Why do changes to our urban environment generate so much anxiety and hostility even though we know the present status quo is failing us?
We also know, from decades of research, that once changes are established people love them and do not want to go back.
Yet each time any manipulation of our urban environment occurs the “Hill of Hysteria” kicks in.
This blog seeks to explain why change to the urban landscape is so contentious and why each and every-one of us must work with ourselves to overcome the psychological brainwashing we are all subjected to.
As humans we are programmed to accept the environment that we live in as being normal – what we know and experience is integrated into our psyche. This is known in scientific terms as Base Line Syndrome and is the fundamental reason why we struggle to understand the disastrous state of our environment and the urgent need to act, because we cannot “see” what we have lost.
Take for example insects: We witness a few insects in the garden, the odd dead bug on a windscreen and assume that that is “normal” because it is what we have known all our lives. Yet we have lost 70% of the volume of insects with disastrous consequences for our ecosystem, from bird numbers to our ability to grow food.
However we are unaware of this year on year decline because it is not immediately visible. We all assume that our experience of our environment is normal because it is what we “see”.
The way we live, the way we move from place to place is subject to the same base-line syndrome. We have devised a civic space that prioritises the use of the individual car and so using a car has become part of our psyche. For many it is all they have ever known: driven to school, passed driving test, bought car, driven kids to school…..
And because we cannot envisage what we cannot see – a carless society – we excuse the known dangers of vehicles. This is called Motonormativity.
Psychologists have done fascinating work demonstrating how we excuse ourselves and our behaviour when in a car and the double standards we apply. They asked a series of questions which are effectively the same but in which the car does or does not feature.
In fact, so ingrained is the “driver is right and has all the rights” assumption in our collective consciousness even non-drivers will excuse law-breaking and dangerous behaviour.
A good example is the local reaction to the installation of parklets on the Wandsworth Bridge Road (WBR) in SW London. This residential high-street connects to a bridge crossing the Thames and has a high volume of through-traffic. Recent changes to the layout of the road including chicaning and the installation of a series of parklets in the retail section of the road has caused consternation from some locally. Designed to reduce speeds and create a less hostile environment for people, the parklets have been condemned by some in the local community as being dangerous, with various examples given:
- the HGV that overtakes the bus at the bus stop and as a result squeezes the father and his kids on the cargo bike,
- the Range Rover driver who aggressively revs his engine and hoots at a cyclist who is correctly cycling down the middle of the lane
- the speeding driver who loses control of his vehicle at excess speed taking out a traffic island
Yet these incidents are not the “fault” of parklets but the consequence of dangerous, aggressive illegal driving. Our default response is to blame the infrastructure not the driver – motonormativity. Note lorries parked on the road, which take up considerably more space than a parklet do, are not criticised. Why? Motonormativity, we excuse all behaviour from the driver.
This excellent Youtube video explains Motonormativity and our addiction:
1 Walker, I., Davis, A. and Tapp, A. (2023) ‘Motonormativity: How Social Norms hide a major public health hazard’, International Journal of Environment and Health, 11(1), pp. 21–33. doi:10.1504/ijenvh.2023.10060994.
So what to do? Do we create an urban environment that makes it easier for these dangerous drivers – nice straight roads, no crossings, no cyclists, no buses in the way. The urban motorways of old. Or do we insist drivers change their behaviour, obey the law and drive safely for the benefit of everyone.
Basically do we feed our addiction – as we have done over and over for the past 40 years or do we recognise our addiction and seek treatment!
Breaking the Habit!
As a society we are addicted to cars. This has not happened over-night but over decades, through advertising, cultural references, assumed aspirations and because we have built our environment on those assumptions therefore further encouraging and promoting cars. Like all true addicts we struggle to even admit or “see” that we have an addiction and as a result we constantly seek to excuse our fellow addicts – because hey that could be me!
When a driver crashed at high-speed into the traffic island at the end of the chicaned zone on the WBR some in the community concluded that the fault lay not with the dangerous driver travelling over the speed limit and losing control of his vehicle but with the very techniques put in place to address this unacceptable behaviour! We excuse the driver and seek to make everyone and everything else responsible for his/her actions.
These types of optical illusions immediately get drivers attention and make them take notice.
Worse we draw the wrong conclusions, assuming that the design of our urban space must help the driver not have an accident – leading to the urban motorways that have blighted our cities – rather than concluding that mixing two tonne vehicles with people, be they on foot or on bikes, is not a good idea. The sensible conclusion has to be that vehicles should be designed out of our urban space, or at least significantly restricted and slowed down to minimise the danger to society. But with our car-addiction we fail to come to this conclusion.
We need to talk about Death!
What is an “acceptable” number of deaths and serious injury caused by vehicles in society? For the airline industry our answer is simple, zero! Yet on our roads on average 35 people a week are killed and seriously injured in the UK, 30,000 p.a. A fifth of these are pedestrians!
Watch this 60 second video:
Because the use of the car is so ingrained in our psyche we subconsciously excuse it and us. Again “Motonormativity” is to blame. Because we cannot see the alternative, a safe environment for everyone, we assume that the risks associated with vehicles must be accepted, it just “has to be”. And since we are all part of the system there is an implicit acknowledgment that we could potentially be a giver of injury as well as a victim of injury. As a result we subliminally seek to excuse the driver, because after all it could have been us!
ActionVisionZero – eradicate deaths and serious injuries from our roads. It can’t be done!
Except that it is already being achieved in other cities.
How? By redesigning the civic space away from making it easy to drive fast and dangerously to an urban environment that is safe for people – whether on their bikes or on foot.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-and-oslo-cut-pedestrian-deaths-to-zero
And the good news is that this not only makes our local environment safer for us, it is also good for our mental and physical health and well-being. See the excellent research and case studies at Pedestrian Pound from Living Streets.
Back to those parklets!! Yes they are an obstruction on the street obliging drivers to PAY ATTENTION!! Things in the road and odd road lay outs force us to concentrate, to step out of mental autopilot and become aware of our environment! “Oh now I’m in a residential area! Oh there are kids trying to cross the road, a mum on a cargo-bike, people sitting on the road – I had better be focussed and slow down”.
Creating an unexpected shared urban environment as opposed to a straight road makes us uncomfortable when driving. This is deliberate. We are asking drivers to exercise awareness of their environment, known as conscious thought, which in turn makes us all into much safer drivers.
For more information on ActionVisionZero click here for the Manifesto for Road Safety:
Manifesto for Road Safety
What about the businesses? They need cars
The biggest myth of them all, that somehow a business can only flourish if it is next to a busy road full of vehicles. Why? Those metal boxes are not entering the shops they are merely being driven by people going elsewhere.
Many businesses massively over-estimate how many of their customers come to them by car.
People shop not cars – the better the environment for people the more successful the shops.
We accept that the centre of European cities can flourish with pedestrianised streets and lovely squares but for some reason do not believe that we can have the same thing here in the UK – because asking for it will ‘punish’ businesses.
Yet many cities on the continent also gave over their civic space to vehicles in the 1960s-1990s.
When they sought to revert to a people-orientated city the same concerns were raised. Yet time and time again once the ‘Hill of Hysteria’ had been climbed and descended citizens and businesses adapt to a new base-line, one that favours local mobility, small commutes, connected communities and quieter calmer environments and no-one wants to go back.
Amsterdam 1971 vs 2020
We have to have the lorries and the vans though.
Well again we assume we do because again we cannot “see” any other way of functioning because it is all we have ever known. But vans can be replaced by cargo-bikes and large delivery lorries are a result of lazy logistics – we have chosen to allow the HGVs full access to our civic space at all times of day. Alternative models already exist; out of town loading areas, last mile deliveries, collection hubs, etc. Florists do not need to have their flowers delivered by HGV nor plumbers necessarily have to have a van.
In Oxford for example the colleges have well over a hundred deliveries per day! They are now working together with a cargo-bike delivery firm so that all parcels are sent to a central location and then delivered once a day by cargo-bike. Voila! massive reduction in van journeys in the city, pollution, congestion, road safety and carbon emissions all down.
Case-study Ljubljana
Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia is a good example. When the mayor of the city proposed that the whole of the city centre be pedestrianised less than 40% of citizens were in favour! He famously got slapped by an angry voter!
Yet in 2007 the city centre was pedestrianised, trees planted, cycle lanes built and public transport extended.
Today Ljubljana is known as one of the most liveable cities in Europe, business flourishes and the mayor has won every election since. Indeed a recent survey showed that 97% of residents support keeping the streets car-free.
(source: Cycling Professor @fietsprofessor)
Build it and they will come
Which is precisely what we have done around the world year after year; building more and more capacity for cars.
The result; more and more cars, longer and longer journeys and distances, creating a perceived need to create yet more road capacity and so on. A very vicious circle.
Most importantly by doing this we have significantly worsened our quality of life.
Hour long stressful commutes on congested roads, aggression and road rage hunting for that parking space, stress at being late for the school run, disconnection from our neighbours, isolation, loneliness and poor health.
There’s no space for change.
This photo perfectly encapsulates the lunacy of our space allocation. We have given over 90% of our public realm to the moving of and storage of metal boxes – in London the equivalent of 10 Hyde Parks.
Everything else must squeeze into the remaining 10%; pedestrians, buggies, wheelchairs, bins, bike parking, bikes, phones, EV chargers, BT boxes, trees, seating etc etc This causes huge tension – there is indeed not enough space for people in our environment today because our cars use it all up.
Yet aside from being the most dangerous, polluting, unhealthy and socially damaging form of transport the private car is by far the most space inefficient!
Cycling infrastructure is a much more efficient way of moving people around than space allocated to motor traffic.
A concrete example is the protected cycleway on Blackfriars Bridge in London, which moves nearly 2,000 people per hour in just one direction in the morning peak (i.e. within 2m of width), compared to just 1,542 people carried in the adjacent two traffic lanes, meaning the cycleway is 5x more efficient at moving people than roads!
https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/dictionary/capacity
You ARE the traffic!
Each time we take our cars we are using up an excessive amount of public space. But once again because driving is the default in our society we choose to do so out of habit. The act of “taking the car” does not pass through conscious thought it is just part of the routine of life.
So when a bus is stuck in traffic it is not the “fault” of the parklet, the cycle lane or the pedestrian crossing it is the fault of those of us who have chosen to use up an excessive amount of public space by travelling in our own car. In a city like London, justification for that decision is hard, we have public transport at our doorstep and increasingly a cycling infrastructure that we and our families can use.
It’s TOO late – we can’t change the way we are
If you had told people in 1950 that smoking would be banned in all public places and that the percentage of smokers in the UK would drop from 80% to 12% you would undoubtably have been laughed at. Yet once the health risks of tobacco became undeniable society did accept the curtailment of public smoking for the greater good. Not only were the laws changed but the act of smoking in public has now become socially unacceptable.
We need to envisage a similar cultural shift in our relationship with the car and private transport. As with tobacco we now know the damage our addiction to cars represents to our health, safety and security as well as to the planet. As with the tobacco industry there is a vast wealthy and influential set of vested interests determined to prevent, or at least slow change.
Ultimately, we urgently need to make this massive cultural shift and the change comes in part through governments changing the layout of the roads and prioritising people over cars. But it also comes from us. We have to understand and accept why the current status quo cannot remain and why each and every one of us needs to reassess our relationship with the car. In short we all need to… THINK BEFORE WE DRIVE.
Article updated 20 Nov 2024 to reflect new research and data links.