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.
Comments 12
Nailed it!
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 1:36 pm ¶I think this is a clash of ideals between the almighty and powerful car vs the absurd over-protection of modern children. This is an exciting philosophical argument (like what happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object) that results in anything you can imagine happening!!!
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 3:31 pm ¶I believe Andy is on the path to Shared Space!
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 5:05 pm ¶You really hit the nail on the head there, Andy. It’s funny to go to the comments section of the article and see how your comment is so far outside the mindset of the other commenters that they can’t even react to it.
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 7:07 pm ¶I love you man!
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 8:35 pm ¶Keri et. al. Thanks
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 8:46 pm ¶Wow, very, very powerful article. Oh, that more communities could think this way. Thank you!
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 9:17 pm ¶It does seem that all current traffic models are designed to get automobiles from other neighborhoods to pass through as quickly as possible at the expense of everyone else. Wouldn’t it be sweet if quality of life for local residents, including the safety of all children, was considered first?
Posted 16 Aug 2010 at 10:29 pm ¶Seems like a fiscal argument could be made that you can hire N additional bus drivers and spent $ to maintain M additional buses requiring making X additional trips a day, OR, you could hire a couple of crossing guards.
Posted 17 Aug 2010 at 4:14 am ¶You’re starting to sound like a Canadian, or worse yet, a European! Pedestrians and bicyclists before cars. Who ever heard of such a thing? (^8
I was a young man visiting Alberta, Canada, nonchalantly driving through a small town, when my Canadian passenger admonished me for brushing back a pedestrian that had started to step off the sidewalk. I replied that it was their job to avoid me, that I was driving on the street, and had right-of-way. I was quickly informed that the right-of-way chain in Canada was pedestrian-> bicyclist-> automobile, and any conflict between them would be resolved in short order by the police. They also said that jail time was not an uncommon penalty when injuries resulted. That experience, and expensive fines for not wearing a seatbelt, altered my driving habits for life. And gave me an unquenchable thirst for maple syrup…
Posted 21 Aug 2010 at 2:15 pm ¶I like your “force of nature” analogy. When my daughter went to Cherokee (many years ago)and was expected to cross Campbell to get to school, I couldn’t get the school district to do anything to allow her to ride the bus. I called someone from the city (I think it was the city) to ask about putting in a crossing signal at Plainview and Campbell. They said that Campbell was too dangerous to cross so they wouldn’t put in a signal because it would just encourage more people to cross the street there. A pedestrian bridge would have been too expensive.
Posted 26 Aug 2010 at 11:28 pm ¶After a midddle school student on his way to school was hit (and thankfully only mildly injured) by a vehicle at that intersection, the rules were changed and students who live west of Campbell now qualify for busing to Cherokee.
Unfortunately, the barrier street rule no longer matters if you’re 14 years old and in high school. When it’s time to go to Kickapoo, students who live as far away as (and even a little bit farther than) Plainview and Campbell have to get a ride to school or they have to walk or bike along Campbell south of James River Freeway. This is too dangerous in my opinion, as well as (I presume) in the opinion of the city official I talked to several years ago.
Changing traffic rules as well as school policies are very hard to do. Almost like forces of nature.
The Missouri Safe Routes to School Network is actually analyzing this very concept of hazard busing.
A remarkable study by a group called NPLAN discovered that there is funding policy in Missouri that actually creates a disincentive for districts to encourage students to walk and bike to and from school.
We hope to change this.
Posted 29 Aug 2010 at 10:36 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
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