One of the things I liked about graduate school was using critical theory to ask uncomfortable questions about social and cultural artifacts of various sorts. Another way to put it: It was fun learning to be an intellectual pain in the ass.
Allow me to demonstrate… Consider this article (part of a series) in today’s Springfield News-Leader about what state budget cuts will mean for transporting kids to school:
Walking to a Springfield school on sidewalks lining quiet residential streets is one thing.
Making your way across a fast-moving, multilane highway is quite another.
Springfield school officials acknowledged that safety issue in 2007 by expanding busing eligibility to elementary and middle school students who might otherwise have to cross a so-called “barrier” street.
Superintendent Norm Ridder said the district also “realigned boundaries” a couple years ago to improve the safety of walking routes. “We don’t want kids crossing major barrier streets,” he said.
This month, the district has beefed up efforts to notify parents of the barrier street provision, significantly expanding the amount of information available on its website and reminding parents of the options through e-mail alerts.
Nearly 1,000 elementary and middle school students who live less than 1.5 miles from school, the walk boundary, are expected to receive a postcard explaining they are eligible to ride the bus because of a barrier street.
There’s a further problem. State budget cuts for school transportation may mean that more kids will have to walk or ride a bicycle to school. Now that ought to be a good thing. But notice how these barrier streets are treated in the article by the various sources and the entire tone of the story: Barrier streets are forces of nature — similar to raging rivers — that must be dealt with on the streets’ terms. All that traffic, all those cars, must be allowed to continue on without question or hindrance.
Barrier streets — major arteries — are in fact human constructs (and public property) used by human beings driving cars for individual purposes. As human constructs, these barrier streets can be mentally reconstructed to serve different ends. The only reason these streets are barriers is because we allow them to be barriers by our cultural attitudes toward the automobile and the relationship of humans (in this case school kids) to streets.
What if the mental construct worked this way: In zones where school children cross so-called barrier streets, cars and their drivers are guests on the road. The important users are the school children who have absolute right-of-way. And this right-of-way is backed up by infrastructure, laws, and penalties that enforce the proper hierarchy.
Want to know a culture’s values? Take a look at what it builds. Take a look at its attitudes about what it builds.
Our culture values cars over school kids. If it were truly the other way around, there wouldn’t be such a (mental) thing as barrier streets. The multi-lane, 45 mph artery may still exist, but how we think about it would change. How we drive along it would change.
What we will do instead is spend tax dollars trying to get kids, one way or another, across these barriers without having their crossing affect the people driving cars because the people driving cars are the important ones.
As you can see, critical theory has limited practical uses.
Technorati Tags: bicycle advocacy, bicycle politics, bicycle safety, cycling, pedestrian safety, traffic design, traffic law, Transportation Planning
Two things this morning that haven’t happened in a long time: It’s raining, and I drove a car during rush hour.
