textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp000031.txt

  
TRANSPORT REVIEW FOR H&N 12

"Freedom To Go: After The Motor Age" by Colin Ward (Freedom Press, #3.50)
"Releve Provisiore de Nos Griefs Contre le Despotisme de la Vitesse" 
(Alliance Pour L'Opposition A Toutes les Nuisances, BP 188, 75665 Paris Cedex 
14, France, 15FF)

Transportation policy lies at the vanishing point of command-based politics. 
The political class's pretense to represent a "general interest" implodes 
under pressure from each particular interest (e.g. for or against road and 
rail development schemes). The cartels and corporations pay scant regard to 
the planning pretensions of the politicians, and rational behaviour seldom 
results from the sum of all individuals' behaviour, bringing unforeseen 
results (new motorway; my car trip; their traffic jam).

The delusions of administrative politics are therefore evident, and can be 
opposed with no wider programme than that of a pressure group defending a 
particular community's interests.  But can the issues be developed in a way 
which opposes administrative-technical fixes without positing another set? 
The two present pamphlets, both stand outside command politics, and can be 
viewed from this perspective.

The French pamphlet appears, at least, to intervene in a particular struggle: 
opposing the construction of a south-east arterial route for the TGV 
high-speed train through further communities. However, the pamphlet consists 
largely of denunciation of the cult of speed and suppression of distance by 
those whose use of the TGV allows them to enlarge the commuter dormitory belt 
around the metropolis. 

Much of radical theory followed Marx in favouring the city over the country. 
The metropolis was the focal point: its growth had cast everything into flux, 
initiating new behaviour patterns which were understood to define the public 
and the private. Some proclaimed a new urbanism which would breach these 
divisions, but the substance of these proposals should they spread beyond 
small vanguards (themselves a metropolitan conceit) remained unclear. The 
current pamphlet plays a familiar tune: quality replaced by quantity, true 
need by false, a monotonous standardisation of life. Well and good, unless it 
merely fulfills an obligation to map preconceived ideas onto reality in a way 
which triggers recognition in a tiny number of people.

Another danger lies in producing well-meaning and sensible proposals outwith 
any movement towards their application - the sort of administrative politics 
without power which can be associated with the Green Party.

Ward's pamphlet skirts that danger. It provides a handbook synthesising 
histories of the public and private, the social and personal aspects of 
various forms of transport. The theme is caught up in State structure and 
funding, as prestige projects (like the TGV) are pursued to enhance the image 
of the State, and in the interplay with corporations' activities. As Ward 
describes, the "realm of freedom" based around the private automobile 
resulted from State reluctance to impede the corporations' dismantling of US 
city transport systems as well as from the underwriting of motorised freedom 
by funding road programmes. Like his other writings, however, such 
conspiratorial origins of the Motor Age are balanced with recognition of the 
specific activity which people make in their lives. 

For example, Ward remarks on the intensive interest in tinkering with cars 
(reflected in many Custom Car type magazines at the newsagent), despite such 
activity being far from his or our interest. Such recognition of the 
creativity involved in hobbies is more open to, for example, the impulse 
towards "hotting" stolen cars than would be an attention to the banality of 
the totality which could ignore such activity, act as a parody civil 
liberties lobby by decrying heavy-handed policing, or celebrate hotting as a 
crack in the capitalist monolith.

There is certainly an awkwardness in Freedom To Go, one which appears in any 
attempt to propose positive goals while withholding consent from those in 
power. Ward highlights the extent to which contemporary palliatives, such as 
pedestrianisation and traffic calming devices, offended against town planning 
orthodoxy but have since become a new "good practise". Not that the adoption 
of such programmes represents a victory of the convivial over the planners - 
control is not relinquished, merely remoulded. The highest profile traffic 
calming programmes are those around army checkpoints in Northern Ireland. 

Pedestrianisation is predominantly introduced in town shopping streets and 
the effect, rather than restoring the multiple use of space which preceded 
the domination of motor traffic, is often to dedicate the area to consumption 
by day and leave it unsafe to walk alone at night.
Ward recalls the campaigns against higher public transport fares in London 
(and Glasgow) with free transport a worthwhile goal, both in the local 
transport infrastructure and in potential wider benefits. As well it might 
be, but the past decade has seen different or even contrary impulses at work. 
In particular, deregulation of bus services had the ostensible purpose of 
allowing market mechanisms to provide a better provider-purchaser service. 
Beyond asserting that the true goal was different, any revived campaign for 
free mass transport would need to define "public" control on a level other 
than that of the municipal.

To step back from the security and guarantee against reformism apparently 
provided by the idea of a banal totality requires recognition of the forces 
at work, the interests of the administrative strata and their propensity to 
co-opt, and also of the difficulty of finding a rooted position, outwith the 
circling rhetorics of anti-social and social oppositions. The developments of 
mass and individual transportations both formed and weakened our communities, 
such as they are.
From Here & Now 12 1992 - Nocopyright