 Hey guys today. I've just been reading this book this morning Time Innovation and Mobilities and It's really blown my mind about how traffic is really a political idea and not an engineering idea So here's what we'll do. We'll go for a bike ride and I will talk to you all about this book All right guys, so let's go for a ride. Here's a fun fact using a cell phone definitely against the law, but reading the book I Don't think so. So let's try and do this on the move So I think this book is really interesting. It talks about how the entire concept of traffic planning is based on very car-centric methods and that its view as a scientific and engineering technical endeavor instead of being viewed as a political endeavor and The fact that there's a lot of numbers and graphs really covers up the the idea that It's it has a political basis, but we've we've kind of framed it in a way So that traffic engineering appears to be value-free now Frank Peters Peter Frank Peters Then takes this idea and argues that there are two let's say contradicting or Or differing points of view when it comes to traffic and public space philosophy and how we design the streets So he argues that oh And I'm only able to do this because it's a three-wheel cargo bike. You can see that bright so He argues that there's on the one hand modernism, right coming from the tradition of the Corbusier of Frank Lloyd Wright and And this idea of traffic segregation Central to their designs I quote from page 132 Central to their designs was the ideal idea of zoning in which different urban functions such as working living Recreating and being in transit were segregated The Corbusier's design of an urban neighborhood consists of three systems of circulation constructed on three levels exemplifying the concept of zoning Now in this section on designing the traffic landscape He says the creation of material conditions for the intersection of traffic at different speeds is achieved by adjusting several elements That determine any given specific traffic scenario such as infrastructure urban layout and geography traffic designers Interesting the word designers and not engineer are used here that traffic designers work on a continuum of styles The ends of which he says are formed by two ideal types Ready for them. They're a modern so the Corbusier and and others and the other one being organic and Organic is is what he argues is Has become the Dutch approach since the 1970s at least in in in living neighborhoods Right, so he says what is the organic style the organic style is both older and also newer than the modern Whereas a modern style Attempted to solve the problem of intersecting speeds by preventing them from meeting in the first place The organic design style seeks to integrate traffic participants in this approach The traffic landscape has been designed in such a way that That differences in speed or minimized in practice. This means that Fast road users had to adapt to slow road users This approach is old in the sense that it entails a return to slow users Sorry, it returns to the kind of traffic landscape that existed before the introduction of motorized traffic So this is this would be if you're following the cycling research review series This would be referring back to the ideas of of Monterman the ideas of Hamilton Bailey on shared space and reflects a philosophy on And it's it's for this extent. Why do we even design for cars in the first place, right? So then he goes on to Describe one of these shared spaces Reconstruction of a central square in a city in the Netherlands from what was before a a Normal road street with segregations and it is now paved with red cobbles stones and nothing more Nothing less. No signs. No sidewalks. No bicycle lanes. Nothing. Not even the decorative railway sleepers Only when you look more closely. Do you see the design? elements that Steer the gaze an old man trudges diagonally across square A mother parks her car gets out and changes her kids trousers a truck gives priority to a group of cyclists Coming from the right in a cargo bike. Great. This is this is what this show should be so so then Peters talks about this idea of risk the relationality the section the relationality of time space and risk He writes the motorist driving at high speed in the city has little time to react To unexpected events such as the pedestrian who is suddenly crossing the street This means that certain skills and experience are needed to drive a car in urban traffic landscapes Car drivers are asked to prove that they possess such knowledge by carrying a driver's license The braking path is related to the speed of that the vehicle is going the faster the car The more meters away necessary to stop a car driving at 30 kilometers an hour while The energy is square velocity, right? Remember this the car driving at 30 kilometers an hour has a braking distance of 10 meters a car going at 50 kilometers an hour Needs 30 meters Braking distance can be calculated by taking the sum of the time an individual needs to react and the vehicle of a Specific mass moving at a certain speeds needs to come to a stop This means a car not only needs a right at the road right in front of it But that an even larger distance must be free in order to prevent collisions so it's not just the six square meters that car takes up, but it's also the the many many perhaps hundreds of square meters that's required in terms of road space to prevent a collision and in traffic engineering speak it's rather inoculus we call it clear zone or lane width and such but It's not so neutral because in an urban setting space is contested Peters goes on to talk about risk and this idea that that we are by managing speeds We are redistributing who bears the burden of the risk Thus speed is not only a quality of a vehicle but always presupposes a combination of skills technical characteristics of a car and An ordering of the traffic landscape in terms of the design and application of rules when different traffic Participants encounter each other An exchange of time space and risk takes place He argues that a pedestrian who walks calmly to the other side needs a certain amount of time Right if a car is approaching a pedestrian usually knows from the experience of the speed of the car And the braking distance that goes with it will leave if this Impending object will leave him or her enough time to reach the other side In this example the space of a street is thus Contested by two traffic participants the street constitutes part of the passage of the pedestrian and that of the car driver In the movements of both the pedestrians the car driver a Continuous exchange of time space is taking place the pedestrian must give Space to the car driver by either standing still or walking faster and the car Driver must give way to the pedestrian by braking the higher the speed of the car The more space is needed to look ahead To have enough time to react to unexpected situations Conversely, but as the pedestrian has a very short braking distance, but needs time to cross the street So in a way the pedestrian is much more agile The street is thus relational It is part of the movement of both the pedestrian and the car driver a street curves also illustrates the rationality of traffic space When a street has wide curves a car driver can take a quick turn left or right, but the pedestrian needs more time to cross the street So this is a distribution of space. The street is also a distribution of time Thirdly, another type of distribution is risk. Aha, here we get to it A traffic participant who takes risks for example driving faster than loud also enlarges the risk of an accident for other road users Between motorized and non-motorized forms of transit, they're predictable asymmetries in the chances of being in a fatal road accident So then Peters goes on to talk about the relationship between space time and risk He argues that this is constructed right through design through social interaction He quotes Harvey in saying that space is an order of coexistence That is an order among mutually contemporaneous states of things While time is an order of succession That is order being the various different mutually co-existing state of things Which because they are mutually co-existing must of course have a spatial structure According to this line of reasoning goes on to say Peters, the passage of cars and bicycles are part of each other The heterogeneous order of passage is partly laid down in the design of traffic landscapes for example By segregating bicycle and cars and this makes greater differences in speed possible So he continues to argue that because passages are related to each other That space time and risk are all being exchanged continually in the act of driving, cycling and walking And this naturally brings in the question of power So if you're in a bigger vehicle and you take more time to stop and other people know that Then you could deliberately influence how much you're putting other people at risk And he argues earlier that because pedestrians and cyclists are relatively more nimble That they are the ones who have the most incentive to get away because they're not in the cage And they are most able to do so because their slowness gives them the flexibility to change direction So this is one way in which the automobile driver exerts power on the road The question here is should cyclists have their own bicycle lanes or is integrating them with other traffic a better solution Now he goes on to talk about Dutch design for the bicycle He goes on to say that even in the case where the Netherlands a lot of people ride bikes and bicycle infrastructure We can say is relatively good that there are certain underlying assumptions Even in the question of segregation or integration See the Dutch approach is that in sections in which there are high car speeds and congestion, high volumes Physical separation should usually be advocated And this is in the interest of protecting cyclists But he points out that perhaps this logic of segregation is actually aiming to increase the free flow of motor traffic So on one hand you're protecting cyclists but on the other hand by doing so you are encouraging in a way faster motorized traffic So then he talks about the design manual And the design manual has a very very interesting graph It's actually innocuous if you're a traffic engineer But what this graph shows is that speed on the x-axis and then volume of vehicles on the y-axis You can choose, you're given a guideline on whether choosing whether to segregate or to combine traffic Now what's wrong in this graph? What's wrong is that this graph does not acknowledge the implicit political character of the problem Because we are taking for given that there are automobiles going at a certain speed Peter says the authors of the design manual have difficulty imagining a world in which the maximum speed of cars could be instead derived from bicycles What if we design a city in which the maximum speed was 30? This is not a new idea and a lot of practitioners have latched onto it But I think being expressed in this way is a new idea I'll say it again, the authors of the manual have difficulty imagining a world in which the maximum speed of cars could be derived from a bicycle Their approach to the problem shows their sense of realism That it's so ingrained in the way that we do traffic planning But by taking the speed of motorized vehicles as a point of departure for the design of bicycles friendly infrastructure They make it impossible to consider the justification of this speed or the cycling speed as a political question and thus a choice So the volume and speed of motorized traffic is given and we design bicycle infrastructure based on that But what the alternative is is not whether to separate or to integrate bicycle traffic The real alternative is how to design a city around the bicycle and not around the car as a given Because traffic is not given, motorized traffic can be controlled Motorized traffic can be tamed, motorized traffic can be calmed, motorized traffic can be banished altogether In the technocratic vocabulary of the design manual, scarcity and speed are given And thus the task of the designer is to look for an equilibrium between form, function and use by repeatedly adjusting these three linchpins in order to level the design In practice, this approach yields a great number of possible choices If we want to explicate the political character of passages, it would be better to make sense of this by using politics of these passages as part of the design philosophy And the final argument that he makes is that passages are relational space-time ordering So how people and vehicles are ordered in space and this exchange of time, space, risk are actually distributed among cyclists, car drivers, pedestrians And for the designers of bicycle friendly infrastructure, these are uni-local categories So then I finally also want to invite you to consider that different people have different conceptions or abilities to negotiate these ideas and spaces of time and risk And even their surroundings, right? So a person that is elderly, 80 years old, probably slower reaction time than someone who is younger Kids don't understand the dangers of traffic pose, so you're restricting both their freedom of movement and also adding stress and pressure to the parents who are trying to develop this freedom of mobility In a system in which we've made it dangerous to move about for kids And I think that this is the key point here, is that within this prescribed technocratic framework there are underlying political assumptions And these underlying political assumptions should not be then driving our decisions If they are driving our decisions, we should at least make them explicit and not purely in the technocratic engineering domain So I guess the riding didn't work while reading a book, but this cargo bike is my way of appropriating public space for private use Anyways, hope you enjoyed this rant, we will be back with more fun stuff here at the Urban Cycling Institute And I hope you have a nice day Hey guys, thanks for joining me for this rant of mine So Marco de Promescut has written earlier a book review on this book as well And it is posted on the Urban Cycling Institute website So I'll link to that written book review below And I hope to join you guys in very shortly back for another one of our Spokes podcast episodes So take care and have a nice day