January 21, 2006
The conflict surrounding the rouge bus driver is a typical human drama over limited resources. In this case, the resource is public space for travel on roads. The supply is limited (or even decreasing, with tightening road repair budgets) and the demand is escalating (as civic leaders embrace immigration and population growth).
What seems to be strangely overlooked by many participants in the debate is that only one side has the power to kill the other (unless "this bike is a bomb" is somehow realized). In the absence of civil discourse, it is a dispute without parity. Therefore, I was pleased to see last Saturday that the Oregonian editors chose to print the letter I sent that summarized my concerns about this crucial issue. I have enclosed the entire letter. [1] (The editors added the first bracketed phrase and deleted the second one from the published version. Despite my call for state solutions, I recommend small scale as preferable.)
My concerns about violence are heightened by the parade of ignorance on display in recent days. The position of the Robert Moses [2] camp appears to be that bicycles must yield to motor vehicles at all times. While I loathe identity politics, an additional oppressed identity grouping seems evident. In the absence of equal access to the traffic commons, there is clear discrimination on the basis of mobility. In a society drunk on oil, perhaps only motorheads are first-class citizens.
The late Ivan Illich made the same point a generation ago in his famous series of essays on "Energy and Equity" – first published in Le Monde. [3] He wrote, "Beyond a certain velocity, passengers become consumers of other people's time, and accelerating vehicles become the means for effecting a net transfer of lifetime." This inequity is especially apparent in the barriers created by highways in Portland and other American cities. Illich wrote that mobility is an essential part of liberty. "This inalienable right of free movement does not lapse just because most of our contemporaries have strapped themselves into ideological seat belts."
Illich also suggested that speed stunts the human imagination. This effect would partly explain why modern industrial societies become stuck in an endless search for speed. To counter this trend, artists Ken and Roberta Avidor created an imaginary post-industrial village they called "Illichville". Their premise is that imagining a de-escalation of technology is the first step toward creating a sustainable society.
Meanwhile, yesterday's front-page Oregonian headline asked, "Bicycles are clean, green and an inexpensive way to get around, so what's behind the backlash?" In a word, it's capitalism. The ideological basis of traffic inequity lies in the values that drive our social and economic system.
Capitalism is an economic system with a mission to maximize production. Large scale and fast speed are highly valued. Capitalism demands endless growth in production and consumption to feed investors with the profits formed by surplus. Workers who are insufficiently productive are punished, while those who create the most goods and services are rewarded. Sharks eat minnows, and may the Devil take the hindmost. People are harried, rushed and impatient because they are in the grip of an imperative to be "efficient" with their lives. Many embrace the system in the wake of social programming, while the rest acquiesce because they perceive no other choice. Capitalism is not a marketplace that necessarily maximizes truth, beauty, freedom or love. Material acquisition trumps any other desire.
(Note that state socialism embraces production with equal fervor, and is therefore no substitute for those seeking a marketplace formed by different values.)
Bicycling defies the imperatives of the capitalist marketplace by reducing speed and facilitating reduced consumption. Simple living is heretical to an ideology designed for abundance. Capitalism has little tolerance for such dissent to its mission and values. Dissent is only embraced if it can be molded to suit the mission to maximize production (such as the use of countercultural songs to sell cars). Otherwise, it must be crushed, suppressed, or pushed aside to make room for modern industrial hegemony. That is the source of the backlash against bicycling. That is the source of the inequity in the traffic commons.
With all of these thoughts in mind, I noted the scenes from the TriMet video next to the story on the front page of Tuesday's newspaper. Randy Albright pulled in front of the bus at 9:07:35 in the morning. His action was absolutely justified. The driver of the vehicle had nearly killed him. Such a threat is totally unacceptable. As noted by other bicyclists, reporting the union driver to his supervisors would have probably had little effect. Briefly confronting the aggression directly was more potent for both parties involved.
(As an aside, I am reminded that when disciplining a cat or dog, the response must come shortly after the misbehavior, or the animal won't understand the connection between cause and effect. Aggression toward bicyclists often seems to originate from the primitive part of the brain. So a response tuned to the brain stem of the aggressor seems appropriate. "Bad driver! Stay!")
I also noted the speed with which the victim was attacked and pushed aside – to make way for those with greater conformity and, therefore, greater privilege to the commons. The TriMet video shows a punch being thrown at 9:08:08 – just 33 seconds after the bus was still stuck behind a line of cars. In protesting the threat to his life, Randy Albright could have made his point in five minutes or even two minutes. For all I know, that was his intent. But he was not even given half a minute! Such is the addiction to speed of the TriMet vigilante and other impatient cogs of the industrial machine.
Mark Knapp
The Oregonian
January 14, 2006
Dear Editors:
The seeming disdain and lack of remorse on the part of Lindsey Llaneza [who killed two bicyclists and critically injured another while driving drunk in Portland in June 2003] may seem shocking to some readers. But in my extensive experience, this attitude toward bicyclists is not unusual. Only the outcome – brutal vehicular homicide – is rare.
As a careful but assertive bicyclist on the streets of Portland, I am subjected every day to the anger and outright threats of motor-vehicle drivers. The message I receive from the honking, yelling, speeding, near misses, revved engines and opening doors is that many drivers would rather kill me than share the road.
[In the absence of real communities to confront such behavior,] it is high time for the city and state to put more of their traffic safety efforts into the human factors that turn Jekyll citizens into Hyde outlaws. That means less focus on infrastructure and more education and enforcement. As a start, I suggest that a prerequisite for a driver's license should be a tested understanding of how and why bicycles are vehicles with a right to the road.
Mark Knapp
Robert Moses was a primary architect of what became known as the "car culture" in the United States.
The Radical Monopoly of Industry
by Ivan Illich
A desirable ceiling on the velocity of movement cannot be usefully discussed without returning to the distinction between self-powered transit and motorized transport, and comparing the contribution each component makes relative to the total locomotion of people, which I have called traffic.
Transport stands for the capital-intensive mode of traffic, and transit indicates the labor-intensive mode. Transport is the product of an industry whose clients are passengers. It is an industrial commodity and therefore scarce by definition. Improvement of transport always takes place under conditions of scarcity that become more severe as the speed – and with it the cost – of the service increases. Conflict about insufficient transport tends to take the form of a zero-sum game where one wins only if another loses. At best, such a conflict allows for the optimum in the Prisoner's Dilemma: by cooperating with their jailer, both prisoners get off with less time in the cell.
Transit is not the product of an industry but the independent enterprise of transients. It has use-value by definition but need not have any exchange-value. The ability to engage in transit is native to man and more or less equally distributed among healthy people of the same age. The exercise of this ability can be restricted by depriving some class of people of the right to take a straight route, or because a population lacks shoes or pavements. Conflict about unsatisfactory transit conditions tends to take, therefore, the form of a non-zero-sum game in which everyone comes out ahead-not only the people who get the right to walk through a formerly walled property, but also those who live along the road.
Total traffic is the result of two profoundly distinct modes of production. These can reinforce each other harmoniously only as long as the autonomous outputs are protected against the encroachment of the industrial product.
The harm done by contemporary traffic is due to the monopoly of transport. The allure of speed has deceived the passenger into accepting the promises made by an industry that produces capital-intensive traffic. He is convinced that high-speed vehicles have allowed him to progress beyond the limited autonomy he enjoyed when moving under his own power. He has allowed planned transport to predominate over the alternative of labor intensive transit. Destruction of the physical environment is the least noxious effect of this concession. The far more bitter results are the multiplication of psychic frustration, the growing disutilities of continued production, and subjection to an inequitable transfer of power-all of which are manifestations of a distorted relationship between life-time and life-space. The passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolized by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control.
Every society that imposes compulsory speed submerges transit to the profit of transport. Wherever not only privilege but also elementary necessities are denied to those who do not use high-speed conveyances, an involuntary acceleration of personal rhythms is imposed. Industry dominates traffic as soon as daily life comes to depend on motorized trips.
This profound control of the transportation industry over natural mobility constitutes a monopoly much more pervasive than either the commercial monopoly Ford might win over the automobile market, or the political monopoly car manufacturers might wield against the development of trains and buses. Because of its hidden, entrenched, and structuring nature, I call this a radical monopoly. Any industry exercises this kind of deep-seated monopoly when it becomes the dominant means of satisfying needs that formerly occasioned a personal response. The compulsory consumption of a high-powered commodity (motorized transport) restricts the conditions for enjoying an abundant use-value (the innate capacity for transit). Traffic serves here as the paradigm of a general economic law: Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need. Beyond some point, compulsory schooling destroys the environment for learning, medical delivery systems dry up the nontherapeutic sources of health, and transportation smothers traffic.
Radical monopoly is first established by a rearrangement of society for the benefit of those who have access to the larger quanta; then it is enforced by compelling all to consume the minimum quantum in which the output is currently produced. Compulsory consumption will take on a different appearance in industrial branches where information dominates, such as education or medicine, than it will in those branches where quanta can be measured in British thermal units, such as housing, clothing, or transport. The industrial packaging of values will reach critical intensity at different points with different products, but for each major class of outputs, the threshold occurs within an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable. The fact that it is possible theoretically to determine the range of speed within which transportation develops a radical monopoly over traffic does not mean that it is possible theoretically to determine just how much of such a monopoly any given society will tolerate. The fact that it is possible to identify a level of compulsory instruction at which learning by seeing and doing declines does not enable the theorist to identify the specific pedagogical limits to the division of labor that a culture will tolerate. Only recourse to juridical and, above all, to political process can lead to the specific, though provisional, measures by which speed or compulsory education will actually be limited in a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can be pinpointed by social analysis.
A branch of industry does not impose a radical monopoly on a whole society by the simple fact that it produces scarce products, or by driving competing industries off the market, but rather by virtue of its acquired ability to create and shape the need which it alone can satisfy.
Shoes are scarce all over Latin America, and many people never wear them. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or wear the world's widest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by a range of artisans. Their transit is in no way restricted by their lack of shoes. But in some countries of South America people are compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs, and public services was denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of shoes as a sign of indifference toward "progress." Without any intentional conspiracy between the promoters of national development and the shoe industry, the barefoot in these countries are now barred from any office.
Schools, like shoes, have been scarce at all times. But it was never the small number of privileged pupils that turned the school into an obstacle for learning. Only when laws were enacted to make schools both compulsory and free did the educator assume the power to deny learning opportunities on the job to the underconsumer of educational therapies. Only when school attendance had become obligatory did it become feasible to impose on all a progressively more complex artificial environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do not fit.
The potential of a radical monopoly is unmistakable in the case of traffic. Imagine what would happen if the transportation industry could somehow distribute its output more adequately: a traffic utopia of free rapid transportation for all would inevitably lead to a further expansion of traffic's domain over human life. What would such a utopia look like? Traffic would be organized exclusively around public transportation systems. It would be financed by a progressive tax calculated on income and on the proximity of one's residence to the next terminal and to the job. It would be designed so that everybody could occupy any seat on a first-come, first-served basis: the doctor, the vacationer, and the president would not be assigned any priority of person. In this fool's paradise, all passengers would be equal, but they would be just as equally captive consumers of transport. Each citizen of a motorized utopia would be equally deprived of the use of his feet and equally drafted into the servitude of proliferating networks of transportation.
Certain would-be miracle makers disguised as architects offer a specious escape from the paradox of speed. By their standards, acceleration imposes inequities, time loss, and controlled schedules only because people do not yet live in those patterns and orbits into which vehicles can best place them. These futuristic architects would house and occupy people in self-sufficient units of towers interconnected by tracks for high-speed capsules. Soleri, Doxiadis, or Fuller would solve the problem created by high-speed transport by identifying the entire human habitat with the problem. Rather than asking how the earth's surface can be preserved for people, they ask how reservations necessary for the survival of people can be established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of industrial outputs.