Thatcherite Modernisation to Incomplete Modernity. In: Altered States: Postmodernism, Politics, Culture (M. Perryman, ed.), pp. 7394. Lawrence & Wishart, London. Seidman, S. (1992). Postmodern Social Theory as Narrative with Moral Intent. In: Postmodernism and Social Theory (S. Seidman and D.G. Wagner, eds), pp. 47-82. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Somers, M.R. and G.D. Gibson. (1994). Reclaiming the Epistemological "Other": Narrative and the Construction of Identity. In: Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (C. Calhoun, ed.), pp. 37-100. Blackwell, Oxford. Tarrow, S. (1994). Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics. University Press, Cambridge. Tilly, C. (1978). From Mobilisation to Revolution. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co, Reading MA. Willis, P.E. (1978). Profane Culture. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

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6

IDENTITY, LIFESTYLE AND THE GAMING INTERVIEW

Tom Turrentim, University of California, Davis, USA

Modern society will find no solution to the ecological crisis unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle. (Pope John Paul II, December 8,1989) Our lifestyle is not up for debate. (Former President George Bush Snr. in a statement released in anticipation of his attendance at the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro)

Lifestyle in Environmental Studies The issue of consumerism and lifestyle choice has become an increasingly important topic among environmentalists, with particular focus on personal automobiles. The World Watch Institute has targeted automobiles as an unsustainable technology (Lowe 1989). In his diatribe against consumerism, Durning (1992) gives automobiles a travel chapter as does Albert Gore in his book Earth in the Balance (1992). Durning proposes a three-tiered global ecological class system, based upon consumption levels according to three primary variables: type of diet, mode of travel and types of materials used in goods. Consumers (1.1 billion persons) eat meat, packaged foods, drive cars and use throwaway materials; the Middle Class (3.3 billion persons) eat grains, drink clean water, ride bicycles and buses and use durable goods, while the Poor (1.1 billion persons) have insufficient grains, unsafe water, walk and consumer only local biomass (pg. 27). During targets the Consuming class as using more

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than their fair share of the world's resources and following an unsustainable path of development. He blames consumerism primarily upon capitalist industries for creating false needs. Environmental economist Liisa Uusitalo (1986) defines lifestyle as "a holistic concept", referring to a "whole" class of activities and preferences depending on people's personal, social and institutional background. But Uusitalo is concerned with the transition from traditional societies to modernity. Uusitalo sees lifestyle measured primarily with two sorts of indicators - (1) consumption patterns and (2) time allocation patterns. To focus her discussion, Uusitalo prefers the term "consumption style" to lifestyle. Consumption style is "an intervening variable between the structural changes and a household's environmentally relevant behaviour". Uusitalo identifies three major trends in consumption styles: 1.

Modernisation of Life - Which is a shift away from home production to market purchases of goods and services; career orientation, market efficiency orientation - the purchase of time-saving devices and services as opposed to non-effective, expressive time use; privatisation, which is emphasis on nuclear family activities as opposed to community.

2.

Enrichment and Variety of Consumption - Which refers mainly to the increases in discretionary spending by households for non-essentials, as well as greater time allocation to individual desires and self-actualising activities.

3.

Private Automobile Use - Here Uusitalo gives special mention to autos as a basic change among all consumption trends. The trend to autos is found to be somewhat universal between classes and across countries.

Like Durning, Uusitalo is especially concerned with the environmental consequences of automobiles and doesn't expand on their actual use in lifestyles. I would argue that the automobile was a central technology underlying the shift to lifestyle capitalism; it expanded the landscape of personal choice immediately as well as allowing structural expansion of that landscape. But the automobile, as many of these theorists have discussed has run up against some physical barriers to its increased use. The auto has become a sort of lifestyle contradiction. As it was once put to me, the automobile is at the root of Los Angeles' problems and at the same time, it is the only way out of town.

Environmental Economics Because of the inability of conventional liberal economics to incorporate environmental externalities into its valuation techniques, an entire new branch of environmental economics has sprung to fill the need for estimation of the value of environmental goods. Much of the effort in this field has centred on the attempt to obtain hypothetical bids of the value of externalities such as air quality, clean beaches, or endangered species. Such an approach is

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 99 appropriately named contingent evaluation, although so far, it has yet to be demonstrated that such goods have such market place values. Hopkinson et al (1992) test such an approach with a group of one hundred households in North Yorkshire, to evaluate environmental values on several road-building schemes. They report several interesting results from their attempt to obtain values. First, it was assumed that the participants were satisfied with the current state of affairs, when in fact there was much dissatisfaction with the current road system impacts. Second, it was difficult for participants to comprehend a tax to obtain preferences. Third, when information was offered for evaluation, official information was used rhetorically by participants rather than to reevaluate options. In general, obtaining valuations was discouraged by the participants, who were more interested in being heard. Sagoff (1988) offers a critique of these approaches which is most relevant to life politics. He compares two contingent methods, one used in a study of the value of air quality in a national park in Wyoming and another method used in Hawaii, which attempted to measure the value of saving Humpback Whales, in each study, there were similar problems to those observed by Hopkinson in the previous study. In general, participants in the studies were leery of placing values on the environmental resources in question and were more interested in deliberating the issue with the researchers. Sagoff concludes that such resources were important, not for some use value, but rather as philosophical resources for some unspecified future. These approaches to green consumerism above engage in a relatively reflexive manner with environment and consumerism. They suggest that green consumerism is more than a fad, that solving environmental problems is at once a practical problem for households and political. The dilemma relates strongly to both uncertainties about the future of the earth, alongside of questions about lifestyles and consumerism. The future presents itself as sets of choices, about how to live, especially around the issues of autos and technologies, which promise better environments without disturbing critical lifestyle activities. These alternatives, however, do not offer simple substitution effects. For example, there are many technologists who are suggesting cyberspace as a solution to the travel problem. But as Mary Douglas and Byron Isherwood point out, presence and non-presence creates a hierarchy of meaning (1979). Physical presence is likely to continue to be more highly valued than electronic presence. This means that as electronic presence stretches human relations over space, demand for travel will increase as a function of investing in more distant lifestyle sectors initiated through electronic means. As human presence is limited by time, automobiles will continue to offer the highest presence availability (alongside of plane travel). Cars are not going to go away soon. In this chapter, I describe a research project with fifty-one California households who kept one week travel diaries in a market research project I conducted aimed at exploring the market for electric vehicles (EVs) as a means of moving towards energy and environmental benefits (Sperling 1994). The diaries describe a week in the life of participants, which then is analysed and used in an interactive interview with both the research team and the household.

100 Delivering Sustainable Transport These diaries glimpse the complex spatial organisation of late modernity. While the overall design of the project was intended to explore consumer responses to electric cars, the diaries and interviews which accompanied them, were data rich opportunities for learning about lifestyle choices, especially as those relate to the use of automobiles. Using an analytical framework, I discuss how cars are being used to achieve lifestyle goals. It is intended that this study is reflexive in some of the ways Bourdieu and Giddens prescribe for sociological research (Giddens 1991; Bourdieu 1992). The researchers and participants are aware of the goals and subjectivity of the research methods. They work together to establish a common understanding of the conditions of household decision-making.

One-Week Diaries of Fifty-One California Households Automobiles are used by the vast majority of households in California for most activities outside the home. A one-week diary of vehicle use for a household chronicles most of the activities everyone in the house did that week outside the home, and even draws attention to many of the activities in the home. For instance, household members return to the home often for reasons arising from activities outside the home (students often return home to study for exams). The diaries are surprisingly detailed and intimate. Some households who participated in the study noted with some alarm that the vehicle diary was a bit more revealing about their personal affairs and whereabouts than they had anticipated. A colleague warned me when I began this study that some households might become afraid that the diaries could fall into the wrong hands, that burglars could learn the patterns of comings and goings. Actually, few of the households in this study were concerned about burglars. More were concerned about whether their lives appeared sensible or overly mundane. The diaries revealed much about their attempts and sometimes failure to create meaningful or interesting lifestyles. The type of one-week diaries used in this study were developed from use in travel behaviour research called Interactive Stated Preference Techniques. Such research originates in planning games known as Household Activity and Travel Studies (HATS) and was developed by Peter Jones at the University of Michigan and at Oxford University, England (1979,1990). Furthering this work has been Martin Lee-Gosselin of Laval University in Quebec (1990), developing a technique known as Car Use Activity Patterns Interview Games (CUPIG). The diaries provide a one-week glance of a household's driving and activities for constructing a time line chart, much like the time space drawings of Hagerstrand. The one-week drawings are then used in an interview with the household to probe household decisions given a different set of goals, incentives, or other hypothetical variables to household allocation of travel. The Purchase Intentions and Range Evaluation Games (PIREG) diaries discussed here were designed to probe household response to the substitution or addition of an electric vehicle, with limited daily range, to a household fleet of vehicles. The seven-day record of activities is used to construct a contingency board for use in a household interview, that is, the interviewer and the household participate in an interactive game-like situation to explore

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 101 plausible alternative realities and decisions using an actual week as a starting point. Martin Lee-Gosselin and Tom Turrentine developed this new adaptation referred to as PIREG. The diaries consist of daily logs in which households maintain records of trips made in their vehicles. The driver marks for each trip, who is driving, the destination, the time, the odometer readings, the passengers, cargo, the importance of the timing and the degree of planning ahead for that particular trip. A trip is a single segment of travel, i.e. from home to the grocery store, or to work. The trip home is a second trip. The household keeps diaries in each of their vehicles. Room is made for a potential twenty trips per day. The average number of trips per day per vehicle was five, including diaries with no travel for several days, as well as some diaries in which more than twenty trips were made each day.

Household Response to Diaries Keeping travel diaries is not a normal activity for participants. For most participants, the diaries were a new thing to do and required both detailed instruction and perseverance. The diaries were instructive. Over the course of a week, the participants got better at keeping diaries. Entries were more complete at the end of the week, with fewer mistakes. Additionally, households became more accurate about predicting times and distances. These effects of diaries are discussed by Golob and Muers (1986). The diaries were a nuisance for many participants. The schedules of most participants were hectic, and auto travel, tied often to tight schedules is stressful. The added work of diaries, of stopping and making entries at both the beginning and end of trips was mentioned by many of the participants as particularly stressful, with the notable exception of retired persons, who have more generous time allowances between activities and business persons who are used to keeping auto records for tax and business purposes and are accustomed to taking a few moments at the beginning and end of each trip to record gas, odometer and trip purposes. A few participants jokingly commented they had avoided making some short trips until the next week just to avoid having to make data entries. Some participants, while complaining about the hassle of the diaries, nevertheless said that the diaries were informative. Some, openly conscious of the environmental orientation of the study, commented on how short their trips were and felt some guilt at using the car for such short journeys, others commented on how they could have done a better job of chaining trips. Yet, the majority of comments on the diaries came during the household interactive interview, when the households saw their written diaries converted to a time line chart.

The Gaming Interview The week after the trip diaries were completed by a household, the PIREG interview was conducted at the home of the participating household. All members of the household were

102 Delivering Sustainable Transport present. Two researchers participated in the interview, one to take notes and one to conduct the interview. The information from each of the diaries was transferred to a time line chart for use in the interviews. The line chart is set up in a room chosen by the family where all can view. It is a large chart - forty-eight inches wide by forty inches high, with line charts running from left to right, which represent the car use over twenty-four hours. Seven days of car use are on the chart, so each car is represented by seven twenty-four hour lines. Each time line is split between showing the car either parked at home, being driven or parked away from home. The chart defaults to the home as the primary locale from which all trips originate and terminate. This approach works for most purposes, but many trips actually originate and terminate at work or another locale. The time chart also shows who was driving, through colour coding, as well as special notes as to the name of a destination, the number and ages of passengers, the mileage of each trip and in some versions the type of roads travelled. At the side of each day, we recorded how many miles the household thought they would travel. The responses of households to the time line chart are pronounced. When the chart is set up in a household, household members usually become engrossed in viewing and learning the notation on the chart. The chart shows household members an entire week of their activities at a glance as well as the activities of other household members whose activities are usually unseen or only verbally reported. One of the analytical aspects of the chart is to allow comparisons of travel time, distance and scheduling between days as well as different drivers in the household, in particular the chart makes clear any issues of co-ordination and simultaneity to the household. It allows the household, whose members live in clearly different segments much of the time, to see what the other person was doing, for instance, while they were at work. Some spouses make lengthy comments on the driving schedule of the other, whose activities are brought into clear focus possibly for the first time. For many fathers, there is considerable surprise at the busy and tight scheduling of driving tasks by the mother with children. Parents are keenly interested in the time line of their teenage children who are using vehicles autonomously for the first time. The first part of the interview consists of validating the time line chart to ensure that the research team and the household are in agreement about the events represented on the chart, In Martin Lee-Gosselin's vocabulary the second part of the interview is a "calibration phrase". Here, the household is questioned about how typical the travel is on the chart and what travel might normally be on the chart which did not happen that week. Also, the family is asked about travel at other times of the year, special travel not found on the chart, other types of travel including biking, trams and buses. The rest of the interview concerns what would happen to the travel of the household were a limited range electric vehicle substituted for one of then- vehicles. Several hypothetical scenarios are explored, including added travel demands proposed by the interviewers, drawn from the travel repertoire and routines of the households. The final part of the interview is a selection of a hypothetical electric vehicle from a range of attributes and an informal, open-ended post interview discussion, which probes the response of the household to the diaries. A PIREG interview has five parts:

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 103 1.

Calibration - The household is questioned about the typicality of the week on the chart and about daily, weekly, monthly or annual travel not found on the chart (including travel by other modes).

2.

Minimum Range Estimation - One of the household vehicles is "replaced" by an exact copy, except the copy is an electric vehicle (EV) with a limited range of mileage and is recharged at home. The interviewers choose a "challenging" range - a range which will cause some problems in completing the week of actual travel. The household members review the week and discuss how to solve the problems presented. If they successfully solve these problems, a lower range is proposed. The process is repeated until the household arrives at the lowest range vehicle it is willing to accommodate.

3.

Adaptation - Using the minimum range vehicle, the interviewer presents the household with further problems not contained in the diary, such as a medical emergency or other real situations, which might demand more range or further behavioural change. The household continues the process of problem solving.

4.

Optimisation - The household is asked to optimise the use of their hybrid fleet of vehicles under the condition of higher operating costs.

Adaptability The environmental response which interests us most in this study is adaptation to the limited range of electric vehicles (although the car companies, who are interested in profit, and others who believe electrics will cost more - at least initially - are more interested in how much consumers will pay for green and clean vehicles over dirty vehicles). We take a different tack in this study, that is, how willing are households to consider adjusting, or adapting to occasional problems with range, either for the objective of improving the environment or in some cases to get other technological benefits such as home recharging.

Second Car or Hybrid Household? Travel behaviour studies have often conceptualised EV's as a "second" car, using one or more of the following criteria: order of purchase; ranking of value; amount of use; or priority of use compared to the other vehicles in the household. In fact, the use of the term "second car" is a cultural-historical concept, related to the perceived purchase patterns of the nuclear family in the post-world war period, in which young families first acquired a car which the father used for work and a second car was purchased for morn to do shopping. One can still read this anachronistic cultural interpretation in many discussions of the role of electric vehicles, (e.g. DeLorenzo, 1993), despite radical shifts in vehicle buying habits of households which include the specialisation of vehicles and the increased role of women in automotive purchases.

104 Delivering Sustainable Transport

Some argue that the newest car in most households would normally be the preferred longrange vehicle and that this vintage and use pattern defines the "first" vehicle. But in our sample of households, the issue of which vehicle would be the long-range vehicle was determined by vehicle body style, not order of purchase or vehicle age. Universally, households in the PIREG sample use their larger vehicles, such as minivans or larger sedans, for long-range travel because of their comfort and payload capacities. The smaller vehicles, which in the PIREG sample are also the newest vehicles, are used primarily for local driving, yet travel nearly as far as the larger vehicle in the household - an average of thirty-four miles per day for the smaller, newer vehicle versus thirty-seven miles per day for the larger, older vehicle. Thus, in these households the "second car" label does not accurately describe any vehicle in the household. We find the terms "first" car, "second" car, etc. to be bereft of analytical content. Therefore, we do not assign the EV a "second" car role in the household, but allow the household to explore the ways in which the EV changes their assignment of vehicles to drivers and tasks. Drivers are often, not always, assigned to a specific household vehicle. The exclusivity of this assignment varies greatly between households. Some households have very exclusive his-hers vehicle purchase and use patterns while others have a pattern of daily or even trip-bytrip allocation of vehicles to tasks and drivers. Therefore, at least one decision step for households when considering an EV is to first estimate the routine trip allocations expected for the vehicle being purchased, as well as special, occasional demands on the vehicle. This decision involves weighing the adaptations required for those occasional trips against the benefits of EVs, such as home recharging or low fuel cost. In the PIREG interview, we first ask households to imagine replacing one of their vehicles with an EV (note that this is not a purchase intention, but a use intention). Since we originally recruited households based upon their having recently purchased a car of the likely body style of EVs, we call this newly purchased vehicle the target car - the vehicle we hypothesise will be replaced by an electric. However, not all households select the target vehicle to be an EV: seven choose another vehicle in the household. Additionally, three households, with the income and car purchase habits to back it up, stated they would likely add an electric vehicle to their household stock of vehicles and four households felt incapable of using a limited range vehicle in place of any of their vehicles. Thus, thirty-seven households chose the target vehicle. Once the household chooses which vehicle will be electric we proceed with the interview on the premise that the electric vehicle is exactly like the gasoline vehicle it replaces, except for its driving range and recharge characteristics. Households must next discover the minimum range to which they could imagine adjusting. Minimum Range After examining their travel activity recorded in their seven day trip diaries, households were asked to decide upon a minimum range to which they could adapt without undue (in their view) sacrifice of their lifestyle goals (which they define). The household is asked to explain

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 105 how they arrived at such a range and asked to relive the previously recorded week using their hypothetical hybrid fleet of vehicles. The interviewer interjects with problems based on the known car use patterns of the household and potential emergencies in order to challenge the selected minimum range. The point is to explore how the household adapts to these unplanned activities — whether they adjust their minimum range requirement, reassign the household's vehicles, or make other travel adjustments. The first column of Table 6.1 several pages ahead, reports the minimum range selected by households. A substantial number of households can adapt to even very short ranges. Fourteen of the fifty-one households adapted to a forty mile range vehicle and twelve more to a range of fifty miles. A total of forty-seven households adapted to a range of one hundred and twenty miles or less. Only four households simply could not accept a range limit without also having fast charging capability; the vehicles either were not parked during the day where they could be recharged at a slow or "normal" rate or they were always on the move.

What do you do when you need to go farther? The interactive problem solving quickly reveals it is too simplistic to assume that the EV simply substitutes for one of the household's gasoline vehicles. Substitution is only the starting point for the household's learning. Households quickly recognise the possibilities for reallocating travel between vehicles and drivers as well as other strategies for incorporating the EV into the household fleet. Below we describe each of the strategies used by households in incorporating the hypothetical EV into their fleet of vehicles. We also report the number of households who suggested they would employ each strategy. 1.

Work Recharging - We allowed persons who worked at locations with one hundred or more employees to assume their employers would offer recharging facilities. Cars, which are parked for several hours at work, are capable of effectively doubling daily range. This is the second most frequently chosen adaptation to specific hypothetical range problems (twenty-two households).1

2.

Swapping - When the driver who normally uses the EV needs greater range on a given day, he or she swaps vehicles with another driver whose range needs are less on that day. This was the most frequently chosen adaptation (twenty-five households) in the face of a range problem. This behaviour is already in the repertoire of many households

1 In PIREG we did not discuss potential differences in on-off peak electricity rates for recharging, although such behavioural issues are important for utility load management. We were most interested in consumer behaviour outside such rates and it is unlikely consumers could easily assess their valuation of daytime opportunity charging given different electricity prices, even in the PIREG interview context. Our results cannot be used to measure potential daytime use assuming differential rates, rather they demonstrate how much daytime charging BEV drivers might do if such charging is easy and inexpensive.

106 Delivering Sustainable Transport in the sample. They currently swap vehicles for several reasons, e.g. increased passenger or cargo capacity for a day. Conversely, a few households never swap. These include households in which drivers identify strongly with their vehicles, or in which one driver does not like driving other vehicles because of standard transmissions, vehicle size differences, passenger loads needs, or special cargo requirements such as child seats or business supplies which are inconvenient to transfer between vehicles. 3.

Switching - When the driver of the electric vehicle needs more range and there is another, unused vehicle in the household, that driver either switches to the unused vehicle at the beginning of the day in anticipation of a need for additional range or returns home to switch vehicles later. This is the third most frequently chosen adaptive strategy, used by twenty-one households to solve a range problem. This strategy is most commonly employed on weekends when both drivers travelled together and one car was idle.

4.

Daytime Charging - An EV user may recharge during the day at home between trips in order to extend daily range. This strategy is employed by ten households to solve a specific problem, but additionally is expected as a routine practice by sixteen households, often on weekends. If home serves as the hub of daily activity, as in the case of retired persons and home-workers, daytime charging at home is more likely to be an important strategy.

5.

Fast Charging - We defined fast charging as being available at a special fast charging station which offers up to 80% of full charge in twenty minutes. Only four households expected to use this strategy to solve any range problem. Fast charging was widely rejected as a solution because of two issues: the long in-station time of twenty minutes and households' desire to use the gasoline vehicle for any travel extending beyond their routine activity space. Drivers who indicated they would like to fast charge have no time during the day to park their car at a possible slow charging location.

6.

Car Pooling/Van Pooling - A household overcomes a range problem by either travelling together in a household gasoline vehicle, or travelling in a gasoline vehicle not owned by the household. Note this definition extends well beyond trips to work. For example, two couples travelling together to a social activity constitutes a car pool under our definition. The four households using this solution live in Orange County where recent legislation has created employer-provided car pool incentives and heightened household awareness of this option.

7.

Renting - A household or individual driver rents a gasoline vehicle to overcome a range problem. Only one household suggested renting to solve a specific problem. Households often describe vehicle renting as too expensive and too inconvenient.

8.

Borrowing - A household borrows a gasoline vehicle from another household to solve a range problem. In four households, borrowing the car of a friend or family member was suggested as a reasonable adaptation, especially in emergencies. Borrowing was a normal practice of these households.

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 107 9.

Bike, Walk, Transit [public transport] - A household uses a bike, walks or uses transit to solve a range problem. Two households suggested biking and four suggested transit to solve specific problems.

10. Chauffeur - Gasoline vehicle driver in a household chauffeurs the EV user to a destination which would have strained the limits of the EV's range. Used by two households, in both cases the household was made up of retired persons. 11.

Reschedule Trips - Household or EV user reschedules trips from a "long range" day to a day on which fewer or shorter trips are made. Rescheduling is used to solve range problems by only two households in the minimum range and adaptation phases of the interview, but is used by five households to optimise EV use during the final interview phase.

12. Cancel/Reduce Trips - The household or the EV driver cancels or shortens a trip to solve a range problem. Trips were only cancelled or reduced in four households and then only in the last part of the interview as an optimising action.

Transition from Minimal to Comfortable Driving Range After determining minimum acceptable ranges, exploring adaptive strategies and determining how much of the household's travel could be shifted to a hypothetical EV (which has the minimum acceptable range), households were given the opportunity to "buy" an EV with a different driving range and recharging time. The goals of this section were: to see whether households would choose to buy longer driving range than their minimum range; to observe trade-offs between range and recharge time; and to explore responses to different electric vehicle technologies, e.g. fast recharging and fuel cells, which offered more "gasoline"-like performance, i.e. longer range and faster refuelling at fuel station. Driving range and recharging times were bundled together in "option" packages and presented in a priority evaluator (PE) table in which each range/recharging option was assigned a relative price - that price being the difference between each range-recharge option and their minimum adapted range (their "base" option). Thus, these relative prices were customised for each household. In general, households could choose to pay a higher price than the base option by buying longer range or faster recharging, or to pay a lower price by buying shorter range or slower recharging. Some of the range-recharge options have a zero price difference from the base option bundle so that certain levels of range and recharge rates can be chosen with no hypothetical dollar cost (or savings). We do not report the prices used because they are not indicative of either willingness to pay for range and recharging time or the cost of actually providing specific range and recharge time. Consistent with the goals for this phase of the interview, the prices simply serve to stimulate further household exploration of range and recharging. We report on recharging rate choices later in the paper. The second column of Table 6.1 reports that the ranges chosen by households in this phase as

108 Delivering Sustainable Transport "comfortable range" and Table 6.2 shows the transition matrix for changes from the minimum range to this comfortable range. Table 6.1 indicates that no households chose to "buy" a range shorter than their minimum range. While thirty-four households could adapt to a minimum range of sixty miles or less, only eight households chose those short ranges when offered the range-recharge bundles in the PE table. Twelve households chose a one hundred mile range. One hundred appears to be a "magic" number - a round number which perhaps represents a perceived threshold required to accomplish lifestyle objectives. Four households who already had high minimum ranges of one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles moved to an even higher range of one hundred and fifty miles.

Driving range

Number of households for whom this was the minimum acceptable range

Number of households for whom this was the comfortable range

40 miles

14

1

50 miles

12

3

60 miles

8

5

70 miles

3

3

80 miles

6

10

90 miles

0

3

100 miles

2

12

120 miles

2

6

150 miles

0

4

Unlimited miles

4

4

51

51

Total

Table 6.1 - Minimum Acceptable and Comfortable Driving Range (Kurani et al 1994)

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 109 These range choices are labelled "comfortable" because it allowed them to either eliminate all adaptive behaviours previously necessary to adapt to their minimum acceptable range, or to reduce the frequency of such adaptations to only a few occasions per year. In the end, threefourths of our households discovered that replacing one of their vehicles with an EV with one hundred miles or less driving range made virtually no difference in their ability to accomplish their chosen activities. We observed tremendous instability in households' choices of range when presented with incremental information and new problems. Reflection on their own travel and the introduction of information on EV range and recharging elicited various range and recharge rate selections at different points in the interview. Households often discussed their selections at length and it was not uncommon for households to make three different range choices during the minimal range, adaptation and comfortable range stages of the interview.

New Household Decision Variables Related to Driving Range We observed three critical new decision variables in households' decision-making regarding limited range. These variables have not previously appeared in survey work on the EV market. The first is driving range safety buffers, the second is routine activity space and the third we call the critical destination. The safety buffer was the range to be left on the electric vehicle at all times. As a feature of the EV we posited instrumentation which precisely estimated the remaining driving range at all times. Most households in this study responded that they wanted twenty miles of range always left on the vehicle. Households arrived at this twenty-mile buffer almost irrespective of the types of hypothetical emergency situations created by the interviewers or the location of the household with respect to emergency services and activity locations. Fourteen households were able to adapt to a forty-mile range vehicle while maintaining this safety buffer - that is, they regularly accomplished their daily activities while travelling less than twenty miles in one of their vehicles. The critical destination is the furthest destination which the household member using the EV feels they must be able to reach, perhaps for an emergency or for activities important to their lifestyle. They must be able to reach this destination even when the gasoline vehicle is not available. Common critical destinations are a friend or family member who is visited frequently or a favourite recreational location. Not all family members choose the same critical destination. In some cases, one member identifies a destination which is already part of the household's activity space, either within the routine activity space or otherwise frequented. Another member may argue for an imaginary critical destination, a destination which is not actually in the travel history of the household, but which the person nevertheless wants available. Sometimes singly, sometimes in combination, these three decision variables act to determine the driving range choices of households in our study. What is clear to us is that households

110 Delivering Sustainable Transport have widely varying degrees of self-awareness of these elements prior to actually documenting their travel in their travel diaries. Faced suddenly with a distance budget (in the form of an EV purchase decision), it appears most households will require a period of learning to determine their range choices.

Comfortable range Minimum range

40 miles

50 miles

60 miles

70 miles

80 miles

90 miles

100 miles

120 miles

40 miles

1

1

1

1

3

1

4

2

2

3

1

2

3

1

4

1

2

1

1

50 miles

60 miles 70 miles 80 miles

1

1

2

3

150 miles

1

90 miles

100 miles

2

120 miles

2

Table 6.2 - Transition Matrix from Minimum to Comfortable Range Note: This table does not include the four households who could not/would not accept any limits (Kurani et al 1994).

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 111 Routine activity space contains the locations of activities that the household accesses on a routine basis, including work, schools, doctors, banks, favourite shopping locations, grocery stores, local family and friends. Households are quite aware of this set of destinations and most are familiar with the distances to these activities. These routine activities form the basis for the initial judgment of driving range needs and the value of home recharging. For households with geographically small routine activity spaces, home recharging provides virtually all recharging needs and is therefore quite attractive. It is true that in some households, one member did express discomfort with buying a vehicle with any range limits. Their objections were not based upon calculation of demonstrated needs, but rather upon desires for the open-ended possibilities of long range and fast refuelling. However, in the midst of lifestyle planning with their partner during the interview, they agreed that the household was not greatly inconvenienced by having one limited range vehicle. Only in households in which each driver made a highly autonomous auto purchase and use decisions did desires for unlimited range prevail over the practical reality of how and where the household actually travels. In the last phase of PIREG interviews, households optimised the use of their hypothetical fleet under the premise that gasoline prices had risen to $5 per gallon. The hybrid fleet consists of an EV of the minimum-adapted range and all the household's other ICEV's. The intent of this exercise was not to test their response to expensive gasoline per se, but rather to test their ability to reallocate driving between vehicles under conditions which greatly favoured the use of one fuel (electricity) over the other (gasoline). When pressed by high gasoline prices to increase the use of their EV, virtually all the households shifted additional travel to it. Three households that did not are poor candidates for EV's because they had greatly reduced the miles assigned to the EV in their earlier search for a minimum adapted range and were unable to shift travel back to the EV in the optimising scenario. After optimising vehicle use, the EV's in the forty-eight other households travelled an average of 17% more miles than the gasoline vehicle it replaced had travelled during the diary week. Half the households shifted at least 12% more travel to the EV and one-fourth of the households shifted at least 25% more. These results further support the idea that analyses which assume simple substitution of an EV for one household vehicle, are too simplistic. Under a variety of conditions, households are able to shift travel between household vehicles. Our interview uses a "shock" technique to force households to use fuel prices to make these adjustments. But the results suggest a dynamic in which new hybrid households may shift increasing amounts of their travel to an EV, if they realise the promise of lower operation and maintenance costs or are offered vehicle use incentives such as preferred parking and use of high-occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lanes. One inescapable conclusion of the PIREG interviews is that many multi-car households easily adapt to driving range limits on one household vehicle. How then do we interpret previous research which estimates extremely high disutilities for limited driving range? One of our hypotheses is that households do not understand, or not aware of, the distances of either their individual trips or daily travel. To understand how well households know their travel

112 Delivering Sustainable Transport distances, we asked PIREG participants to estimate each day's travel at the start of the day and each trip's distance at the start of the trip. They also recorded odometer readings, which allowed us to calculate the actual distance travelled each day and each trip. As expected, participants were much better at estimating travel distances for regular trips than irregular trips. Commute trips are the most common type of regular trips. Commute trip length in our sample ranged from one to forty-five miles, with a mean of 12.6. The distance of the first recorded commute trip was generally estimated accurately, with an average absolute error of 1.1 miles, or 8.7% of the mean estimate. Greater absolute and percent errors were made in estimating the distance of the longest (non-commute) trip made during the week, which is typically a trip to an irregular destination. No matter how the data is analysed to distinguish between errors due to irregularity of the trip and errors due to the length of the trip, we find average errors around the mean estimate that are three times larger than the commute trip errors. Analysing only those longest non-commute trips that are less than forty-five miles in length to remove the possibility that people are simply less able to estimate longer distances then shorter distances, yields a mean trip length of 22.5 miles and a mean error of 5.0 miles (24%). We also selected the worst estimate for each driver, regardless of the trip type or length. The average worst error was 34% of the actual trip distance. Since initial commute distance estimates have an average error of only 8.7%, drivers are clearly estimating other trip distances with much less accuracy. Drivers showed improvement during the diary week in estimating trip lengths. The average error in estimated trip distance between the first and third recorded commute trip dropped from 8.7% to 1.2%. The act of estimating and measuring trip distances was itself a learning process for many households. Several households indicated the diary had increased their awareness of both the number of trips they made and how far they travelled. On the issue of total daily distance estimates, we examined the most poorly estimated day for each driver. Drivers had more difficulty estimating long travel days, just as they had difficulty with irregular trips. The average absolute worst error in estimating how far an individual driver would travel on a given day was seventeen miles or 34% of the average actual distance for that day. Households which underestimated their longest day tended to do so by a larger amount than households which overestimated their longest day; the mean underestimate was twenty-eight miles and the mean overestimate was 18.6 miles. Despite the magnitude of these errors, we cannot attribute the high disutility of limited range inferred from stated preference to these errors. We created worst case scenarios by adding a household's worst absolute error to its longest travel day (regardless of whether they actually occurred on the same day). The sum is still much less than the driving range of gasoline vehicles and well within the range of the EV's considered in this study for all but a few households. In only four households does the sum of the longest day and the worst error exceed one hundred and fifty miles. Note we have added the absolute value of the worst error, thus inflating the apparent range requirement. It is not the travel estimation errors per se which are the source of the apparent disutilities of limited range vehicles, rather it is consumers' choice of a familiar anchor when faced with the

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 113 unfamiliar prospect of a distance budget. Although it was not a formal part of the study,2 many PIREG participants stated at the end of the interview that prior to completing their travel diary, they would have offered much higher estimates of their daily minimum range needs. But after reviewing their actual driving needs and lifestyle goals, they found that they could adapt to a limited range vehicle. Households deal daily with money and time budgets, but have no daily distance budgets, and currently do no accounting of distances (unless they do so for business purposes or to gauge fuel consumption rates). When consumers, unfamiliar with a distance budget, are asked to respond to limited ranges, they typically respond with a range they are familiar with - that of their current gasoline vehicles. But those vehicles have refuelling characteristics and range instrumentation optimised for open road, long distance travel.

The Purchase Situation in the PIREG Study The long interview process, from sample selection, diaries, chart-making and gaming interview lead up to the question of whether a household would or wouldn't choose an electric vehicle for their next purchase. There was no final decision by households except in situations where there is a constraint fully blocking an electric vehicle purchase. The interview closes with varying degrees of uncertainty between the researcher and participants about the seriousness of the purchase intentions. Additionally, the members of a household may not only be uncertain, but not always in agreement. In fact, compared to simple surveys in which researchers force participants to make a choice, one leaves these gaming interviews with the feeling that the more we know, the less certain we can be of a decision. We know better the variables, which will influence a household, we observe better how a decision will be made, but the full framework of a decision has yet to be developed. One element of that decision is the issue of identity. We hear from respondents emerging identity issues, often in the margins of the interview. Household twenty-two is a couple who own a full sized pickup, a new Saturn sedan and two full sized touring motorcycles. The husband uses the pickup to commute to work - about twenty miles; his company pays for his vehicle expenses and so it makes sense for them that he use the pickup more often for work because of the higher expenses. The wife drives the Saturn to her work, about eight miles from home. Initially, the interview began with the assumption that the wife's Saturn was the logical target vehicle to be an electric. As we explored the potential use of the EV, it was apparent she was cold towards the idea. In the final steps of the interview, it was clear that she wasn't interested. She was convinced that the electric was a wimpy choice, she liked power and speed, preferred to drive the pickup when it was available and was most in love with her motorcycle.

2

We do not discuss household's "preferred" range prior to the PIREG interview. We wished to avoid both anchoring to a pre-conceived number, which we had observed in previous work, and over dramatization of the magnitude of any possible changes in their daily range choices.

114 Delivering Sustainable Transport

In a turn of events, the husband suggested that he get an electric. The wife was flabbergasted. "You - an electric vehicle? Since when have you ever had an environmental bone in your body". The wife went on to complain that it would make no sense given the demands of his job to cany clients to distant locations on the spur of the moment and besides it was doubtful his company would pay for electric vehicle expenses. The husband replied that actually he had often thought about environmental problems. In fact, he had often thought that the truck was the wrong kind of vehicle for what he was doing and it used too much gasoline, "something has to be done about cars". It wouldn't be that hard to adjust. We left unclear about what this household might do. Despite our long interview, a decision was nowhere in sight. There was much left for the household to do before a realistic decision could be expected. Practical concerns were mingled with issues of identity. The wife could easily use an EV but was against the imagined image it would project, the husband was interested in a change of technology, despite a less likely set of practical concerns. As we began the interview with household eighteen, the father warned us that they were not environmentalists, in fact he and his son were hard-core dirt bike riders. The mother in the family was very quiet; she drove a mid-size sedan for real estate purposes and it was clear that she could not work with range limits. The son drove a high performance sport coupe, and often took late night trips to clubs or weekend trips to distant recreation spots with his friends. The father drove a van to work, about twelve miles per day, perfect for EV's except that he and the son used the van to carry dirt bikes to remote trails. The family decision dynamics were disturbing. The father was dominating and interrupted whenever we directed questions to other family members. He continually asserted his identity as "definitely not an environmentalist". He additionally asserted that he believed electrics would probably be unsafe; he would not buy one for any of his family. The attitudes and habits of the household seemed to make them highly unlikely candidates for an electric or any other environmental vehicles. However, near the end of the interview, the son put his hand up to the father and said, "Listen Dad, this could be interesting. I might want one of these things. It could be great to be one of the first people to use one of these". The son then explored how the EV would have affected his lifestyle. When it was apparent that it wouldn't work, the father chimed in that he could use an electric; the large engineering company where he worked already had recharging locations for a couple of employees who had done their own hobby EV's. He and bis son were not doing much dirt bike riding and they could still keep the van. The identification with cars and the lifestyle implications of each of these households above are strong. Vehicles are used for sport, for commuting and for work purposes. Resistant at first to the idea of incorporating an electric vehicle into their household fleet, they make some moves towards the idea, when they see new biographical material, for themselves or their household. In the first household, the husband sees a new self-image developing around a clean vehicle, even though it is not practical. In the second household, the father, whose

Identity, Lifestyle and the Gaming Interview 115 identify is tied closely to the desires and activities of his teenage son, is swayed by the potential development of a new lifestyle sector, a shared technology, with his son.

Growing a Green Market Life politics involves households and individuals in complex decision issues, involving conflicting claims by experts about technology, potential conflicts between lifestyle goals and environmental correctness, as well as decisions about allocations of resources. Automobiles in particular are an expensive and central lifestyle technology for households, thus decisions about automobiles are critical to goals of the household to participate in lifestyle sectors. In the case of electric vehicles, the central problem of providing quick recharging and greater energy density in batteries becomes the focal point of green politics. Thus, electric vehicles open a new life politics of energy as well as reduced emissions. Electrics draw attention to the spatial demands of households and overall fleet composition of households. Electric vehicles will be the biggest shift in technologies in the history of automobiles. This technological innovation intrudes on the market, revolutionising the choices available to consumers, creating an unambiguous clean car (relative to the other vehicles). But it does so imperfectly, offering a choice to only a portion of the market place because of the limited range and corollary of limited size. The households in the studies above are those at the core of this market. They are not necessarily activist households; rather, their current travel patterns and vehicle use patterns fit the technology. Their decisions about purchases will determine the fate of the market. Thus electric vehicle purchasers will heavily politicise choices in this sector, more so than among other sectors of the market. The burden of greenness rests on them.

This is not necessarily an unwelcome development among these consumers. They in general are interested in environmental solutions, see automobiles as a significant environmental problem and consider most of the adjustments to electric vehicles to be reasonable. Clean vehicles fit with their image also of what they would like to become, as long as the technology is affordable and can be budgeted. Regulators, auto companies and local planners for air quality and electrical infrastructure must consider these potential buyers as knowledgeable participants, building an institutional structure which is not built merely on subsidies, but rather on a broad contract to bring electrics to the market at a reasonable cost and to facilitate public understanding of the benefits and expected plans for the transition to cleaner technologies.

116 Delivering Sustainable Transport

References

Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. DeLorenzo, M. (1993). Plug in, turn on, or drop out: a debate grounded in reality. Auto-week, 43, 51,17. Douglas, M. and B. Isherwood, (1979). The World of Goods. W.W.NotonandCo,NewYak. Durning, A. (1992). How Much is Enough?: The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth. W.W. North and Co, New York. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Golob, T. and Meurs, H. (1986). Biases in Response Over Time in a Seven Day Travel Diary. Transportation, 13,163-181. Gore, A. (1992). Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Hopkinson, P., Nash, C. and Sheehy, N. (1992). How Much do People Value the Environment? Transportation 19,97-115. Jones, P. (1979). HATS - A technique for Investigating Household Decisions, Environment and Planning A, 11,1. Jones, P., Koppelman, F. and Orfeuil, J.P. (1990). Activity Analysis: State of the Art and Future Directions in Developments in Dynamic and Activity Based Approaches. In Transport Analysis, (P. Jones, ed.) pp. 34-55. Gower, Aldershot. Kurani, K., Turrentine, T. and Sperling, D. (1994). Exploring Demand for Electric Vehicles hi Hybrid Households: An Exploratory Analysis. Transport Policy 1,244-56. Lee-Gosselin, M. (1990). The Dynamics of Car Use Patterns Under Different Scenarios: A Gaming Approach. In Developments in Dynamic and Activity Based Approaches to Travel Analysis, (P. Jones ed.), 251-271. Avebury. Aldershot, UK. Lowe, M. (1989). Alternatives to the Automobile: Transport for Liveable Cities, World Watch Paper 90. World Watch Institute, Washington D.C. Sagoff, M. (1988). Fragile Prices and Shadow Values. In Economy of the Earth, 74-98. Cambridge University Press, New York. Sperling, D. (1994). Future Drive: Electric Vehicles and Sustainable Transportation. Island Press, Corvelo, C.A. Uusitalo, L. (1986). Environmental Impacts on Consumption Patterns, Gower Publishing Company, Aldershot, England.

PART THREE CULTURAL STUDIES

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7

THE AUTOMOBILE ERA: A CULTURAL ANALYSIS K.H. Schaeffer and Elliott Sclar, Columbia University, USA

By now it is hardly news that the United States' major metropolitan areas, and even many of its minor ones, are in a state of crisis. While the extent of the problem may differ, the basic symptoms are the same everywhere. In spite of urban renewal, large areas of the cities are in a state of physical decay; slums are growing, not shrinking. The central cities and surrounding suburbs reel from waves of violence. Crime rates, particularly those for violent crimes, are shockingly high and generally rising. Drugs are common in the inner city as well as the most affluent suburbs. Alienation abounds. Increasingly, people feel that they are no longer master of their fate, that they are picked on and put upon, that they are buoyed about by forces they do not control, and that those in control do not understand their needs, hopes and desires. Meanwhile municipal services are deteriorating. Quite apart from public transit, neither the schools, the hospitals, the police, nor the garbage collectors represent the quality of service and responsiveness they used to. In reciting such a litany it makes little difference if one thinks of the older cities along the Eastern Seaboard, such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Baltimore; the industrial giants of the Midwest, such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or St Louis; the newer metropolitan areas, which had most of their growth in the last thirty years, such as Los Angeles, Houston or Miami; or such smaller cities and their environs as Columbia, La Crosse or Nashua. The problems everywhere are more or less the same. It is our contention that the urban crises which manifest themselves in so many different ways have at least one common root. This is the increasing reliance on the automobile. In every urban area the automobile has become the only means of transportation by which every part of the region can be reached. In addition, metropolitan activity and land-use patterns have become so dispersed that neither the automobile nor any public transit system can furnish the mobility required by every individual to function with reasonable ease in the activities their respective social, economic and physical well-being demands.

118 Delivering Sustainable Transport

Wherever the automobile is the mode of travel, their access to transportation is distributed very unevenly among individuals. This is probably the greatest social fault of the automobile, though little has been said or written about the long-term consequences of this uneven access. The uneven access to transportation is also the most vital new factor which the automobile introduced into urban society. Before the automobile, access to transportation was very evenly distributed. As long as walking was the norm for urban movement, all but the lame had equal access to mobility. With tracked transportation, the fare created a difference in access, but this difference was minor compared to what the automobile has created. There are many factors that account for the uneven access to automobility. Full automobility requires that a person can drive and has a car readily available. For most, these conditions are met infrequently or not at all. Since the automobile has become the local transportation system, one would expect a national policy to make everyone a driver. But this is not the case. Quite to the contrary. The automobile is a deadly weapon in the hands of the unskilled, and in the name of highway safety there are active and effective policies to reduce the driving population by taking 'unsafe drivers off the road'. For example, there is the general policy of revoking drivers' licences for frequent minor traffic violations as well as severe single traffic infractions. Quite often this means that a person is in effect legally prevented from going to work, shopping and generally taking care of personal business, unless a relative or friend who can drive is available, or taxi service and fare present no problem. It is no surprise that under these conditions many drive even though their licences are revoked.

As there are more cars on the road and highway travel becomes faster, drivers - for safety's sake - must have rather fast reflexes. Thus many drivers, long before they lose their licences, voluntarily restrict their driving to local streets, avoid expressways, and often confine themselves to the daylight hours of light traffic. These restrictions, be they voluntary or legal sanction, limit the automobility of a large segment of the population. Little concern has been expressed about the effects on the young and the elderly of the increased reliance on the automobile as the primary form of urban transportation. The common feeling is that nearly every family has a car and that, therefore, all members of the family have adequate mobility. There are two fallacies in this assumption. First, not all families own cars. Transportation planners usually assume that a family with one car has all the required mobility. To have more than one car is a luxury, not a necessity. Though a family often can arrange to live with one car and no public transport, this arrangement may involve considerable hardships. Take the case of a rather typical suburban one-car family. If the husband has a job with regular hours and a regular place of work, he may be able to join a car pool, but this still means he must take the car once or twice a week. If he has irregular hours or reports here today, there tomorrow, he needs the car for work. Also, if the husband took his present job after locating the family, rather than vice versa, the chances are considerably better than even that the length

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119

of his journey to work increased from his previous employment. Longer work trips usually make it more difficult to find car pools, especially if one works in suburbia. If the husband needs the family car to go to work, chances are the wife can work only if she can find employment while the husband is not at work, so that one car can seriously limit a family's income potential. Lansing and Hendricks1 have shown that families with the same income but two or more workers are more likely to be multi-car owners than families with just one worker. To combat congestion and to decrease the cost of commuting, car pools have long been a favoured device of planners and economists. Most cars can carry five or six persons, rather than the usual one or two. If people would share rides, it is argued, present roads could carry two to three times the number of travellers during rush hours; parking requirements and pollution would be reduced; and generally the cost of transportation would be lower. The public, on the other hand, has held car pools in rather low esteem and has reverted to them only if required to by other family members' need for the car, high parking fees, or very long and strenuous commutes. Survey after survey has shown that automobile occupancy is lower for the journey to work than for any other type of journey. Car pools may be appealing in principle, but for the traveller they are more likely than not a nuisance. For a car pool to function smoothly, that is, without ruffling the feathers of its various members, each person must be picked up at precisely the agreed time, and each must be ready when the pool arrives. In the evening the pool must be ready to leave at the agreed time and nothing is more irritating than a car pool member who can't leave work on time. For all practical purposes, a car pool is a transit system with one round trip a day. There is no choice of departure time. A car pool chains one to a schedule. It may operate in a private car, but from the traveller's point of view it is not a personal car. In a car pool, as in any infrequently scheduled transportation system, the traveller queues up and waits for the vehicle to serve him; whereas the joy and convenience of the private auto is precisely the fact that it queues up and waits for you. It is prepared to serve you, the driver, any time you are ready. If the family's one car is used for commuting, all other functions that require transportation must take place outside working hours. Retail merchants recognise this fact, and stores regularly remain open evenings and all day Saturday and Sunday. Over the years these have become the hours when the suburban supermarkets and stores are crowded. The typical suburban youngsters below driving age have little independent mobility, but must rely on their parents to chauffeur them. In the one-car family they must wait until father is home from work so that he or mother can chauffeur them. This is by no means an idle observation but a fact that has become ingrained in the suburban travel patterns. The 1969 transportation study of the Northern Middlesex area,2 one of Boston's suburban sectors, observed that auto passenger traffic peaked in the evening between 7 and 8 pm. During this 1 John B. Lansing and Gary Hendricks, Automobile Ownership and Residential Density, Survey Research Center, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1967. 2 Analytical Systems Corporation, Transportation Demand Characteristics in the Northern Middlesex Area, Interim Report No. 2 for the Northern Middlesex Area Commission, Lowell, Mass., October 1969.

120 Delivering Sustainable Transport

hour auto passenger traffic was 16 per cent higher than during the morning rush hour. Much of this evening auto passenger traffic was generated by the 5 to 15 year age group. Since these youngsters needed to be chauffeured, the study found that during the same hours the 30 to 49 year old drivers, presumably the parents, generated correspondingly heavy 'serving passenger' trips. Finally, the one-car family is faced by another dilemma, if it must rely on a functioning car for all its transportation needs. There is no time to service or repair the car, if the car is needed for commuting during regular working hours. Such cars are tied up during the only hours the garages are open. With less competition than the retail stores, garages need not stay open evenings and weekends and these cars are maintained either badly by weekend mechanics or not at all. This poor maintenance is not just the owner's loss but generates increased ecological costs as well. Poorly maintained cars are also less safe, which can contribute to accidents. Finally, poorly maintained and tuned engines generate more air pollution. Where the car is the only transportation mode, the one-car family operates a transportation system without a backup. This also applies to the two-car family with two workers who both need a car. No bus company or airline would dare to buy just as many vehicles as their peakhour operations require. All fleet operators expect some of their vehicles to be out of service and in the shop. But what family can afford an extra car, just so that the needed cars are always available? No one knows the hours and days that are lost from car owners' jobs because the old car won't start or has to be taken to the shop. Naturally, these losses hit hardest those who can least afford them, the ones with the lowest paying jobs and the oldest cars. In a society where the car is the only available mode of transportation, limited access to the automobile will prevent many trips from being made. This applies even to the affluent. The young can leave their immediate neighbourhood only if someone will chauffeur them. Modern youngsters cannot explore the urban area like the city kids of past generations who used the streetcar to travel far and wide. And considering that most neighbourhoods, especially in suburbia, are rather uniform in their socio-economic status and the age of their residents this becomes a true loss. The children grow up with far less direct exposure to other age groups and to people of markedly different socio-economic circumstances than past generations. Neighbourhoods housing nuclear families of parents and minor children generally have a deficiency of young adults and old people. The youngsters in such an environment are not exposed to the proverbial cranky old woman who chases them from her yard or front porch, or chides them for this or that little inconsequentiality. But while the irritants of extreme age groups meeting each other have been removed, so also has the natural educational process of learning to live with people who are unlike oneself or one's parents. The young and the old are not really enemies - many elderly thrive on visits and occasional encounters with the young, and the young likewise can be enthralled by the old and their tales of long ago. Finally, in moments of conflict at home, who can be better and wiser counsellors than the grandparents, a child's natural enemies, or someone of similar age. These people

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have fought the battle of childhood, and of child rearing, and can counsel with the detachment that the lack of direct daily responsibility affords. While the absence of the aged cheats the child of exposure to how other people live, the absence of young adults makes the neighbourhood teenagers unusually cocksure of themselves. These teens see only adults to whom they do not relate and youngsters over whom they can lord. If young adults are present, a natural pecking order develops. Here for each child or teenager there is someone just a bit older and more mature, a natural big brother or sister. Without the aged and young adults as mediators in the natural battle between the generations, such conflicts become easily exaggerated. The age-segregated neighbourhood - which became a feasible urban form only when the automobile became commonplace - is a natural breeding ground for insecurity and alienation. The harassed child turns to rebellion, drugs and delinquency and the harassed parent to alcoholism and divorce. Naturally, the automobile-generated transportation and land-use patterns are not the sole cause of these pathologies, for most suburbanites are quite 'normal', but these patterns are contributory factors which help to explain the steady rise in the number of people who become victims of these pathologies. Even if the children are chauffeured out of their immediate neighbourhood, their destinations are limited. They can only go where their chauffeurs care to take them and only when they choose to do so. By being chauffeured to specific places, children more likely than not fail to see the seamy side of town, or the multitudinous events that present themselves to the strollers in urban neighbourhoods where people still are more likely to walk than to ride. These places are not destinations of 'planned' trips. But even the destinations of 'planned' trips are more often than not beyond the child's reach. One father told us of his utter amazement when his son, who had just received his licence, recited a litany of places where he could now go on his own. The places included second-hand book shops, libraries and stamp dealers - all locales the parents approved of, but which the parents, who had other predilections, only rarely cared to take their son to. Naturally, the boy was reluctant to ask to be taken, for who wants to go with a bored companion or receive a 'no' for one's quite legitimate request. Many of today's younger parents were once themselves youngsters in auto-dependent and auto-limited suburbs, and may regard youth's lack of mobility as the 'norm' with no real effect on child development. But in the days past when mobility, and not its lack, were the norm, child development psychologists considered it an asset. A case in point are the writings of Dr Arnold Gesell and his colleagues at Yale University. These scientists did their research prior to the early 1950's. At that time they developed 'growth gradients', which describe a child's behaviour at various age levels up to age 16. Between the ages of 8 and 14, the researchers used independent travel as the measure for a youth's facility to orient and master space. Gesell's gradients are known to represent slow-maturing rather than fast-maturing children. Thus most youngsters mastered independent travel at even earlier ages. A careful reading of the gradients shows little if any growth between 9 and 10. One possible explanation is that

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the gradients for 8 and 9 were published in 1946, but those for 10 and older in 1956. During the interval, the post-Second World War move to the suburbs got into full swing, together with a severe decline in public transportation. By now the gradients are inapplicable to suburban youngsters. The vast majority have never been on any public vehicle. Their first solo excursions were probably by bicycle, but these vehicles transported them hardly further than the local school bus. Beyond this immediate area, their first solo excursion occurs more often than not at 16 or 17 after they have gotten their driver's licence and are not permitted to borrow the family car. These are excerpts from the findings:

8 years:

Can go to city on bus if put on and met by someone.

9 years:

Can go to familiar places on bus, getting on alone; or go downtown alone.

10 years:

Ten can often manage bus trips downtown. Some can do so if they are meeting an adult, others can go and return unaccompanied on simple errands, even going to the dentist alone. A few, however, are still not allowed to cross a busy street.

11 years:

Can go downtown alone on the bus, even travel on the tram, if they do not have to change trams.

12 years:

Many now travel alone on the train, can find their way in strange cities asking policemen or others.

13 years:

Now parents describe children as going to Boston and New York alone, rather than downtown as at 10.

14 years:

Many 14 year olds travel independently now without difficulty.

Table 7.1 Typical Expectations of Young People's Independent Mobility in the 1950s.

Besides the young, there are also the poor and the aged who fail to make many trips they ought to make. In the case of the poor, much has been said and written of their problems in getting to and from work. Many solutions have been proposed including special bus routes 3

Arnold Gesell and Frances L. Ilg, The Child from Five to Ten, Harper & Row, New York, 1946, page 443; Arnold Gesell, Frances L. Ilg, Louise Bates Ames, Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen, Harper & Row, New York, 1956, pages 496-7. Cited by permission of Harper & Row Publishers Inc. 4 'Route Guidance', Five Reports, Highway Research Record No. 265, Highway Research Board, Washington, DC, 1968.

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from urban ghettos to suburban job centres, but as a whole these solutions have been very ineffective. The reason is simple. The journey to work is not the greatest transportation problem of the poor. If a person has a job, especially a full-time 7 to 4 or 8 to 5 job Monday through Friday, there is usually a way in which non-car owners can find someone to take them to work. But many employed poor do not work these hours. More likely they work in the service industries, as dishwashers or janitors, with odd hours and frequently split shifts. For these hours it is much harder to find a ride. But even these trips are not the poor's greatest concern. The unskilled jobs by their very nature tend to be temporary, last-hiredfirst-fired type jobs. The poor thus must frequently hunt new jobs, and in job-hunting a car is far more necessary than in holding a job. With no car for job-hunting, even in days of high employment, the poor may lack precisely the one tool - transportation - they require to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. There are traditionally the jokes and the sneering against the poor who ask for welfare and food assistance, but still own a car. At first glance this may strike one as a misplaced sense of value; but the poor, especially the ones hopefully temporarily out of luck, rightly recognise the need for a car, for otherwise they will never be able to enter or re-enter the affluent society. Many jobs in sales and services make car ownership a condition of employment and frequently require the ownership of a late-model car. The various studies which have suggested giving the poor cars as the cheapest solution to their transportation problems may have made the suggestion tongue in check, but certainly had the only true solution. Still the plight of the young and the middle-aged poor is nothing compared to the plight of the aged. The aged have never travelled much, and in past societies there was little need for them to move around. The world they needed was with them or came to them. No so in our modern society. Today, the aged have an ever-increasing need for local trip-making and, as society becomes more automobile-dependent, less opportunity to do so. With the increased ease of food preparation and the near universality of thermostat-controlled furnaces, increasing numbers of the aged maintain their own households. What drives the aged finally to move to old-age homes or to their children's home is frequently their inability to perform the local trip-making that is required to maintain a household. There is the need to shop for food. Here the aged are handicapped not only by their inability to drive, but also by their restricted physical strength. Once there were the milkmen, the breadmen, the icemen, the vegetable men who peddled their wares door to door. Then there were the grocery stores who made regular deliveries. Today, the routemen have nearly vanished and grocers that deliver are few. Where they do exist they usually charge a considerable fee. This means many aged who live alone shop by taxi. The aged, when they are sick, need health care and the attention of a doctor, but, because of the hassle and cost associated with getting to a doctor's office, may frequently not receive the attention they need. While public-health nurses will make regular home visits, the physician's house-call has disappeared with the routeman. Doctors feel that they can give better health care in their office and the hospital emergency room, where they are surrounded by all the required hardware for diagnosis and treatment, than in the home, where they can rely only on their little black bag. Thus, the aged must rely on relatives and friends to

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chauffeur them, and when these don't exist, or are not to be inconvenienced, on taxis. The taxi has become increasingly the transportation system of the aged and the poor. According to the Northern Middlesex Area study, the aged are more likely to make their trips by taxi than any other age group and the median family income of taxi passengers is significantly lower than that of travellers by any other mode, including the public bus. We have described the lack of trip making in the auto-dependent society. This appears to contradict the observable fact that there is a steady rise in trip-making. All over the world auto trips are increasing faster than the population, faster than the reduced ridership in public transportation and probably faster than automobile ownership. Each year the statistical average person takes more trips and travels further. Since even in North America these trends show no abating, one should expect over time that the automobile will supply all the socially needed trips. Meanwhile our all-efficient modern society is turning to a land-use pattern and a transportation system that requires a disproportionately larger number of trips not to transport something, or someone, but to chauffeur empty cars. The modem suburban housewife is the prime victim of this polluting inefficiency, for she makes many of these trips. The chauffeuring mother is today so truly a symbol of the affluent society that the Ford Motor Company could run a television ad in the late sixties in which a young bride proclaimed: 'I promise to love, honour, obey and spend half my life in a station wagon'. With the twentieth century technological revolution in the kitchen and in transportation, the modem mother has been freed from the stove to be chained to the wheel. Today the mounting transportation-generated trips are a pathological sign of the mobility crisis that haunts metropolitan areas. Because of total reliance on flexible automobile transportation, residences, activity centres and workplaces have no direct access to one another and are spread over vast areas of land. The result is that access between activities is limited to formal trip-making, and the people in different activities have little chance of encountering one another. In short, it is a sign of a metropolitan area where there is no real community. There is a lack of community in the auto-centred society because large groups of the population lack the mobility which is demanded for full participation in this society. Better transportation can probably not solve this problem. No transport system that one can imagine can overcome the alienation of modem society and again bind it into a communal whole. Just for argument's sake, assume science had created the magic carpet, free as manna from heaven. The carpet glides through the air, at 60 or 100 mph, covered by an air-conditional cupola. It does not pollute. It can enter buildings through doors and windows. If not in use, it can be rolled up and stuck into a corner. The operation of this vehicle is so simple and safe that anyone can operate it who is capable of walking alone to the end of the block. This science-fiction marvel, since it is free, available to all but the housebound, can fulfil any tripmaking needs that a society can have. No one can say: "I didn't make it because I had no way to go." Different alibis would be needed. If people want to be somewhere, they can be there.

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Still, even this system would not solve the basic social problems. With massive auto transportation, people have found a way to isolate themselves; a way to avoid confrontation; a way to privacy among their peer group. With help of the auto, they have stratified the urban landscape like a checker board, here a piece for the young married, there one for health care, here one for shopping, there one for the swinging jet set, here one for industry, there one for the aged, here one for the rich in their fifties, there a ghetto for the Untermensch - be they poor or racially despised. When people move from square to square, they move purposefully, determinedly (not cruising for the sake of cruising). They see nothing except what they are determined to see. Everything else is shut out from their experience. People prefer to travel on limited-access roads rather than arterials and side streets, because on limited-access roads they are not confronted by oncoming traffic, by children darting about, by cross-traffic. Here everyone travels in the same direction at more or less the same speed. In fact, they wish that others would be even more like themselves, for in traffic people cuss with equal vehemence the cars that pass them as those that block their pathway. People like to insist on airconditioned cars to keep the weather and the traffic noises at arm's length. In driving about they only rarely see the surrounding sights, not only as drivers, but as passengers as well. The fact that auto-transported children are easily lost in their own communities and often do not know their city's most rudimentary arterial road network shows how much one can travel without paying attention to the surroundings. In the short run, this behaviour makes a lot of sense. Privacy is guaranteed. No one is forced to deal with extraneous events. People can go about their business purposefully and efficiently. While people may live for the moment, they exist over time. This privatisation which society practices so joyously and relentlessly through the use of automobiles, and which could not be practiced if there were no cars, is easily the bane of the individual's existence over tune. By reducing most activities to those that are purposeful and efficient, a person sacrifices the antennae that recognise change and that can warn of impending dangers. The alienation that abounds everywhere, the increased feeling that people are no longer masters of their fate, that they are picked on and put upon, that they are buoyed by forces they do not control, and that those in control do not understand their needs, hopes and desires, all this may well be due to the fact that too many, from head of state to social outcast, are too much and too unrelentingly pursuing the business of the moment too privately, too purposefully, too efficiently. Any system that in this environment gives society even more auto-like transportation, even more private insulated transportation, to skip from one purposive activity to the next, be it a business deal, a school examination or a sexual orgy, can over time make today's alienation only worse tomorrow. While unequally distributed mobility is the readily apparent social crisis of the automobilecentred society, the basic problem is not that the young and the aged and the poor have not enough mobility, but rather that the rest have too much mobility. The transportation crisis of the modern society is thus a crisis of overabundance. Society has turned from yesterday's overcrowded cities in horror, to the space-generating automobile and all the privacy it can bestow. But as the old saying goes, 'a rolling stone gathers no moss'. Thus, today, the affluent, the fully mobile ones, run from one activity to another like wound-up automatons, in the search for privacy, non-confrontation and peace, all qualities which they shall never find until they realise that one cannot run away from life's problems but must face them, until

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there is a realisation that people need not just transportation, but collocation as well - forced, peaceful togetherness, where one can work out life's little problems and misunderstandings, where one can contemplate and observe, where one can be both passive observer and active participant, where the world is where one is, not here and yonder. Transportation cannot be the only way in which people come together, it is too complicated, too purposive, too planned. A city, a society, any co-operative enterprise, is both collocation and transportation. If it is either at the expense of the other it is the stinking mess the walking city was, or the organised chaos of alienation today's sprawling metropolis is or threatens to become.

Note This is an edited version of a chapter that originally appeared in Schaeffer, K. H. and E. Sclar (1975). Access for All: Transportation and Urban Growth, Penguin, London.

8

ETHNOGRAPHY OF MOTOR-BIKE BOYS Paul Willis, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK

... 'He used to have a rocket, you know, this mate of mine. You know, and I felt sick when I heard he'd died, 'cause we'd had some good times, you know, and I felt sick. I had a dream about it, you know. In heaven St Peter is there, and there's a dirty great big open road ... there's nothing coming this way, you know, just that way, and you're going really fast, ordinarily it would have blown you off, you're going so fast, it's such a fast bike ... no cars, no motor-scooters, nothing like that, just motor-bikes and every now and again there's a cafe, about every fifteen miles or so ... and the coffee's free, and the music's playing ... rock music, it'd be rock 'n' roll, all those Bill Haley, Little Richard, you know. All the ones I like, all the ones I've got and I still like, they'd all be on, in every cafe I go to, you know ... and there's all blonde virgins waiting for you, and all the coffee's free, and the music's playing, and there's just one dirty great big highway all to yourself, and St Peter gives you a bike to ride and try ... so it must be great up there, honest... Just go in the cafe, quick coffee and 'wham', on to the big highway again, no bends, nothing coming the other way ... after all this, I think I'm going to die tonight when I get on the bike'. Joe, 1969 The Approach I made contact with a motor-bike club in a large English city in 1969, and continued field work and interviews there over a period of nine months. The club is now closed and the members disbanded. During the period of 'the research' the club was very successful, and always full, and had an official membership in their hundreds. The boys were in the typical style of the motor-bike boy, or 'rocker' or 'greaser'. Studded leather jackets and greasy denim jeans were the norm. Large motor-cycle boots or large marching boots were worn on the feet. Hair was normally long and greasy, swept back with a small quiff at the front. The leather jackets were frequently adorned with badges and mottoes. Thought this group and style was clearly marked out during the 1960s by the opposition accomplished partly through the media - to the 'mods', the culture still exists today. The style represents one basic form of working-class culture as it is lived by the young, and

128 Delivering Sustainable Transport contains - often in highly explicit forms - central continuing working-class themes and values. I spent a few evenings simply 'hanging around' the club and taking in its general atmosphere. Contacts would be made with members through the full-time official. One of the contacts, Mick, a long-standing member and one-time secretary to the club, was sympathetic and introduced me to his particular group of friends. These friends, ranging in age from late teens to middle 20s, were not involved in the formal structure of the club, and strongly resisted its latent functions of social control, although they had attended regularly over a number of years. Over the next few weeks, I developed a kind of relationship with this group and finally suggested that they might like to listen to records, and discuss their reactions and whatever else interested them on tape. They agreed — and certainly out of no obligation or coercion. It was frequently impossible to get them all together at one time, and I often spent the evening just drifting around the club chatting here and there or generally observing things. It should be remembered that my study was of the larger social and cultural whole and not of a specific group or of specific individuals except in so far as they embodied central meaning and values. I was not perturbed by this randomness of contact. General exposure to the culture was of the utmost importance. A typical evening for the motor-bike boys would consist of permutations of the same activities: a coffee in the coffee bar, a drink and a game of darts in the local pub, a game of table-tennis or pin-ball in the coffee bar, general horseplay around the premises, chatting in groups around the club. The social situation was very fluid and Mick's group would not remain a coherent whole, but split up and mixed generally about the club. The composition of the group with which I taped discussions also changed over time and varied in number. It centrally included Mick (a foundry worker), Joe (a scaffolder), Fred (a scaffolder), Tim (a milkman), Percy (a student), Roger (unemployed) and Sue (unemployed, girlfriend of Joe). Percy and Roger were not part of Mick's group of friends, but joined our discussions on a few occasions, and were always around the club and well know to all its members. Sometimes it was possible, usually in the pub at about the middle of the evening, to suggest to whomever was around from 'the group' and sometimes others that we should go to one of the committee rooms for half an hour to play and discuss particular records. I would play a number of records both of my own and of their choice, and ask them their opinions. These sessions were relatively unstructured and the discussions frequently 'took off in unpredictable directions without any prompting from me. Although by no means fully accepted I think I was a guy who was known to be 'ok', if a little grey and detached. A lot of the time I was simply unnoticed. That my interest in their culture was general and based also on their music, rather than on them directly, helped to minimize distrust or awkwardness.

Ethnography of Motor-Bike Boys 129 The following account is based on general observation, conversation with individuals and groups, participation around the club, often with the group described above, and taperecorded sessions. Security of identity The world of the motor-bike boys was above all else concrete and unequivocal. They perceived it without ontological insecurity, without existential angst. Words like that did not exist. There was no space for them. Values, attitudes and feelings were so deeply entrenched as to form part of an obvious commonsense reality. There was no abstract dimension to the world, no guilty reading, no burdened 'I' -just a straightforward physicality and confidence in things. The touchstones of this world were manliness, toughness and directness of interpersonal contact. Frankness and directness characterized all of their social interaction. Formal structures or considerations of politeness did not distort normal ongoing life. Form and style were located in concrete and lived situations, not in books on etiquette. Status in any kind of outside hierarchical structure was ignored so far as their relations with each other were concerned. They lived in the unrefined world of the present and its immediate relations.

Death and identity The motor-bike was the crucial symbolic piece of the bike culture. Death on the motor-bike was very common. Their fascination with such a death was frequently expressed: Fred: Joe: Fred:

Joe: Fred:

Racing coppers. Hoorah! Get two of them behind, all fucking day. Thunderbolts, you know, the coppers' thunderbolts, and you're fucking pissing away on an export bonnie or sommat, give it almighty stick, you know, and you kick a couple of coppers, so fast, smoking, your tyres are set alight you know, and a fucking great big twenty-ton lorry conies across, an artic, and you go up the back. Like up the Junction? No, like Johnny Gibson, oh he did fucking hell, he did, blood poured from everywhere, cracking his fucking skull wide open.

The interest in the motor-bike could be taken to signify a morbid fascination with death, paralleling, in a sense, the search for excitement and new experience through drugs. This would be to misunderstand the relationship of the bike boys to the motor-bike. The skills of handling a motor-bike were widely valued, and were precisely about avoiding unnecessary accident. To have died through obvious incompetence, would not have been meaningful. Their attitude was not one of submission to the motor-bike, but one of assertion which stressed the importance of control. If the machine would not be subjugated by their will, then it was to be distrusted, not valued:

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Fred: Joe: PW: Joe:

No ... the motor-bike don't frighten you. If the bike handles well, the bike will never beat you; if it handles bad, it frightens you, that's all. Frightens - what does 'frightens' mean? No, scared, I mean. Like if I've got a bike, and it don't handle well, I won't go fast on it; but if it'll do everything you want it to, well that's it you know.

It is precisely, therefore, confidence in the controllability, the unequivocality, of the physical world which expands to envelope and control the ferocity of the motor-bike - not vice versa. Not only is the ontological security of the motor-bike boys demonstrated in their mastery of the motor-bike, but the qualities and function of the machine itself express their sense of concrete identity within an unarguable reality. The motor-bike responds inevitably and concretely to the subjective will, it accelerates to the point of blowing the rider off at the twist of a wrist. Control decisions are met immediately by the physical consequences of rushing air. The sheer mechanical functioning of the motor-bike - the engineered hardness of metal against metal, the minutely controlled explosion of gases, the predictable power from the swing of machined components - underwrites a positive and durable view of the physical world. Abstraction shrinks in the mouth of technology. Even danger on the bike was accepted mater-of-factly in the scope of a fully connected consciousness. Nor was death regarded in a loose romantic or adventurist fashion. The motor-bike death was a highly specific affirmation of important lived values. Those values concerned not transcendentalism, but precisely the capable handling of a bike: the mastery of a powerful alien technology. Death through stupidity held no value. The significant death came only after physical limits had been pushed to the full, after the body had made massive attempts to control, after the boundaries of skill had been passed, when the rider could do nothing more to save himself. That was 'the way to go': at the point of maximum exertion and skill. It summed up, glorified and held eternally for a second all the aspects of riding a fast bike well - those qualities which in fact, paradoxically, make death less likely in the normal course. The significance of death for the motor-bike boys is, therefore, very much in this world, and not in any mystical 'other' world. At no point is consciousness, or the incontrovertibility of material things, challenged: even in the prospect of death, the risk is met in the confidence and expectation of full consciousness. Death is not an anodyne, but paradoxically, the quintessential recognition of awareness and personality. What is often regarded as a fatalism or a knowing wager with death is, for the motor-bike boys, in fact the specific evocation of the unexpected, uncontrollable and unlocked for event, which comes at the moment of greatest skill. No fore-knowledge, no after-knowledge, is to be allowed into their freezing of a moment: a moment of control central to their living culture:

Ethnography of Motor-Bike Boys 131 Fred:

Fred:

Joe: Fred:

As I say, if I knew I was going to die, you know going down the road on a bike, I wouldn't go down the fucking road on the bike, that's it, I wouldn't purposely go out and get killed as I say. Just blast down the road giving it almighty stick, and fucking that's it. I don't want to know I was going to die, you know what I mean, but if I was going to die, I wouldn't mind going on a bike - fucking great. It's the way you do it, that's all. I'd like to die racing down the road, down the bastard, give it almighty stick, give a jag a go, and then, you know, a rucking big lorry comes out, crunch, that's the end of you... nice, eh?

The style of identity This absolute security of identity was characteristically expressed in a distinctive style. There was a rumbustious extroversion, a rough bonhomie, sometimes a bravado, that short through their social relations. Their sense of security was enacted through an essentially masculine style.

Two kinds of masculinity To be clear about the nature of this masculine style, it must be stressed that it owed nothing to the conventional notion of the healthy masculine life. Participation in organized sport, for instance, held very little attraction for the motor-bike boys. Their view of the appropriate manly scope of action did not include the wearing of shorts and the obeying of formal rules, nor was athletic ability taken as evidence of masculinity. Attempts to channel their aggressive and robust style into formal sports situations generally met with disaster precisely because it misunderstood the nature of, and the difference between, the two kinds of masculinity. Where individuals did become involved in sport, by and large it was to spoof the whole thing. Rules and conventions were ignored, old sweaters and jeans were often worn instead of neat sports clothing. This was not due, as can so often be thought by the liberal establishment, to material or social deprivation, but to a conscious unwillingness to even begin to be trapped by the paraphernalia, the artificial external definitions of what masculine activities should be like. They would not engage in any safe channeling of aggressive feelings. That would have been dishonest. Masculinity and aggression were mixed in with normal life. To have siphoned these things off in a formal and organized way would have been to deny their identify. A crude, completely unorganized kind of football was played in various situations, in the factory yard, or the patch, or occasionally, in the coffee bar in the club. However, this was completely unstructured, and the boys had total control over the game, so that it could be moulded to their own special needs. A ball against a window, or a ball bouncing around an internal room, gave considerably more pleasure than a well-executed penalty shot. Nor did the motor-bike boys have much interest in spectator sports. Participation in formal games held little interest for them, and watching such games even less. There were still the

132 Delivering Sustainable Transport rules and regulations, still the narrowed scope of masculine behavior, still the stereotyped symbols and clothes of the game to disguise fundamental identity, to deny spontaneous expression. An official report notes the lack of interest in sporting programmes when a television set was installed in one of the spare rooms of the club: One point of significance that I have noted is the lack of interest in the sporting programmes, which one might have felt, in a strong physical environment, heavily orientated in the male direction, would not have been the case. This is probably because, with our current clientele, the niceties and skills of professional and amateur sport are basically lost, and are therefore unattractive. This corroborates my view of the masculine style of motorbike boys. It comments, at a tangent, on the disjunction between the two lands of masculinity, and then offers an explanation. I should add that the "niceties and skills' are lost because of the crucial land of masculine style already articulated among the boys. Their masculinity had a broader sweep than anything contained by the notion of skill in a game: the important skills were about preservation of life on a motor-bike, or survival in a fight. 'Niceties' was an alien concept altogether: it managed only to convey something of the distant claustrophobia of middle-class Sunday afternoons and china cups to delicate to handle, too small to satisfy. Their particular land of masculinity was easily and often defined by society as delinquency; their 'code of honour' should therefore not be confused with any notion of establishment or conventional honour. Valued tenets of this code - to harden them for a moment in a way that they did not - such as impudence before authority, domination of women, humiliation of the weaker, aggression towards the different, would be abhorrent to traditional proponents of honour, and labelled criminal by the agents of social control. In attempting to understand their life-style, there must be no suggestion of false continuity between the motor-bike boys and wider society; that is, either of falling into a kind of sentimental idealization of their masculine qualities, or of believing these qualities, once translated, as it were, to be positive and acceptable to normal society. These qualities were in fact consistently regarded as criminal and delinquent by society. No rapprochement would have been possible on either side. Shocking styles and conventional politics The motor-bike boys' attitudes and style were outrageous, shocking and offensive to general society. They also took some satisfaction from this outrage, shock and offence. It would be wrong, however, to read any real political significance into this. They were not in the end challenging the structures of society. Indeed, finally, they were, unexpectedly and surprisingly, reproducing them. Furthermore, it is possible to draw a continuity between the bikeboys and what might be called the traditional respectable working class. A profound corollary of their simple, unrefiective morality and concrete view of the world was that their spontaneous opposition fell much short of a political critique or attempt to change the larger society.

Ethnography of Motor-Bike Boys 133

The conservative and conventional potential of some of their attitudes is obvious. Their belief that women were basically inferior and without autonomous status is an aspect of the common view that the woman's place is in the home with the children and that her field of influence outside should be sharply circumscribed. Their attitude to drugs, too, was basically conventional. There is the same distrust, the same fear of possible degeneracy that conservative critics have about the drug scene. Their racism also shows their distaste for the different, rejection of the strange, that is held to be common, certainly to the stereotyped view of our traditionally zenophobic working class. The most striking and important aspect of the covert conformism beneath the brash exterior was in their attitude to work. There was no radical pressure here on society at its most vulnerable point, site of exploitation and class differentiation. From other aspects of their culture it might be assumed that the bikeboys had an indifferent or dropout attitude to work. The reverse was true. To be out of a job was considered a calamity.

The motor-bike The motorbike both reflected and generated many of the central meanings of the bike culture. It must be understood as one of the main elements of its stylistic make-up. In a general and unspecific way, it was clear that the motorbike was one of the main interests of the motorbike boys. Most of their activities were based on this interest. A large part of conversation was devoted to the motorcycle: discussing new models or comparing performance or describing in detail how repair jobs were done. The club itself acted as an important clearing-house for spares and accessories, sometimes stolen, sometimes legitimate. The boys regarded the club as a center of information and supply. On numerous occasions experts were approached by acolytes for detailed descriptions of mechanical repair jobs, or for a 'professional' diagnosis of mechanical problems. A strange rattle or banging, sluggish acceleration, or bad handling characteristics, would send the less knowledgeable enthusiasts running to the acknowledged 'experts'. At first sight an unofficial hierarchy appeared to be based on this knowledge: individuals with extremely fast motorbikes, or with recognized diagnostic and mechanical skill, seemed to enjoy a position of high status. A common approach would be to offer the 'expert' a drink or a cigarette as a prelude to asking advice. Mick was awarded a senior position within the unofficial hierarchy. This was interesting and alerted me to what lay behind the possibly merely random, chance or purely functional technical involvement with the motorbike. The motorbike had a specific cultural role, and it was its cultured meaning which was most related to status in their social system. Mick's mechanical skills were not at an extremely high level, and nor was his motor-bike particularly fast. In his case it was more his length of experience and his type of experience with bikes.

134 Delivering Sustainable Transport He was older than the rest, had been riding a motorcycle for longer and, more significantly, had had several accidents. He had been in hospital several times, had broken a number of limbs, and had, as a momento of one of his accidents, a piece of metal in one of his legs holding a weakened bone together. He recounted these experiences with nonchalance and seemed to make no special effort to avoid further accidents - rather he seemed to expect further accidents as a matter of course. Status, then, in the light of Mick's case, was accorded less for technical competence with the motor-bike, that for full citizenship within the world of the motor-cycle, for understanding at some level, as it were, not the surface technical details, but the real cultural meaning of the motor-bike: the way in which it reflected important cultural values. The solidity, responsiveness, inevitableness, the strength of the motor-bike matched the concrete, secure nature of the bikeboys' world. It underwrote in a dramatic and important way their belief in the commonsense world of tangible things, and the secureness of personal identity. The roughness and intimidation of the motor-bike, the surprise of its fierce acceleration, the aggressive thumping of the unbaffled exhaust, matches and symbolizes the masculine assertiveness, the rough camaraderie, the muscularity of language, of their style of social interaction. That sheer technical competence alone was not rated highly is clearly shown by the case of Percy. He had a very advanced technical knowledge of the motor-bike, but was accorded very little status. He did not ride his machine particularly fast, had never had an accident and did not regard the prospect with equanimity. His clothing was within the letter, rather than the spirit, of the motor-bike world. It was simply too functional and too meticulous to seem natural in this larger symbolic world. This observation about Percy was important and led to an understanding of the dialectical role of the motor-bike. It mediated not only essential cultural values, but directly developed them in other elements of expressive style. Its nature resonated through the culture. Other cultural atoms took on the structure of its existence, in turn both expressing and further forming the structure of feeling in the culture. The dress of Joe, Fred, Mick and Tun was not primarily a functional exigency of riding a motorcycle. It was more crucially an extension of the motorbike into the human zone: this dress was a cultural transposition and amplification of the qualities inherent within the motorbike and of the experience of riding it. For those who have never ridden a motorcycle, it may not be clear that high-speed riding is an extremely physical experience. At high speeds, the whole body is blown backwards: it was a common way of communicating speed among the boys to say 'I was nearly blown off. When even a slight bend is taken at high speed, the machine and the driver need to go over at quite an angle in order to compensate the centrifugal force which threatens to throw the rider off, and topple the machine away from the direction of the turn. Novices find this an extremely precarious situation to be in, and can panic. The experienced fast motor-cyclist will not take a complete amateur on the back of the motor-cycle in case a lean in the wrong direction on a fast bend may upset the precise balance, and send them both hurtling towards the tarmac. The experienced driver becomes part of the motor-cycle and intuitively feels the correct balancing at high speeds. If there is anything wrong, it is the fault of the motor-bike.

Ethnography of Motor-Bike Boys 135

The dangers and the excitement of bodily wind pressure exist of course for the conventional motorcyclist, too, but he responds only within a technical (culturally arbitrary) framework. He tries to remove himself from the rawness of the experience. He protects his body face, eyes and hands from the wind. He tries to close down and minimize the influence within the human of the inherent qualities of the motorbike. He is, in a sense, contained and sealed by his gear, so that he makes decisions, and controls the motorcycle, at one remove from the direct experiences which made the control necessary. Thus, he must lean with the machine around corners, and he will feel the force of the wind bodily moving him back, but these4 senses are both blunted and mediated by protective clothing. The clothing is also pulled in tightly without open flaps, streamlined and smooth to minimize unnecessary drag and wind resistance. Thus, the conventional clothing of Percy consisted of a helmet, goggles, belted waist, tightly closed-in neck, gloves and large woollen socks. The helmet clearly protected against head injury in an accident, the goggles prevented eye irritation from dust or high winds. The belted waist and tightly closed-in neck prevented wind from entering and ballooning the clothes at high speeds. The gloves protected the hands, and, by overlapping the jacket, prevented wind from travelling up the sleeve. Large woollen socks prevented air from pocketing, and kept the feet warm. Thus, in this conventional dress, Percy was tightly packaged in, and given the maximum protection from the inherent dangers and discomforts of the motor-bike. The special characteristics of the motor-bike, its openness to the elements, its instability, its speed, the free rush of air, were minimized as far as possible, so as to tender the motor-cycle a neutral form of transport. The whole outfit is a carefully worked out, and carefully put together, attempt to negate the effects and characteristics of the motor-bike: it is the technological answer to the problems technology has created - uniformity, anonymity and featurelessness encircle the rough, roaring, dangerous qualities of the motor-bike. The bikeboys' response to the special characteristics of the moving bike is very different. Although their dress contained some of the same basic elements as that of the conventional motor-cyclist, the bikeboys had transformed its meaning and significance by small though crucial changes. To start with, helmets, and goggles and gloves were never worn. They knew quite well that helmets were advisable if only because of a national safety campaign: 'You know it makes sense'. The reason was that helmets and goggles would have inhibited the force of cultural mediation : the experience and the image of motor-cycling would have been muffled or blocked. These accoutrements destroyed the excitement of the wind rushing into the face and of the loud exhaust beat thumping the ears. The absence of gloves, goggles and helmet means that the equivalent of a high gale-force wind is tearing into the living flesh. Eyes are forced into a slit and water profusely, the mouth is dragged back. The bikeboys allow no disjunction whatsoever between the fact and the experience of speed. Physical consequences are minutely articulated with control decisions of the motor-bike. There is no sense in which the rider is protected by a panoply within which there is calm to make protected decisions about events in the world out there. For the bikeboy, he is in the 'world out there' and copes with handling his motor-bike, at the same time as feeling the full brunt of its movement in the natural physical world. More generally the motor-bike boy makes no attempt to minimize the drag effect of the wind. Jackets are partly open and are not buttoned down around the throat, belts are not worn.

136 Delivering Sustainable Transport There is nothing to keep the jacket close to the skin, trousers are not tucked away in boots and socks, there is nothing to prevent wind tunnelling to the sleeves. Adornments of the jacket and free-flowing neckties add, although fractionally, to the total drag, an unnecessary drag that would be avoided by conventional motor-cyclists. The lack of the helmet allowed long hair to blow freely back in the wind, and this, with the studded and ornamented jackets, and the aggressive style of riding gave the motor-bike boys a fearsome look which amplified the wildness, noise, surprise and intimidation of the motorbike. The point of fast driving was the experience, the expressive force, the public image never the fact - of the speed. These were some of the dialectical influences of the bike on the appearance and experience of the boys. In the reverse moment of this relation to the motor-bike, they had made physical changes to their machines. They partly changed the objective nature of the bike better to express their own preferred meanings. Handlebars were often of the large cattle-horn type which required an upright sitting position with hands and arms level with the shoulders. This considerably increases draft, and ironically limits the top speed of the motor-bike. But it improves handling ability and increases the sensation of speed dramatically. The conventional motor-cyclist does exactly the opposite, lowers the handlebars and puts the footrests farther back, so that the body can lie virtually flat along the bike and present the minimum surface for wind resistance. Chromiumplated double exhaust pipes and high exuberant mudguards all helped to give the bikes an exaggerated look of fierce power. It was also common practice to remove the baffles from the silencer box on the exhaust, in order to allow the straight-through thumping of the exhaust gases from the cylinder to carry their explosion directly into the atmosphere. The effect could be startling. The breathy, loud, slightly irregular bang and splutter brought the hardness and power of the metal piston exploding down the metal cylinder, abruptly and inevitably reversing up again, right out into the still air. The minutely engineered turn of the crankshaft brought a power and impersonal ferocity right out into the vulnerable zone of human sensibilities. An alleyway led up the side of the church to the coffee bar of the club. Members often parked their bikes along this narrow passageway, and stood by them talking, starting and revving their bikes, discussing technical matters or indeed any matters at all. The noise was often overwhelming: the loud thumping of the motor-bike engines seemed to promise sudden movement and action, but none came. Strangers and neophytes could be unnerved by the continually imagined necessity to take evasive action against some fantasy explosion of movement and aggression. The ensemble of bike, noise, rider, clothes on the move gave a formidable expression of identity to the culture and powerfully developed many of its central values. Perhaps the most massive general dialectical force of the decked-out, souped-up motor-bike on the bike culture and its forms of consciousness was that of death. Death and its mediations and the forms of its subjective and social appropriation were at the heart of the culture. The

Ethnography of Motor-Bike Boys 137 possibility of accident was recognized - though not sought out - and past accidents were a major topic of conversation. Death on the motor-bike had come to take on a crucial meaning in the culture. It was the ultimate symbolic summing up of courage, masculinity and exhibition. Joe:

PW: Joe:

PW: Joe: Fred: PW: Tim: Fred: Tim: Fred:

I think it's the best way. I'll have a bike until I'm about 35, you know. I think it's the best way to die... I'd like to go quickly, mind you, out light a light, 'bang'... fast, like, about 100 miles an hour... hit a car... smash straight into something. What are the chances do you think of having a serious accident? Oh well, I'm a nut case, you know, on a motor-bike, it might do. I've had some near misses, you know, through crash barriers, and I've had concussion and things like that without a crash helmet. But did that make you think? No, funnily enough it didn't, everybody else said 'I bet that's made you think'... You see, that's why I think I may die on a motorbike. I'd like to die on ... I'd like to die on a bike, that's the way I wanna go, fucking great, I'd hate to get old. Why? The thing is ... Hang on, you daft cunt. I'd like to. It would be a great sensation to croak out on a bike ... I'd like a fucking smash, got to be a good one, or I don't want to go.

Certainly the death rate from motor-bike accidents at the club was appalling. This is from the official report on the club concerning the period of summer 1967: This period has brought a number of major disasters to club members, both in terms of personal injuries and death on the roads. Four deaths were recorded in August along, and each brought with it a major shock to the organization with feelings of hopelessness and despair ... Funerals were attended by large numbers of members wearing ordinary clothes [motor-cycling gear, etc] and pall bearers were provided from friends. Death on the motor-cycle had its effects not only on consciousness, however, but on the material organization of the club, which in its turn, of course, further developed particular kinds of meanings and values within the culture. On the altar table in the church was a large embossed book lying open all the time with the names and dates of the death of past members of the club who had been killed on the road. The pages were turned daily to record exact anniversaries. It was one of the familiar sights around the club to see, alone, or in groups, past girlfriends, friends, acquaintances or admirers of a particular victim looking at the book in solemn ritual silence. Normally the motor-bike boys treated the church with complete disregard. Before the discussions Joe, Mick and others would often play with a large medicine ball, throwing it back and forth to each other down the length of the church, crashing it through chairs and

138 Delivering Sustainable Transport bouncing it up on to the altar. This does not imply sacrilege. They simply treated the church as any other building. However, when a member of the club was killed in a motor-cycle crash, there was always a very well-attended memorial service in the church and a formal entering of his name in the memorial book. In these particular moments of crisis the motorbike boys turned towards the church not out of a sense of religion, but out of marking what they regarded as an important event with formal recognition. Death on the motor-bike sought out a ritualized, formal expression for itself in the face of countervailing everyday attitudes. The motor-bike boys did not have their own institution for recognizing an event of such extreme importance. The church, its paraphernalia and rituals, were turned to because they offered for creative appropriation and modification ready-made and widely recognized formal ways of according significance. It was at the memorial church service that the rider was well and truly recognized as dead, and could stay dead, and was marked as such in the memorial book : a kind of formal root for the dark glory, the collective mythology of the motor-bike culture. It did not matter that the church rituals were not understood - they could not have been understood in the way the church would have wanted them understood and they were anyway filled up from the outside with new meaning. What mattered was the sense of presence, the sense of order, the sense of marking within time of a crucial event. Thus, at these times, there was very special conjunction of a traditional received form and a modem informal form. The motor-bike boys who in so many other circumstances delighted in the outrage of conventional society, at a certain point within the internal expressive life of their culture - at a point which was both crisis and transcendence - turned in an act of cultural fusion to a traditional institution to borrow its solemnity and ritual. This regard for death, the fascination in its rituals, the need to push beyond the normal bounds of their culture for these rituals, attest the degree to which death on the motor-cycle and danger on the motor-cycle were integral to the whole culture and locked in, expressed and developed many of its meanings. The apocalyptic death on the motor-bike and promethean inflation of the victim was registered in another dialectical adoption and adaption of an unlikely form chosen for its inherent power to express significance. It was said that deaths on motor-cycles were always reported in the local press, whereas deaths on scooters or in motor-cars were not reported: Fred:

Joe:

They publish a remembrance in the paper, you can cut it out, like, and put it in a scrapbook. They always do that when you croak out on a bike, they always put it in the paper, you know, no scooters, motor-bikes, Johnny Gibson and all them lot, all fucking in the paper. Johnny Gibson, that was my mate, I talked to him, you know.

Again, we see a surprising conjunction with, and use of, conventional society. An element of conventional society was able to mark or accord significance to something of importance within the culture, in a form which was possible in no other way. No internal culture form could give the public visibility and substantiality which the motor-bike death required. Newspaper items were cut out and kept, and widely talked about, both at the time and afterwards. Past figures, and the manner of their death, were one of the main topics of conversation among the boys. Individuals, who in their time often had achieved no particular status, soon become heroic, mythological subjects of the bike culture folk-lore. The build-up

Ethnography of Motor-Bike Boys 139 of a pantheon of figures in this way owed much of its legitimacy and resonance to a creative borrowing and decontextualizing of elements of the conventional news media and established church. Essentially, then the motor-cycle was not limited to a functional use within the motor-bike culture. It was taken up, not blocked, by experience. It was allowed to make a full dialectical register on human culture. Mechanical qualities were recognized, appreciated, extended and transformed into human qualities which then pushed through for their own material recognition, instituting yet further circuits of development. This is not to posit a cybernetic model of the relationship between experience and technology where machines condition and over-ride specifically human qualities. It is the opposite. It shows a form of man's domination of the machine. The motor-cycle has to be controlled, the direct physical consequences of riding accepted, before the 'spirit' of the motor-bike can be appropriated and anthropomorphized. The bike plays its part not in some other constructed, but in a humanly constructed, world of meaning. The motor-bike was not, therefore, simply one object in a random collection of objects and activities that occupy the life-span of an underprivileged group. External notions of 'culture' might attach no more importance to it than the table or chair we sit on - a functional object totally lacking in 'culture'. In fact there can be a tight, dialectical formation of meanings and attitudes around apparently functional objects in the normal course of living. Such a distinctive and meaningful construction, such a developed expressive function, based on a form of modern technology, cannot be assumed to be valueless and devoid of cultural meaning. It is increasingly the form of cultural life, everyday life, for underprivileged groups. In one way, and concentrating on its oppositional aspects, the whole motor-bike culture was an attempt to stop or subvert bourgeois, industrial, capitalist notions of time - the basic, experiential discipline its members faced in the work they still took so seriously. The culture did not attempt to impute casualties or logical progression to things. It was about living and experiencing in a concrete, essentially timeless, world - certainty timeless in the sense of refusing to accept ordered, rational sequences. Hearing the steady strum of the motor-bike exhaust (reminiscent of the 'pulse' of their music) riding nowhere in particular (as in Joe's dream) is a steady state of being, not a purposive, time-bound action towards a functional end. In a curious way, death on the motor-bike stopped time altogether: it fixed and secured this symbolic state for ever. In sum, they were exploring a state, a space, rather than a linear logic. The stream-like quality of rock 'n' roll matched, reflected and fitted in with this concern. It could be stopped, or broken off or easily changed (as with the single) and did not intrude, with its own discipline, into concrete and spontaneous activity. As the music suppressed ordered, rational time. The stream 'pulse' quality of the music could be taken and used as timelessness - or certainly as an escape from bourgeois time. In this sense, there was a profound inner connection with a life-style that was so utterly concerned with concrete action in the present and the immediate secure experiencing of the world. Note This is an edited extract from Willis, P. (1978). Profane Culture, Routledge, London.

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9 THE EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT LOCALITIES ON CHILDREN'S PLAY AND DEVELOPMENT Marco Hiittenmoser, Research Centre for Child and Environment, Muri, Switzerland

Introduction This study focuses on the personal and social effects of the local areas available to five-year old children. Excluding home and private gardens, this space includes the neighbourhood round the home and playgrounds that are available on the way to nursery school. We wanted to know if and to what extent the presence or absence of freely accessible space in the environment close to the home influences the children's daily lives, their development and the mother-child relationships in young families.

Method The project included several phases and lasted five years. It was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerischen Nationalfonds) and by the City of Zurich. All the data was collected in the City of Zurich1. In the first intensive phase, we investigated 20 families using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The families had to meet various conditions. They could not have moved house during the previous two years. The eldest child in each family (a total of ten boys and ten girls) was five years old and about to enter kindergarten. All families belonged to either the middle or upper-middle class. On the basis of our own observations and a first parent interview, we chose ten families whose children could play freely and alone near their home (A families) and then compared them to 10 families whose children do not have this possibility because of the high volume of traffic and their living location (B families).

1

Huttenmoser, M. und Degen-Zimmermann, D. (1995). Lebensraume fur Kinder. Schweizerischer Nationalfonds, NFP 25, Bericht Nr. 70, Zurich.

142 Delivering Sustainable Transport

In the second phase, parents of all five-year old children living in the city of Zurich were questioned by telephone (n=1729) on their local environment and on how their children go to kindergarten. These parents were also asked about length of residence in their house, their forms of childcare and their children's journey to kindergarten. Some of these parents, i.e. those who looked after their children full-time and who had not moved in the past two years (n=926), were sent an extensive written questionnaire following the telephone interview. When evaluating the written interview, we established two groups (A and B families), using the same principle as in the intensive investigation. To ensure that children of the A group families actually did play unaccompanied outside and that children of B group families did not, we reduced both groups to those parents who had answered the relevant questions consistently. The A group parents who undertook the written interview (n=483) are therefore those who consistently let their children play outside and the B group parents (n=93) were those who equally consistently did not. The following results focus on the intensive interviews and the A/B comparison derived from the written survey. The results were usually established by establishing indicators and could thus be confirmed to a large extent for the whole group (n=926). The quantitative evaluations within the intensive investigations were made according to the U-tests of Mann-Whitney (p