by Josh Bisker
Transportation choices can pave the road, so to speak, for personal empowerment, environmental justice, economic self-sufficiency, civic resilience, and a number of other broad social goods. In many ways, these benefits correlate with increasing the frequency with which we walk, bike, and ride transit, while reducing our affinity for air travel and solo car trips. Promoting a shift in these directions, however, depends on more than just public policy and infrastructure: in any attempt to influence personal transportation choices, progressive planners and activists are inherently grappling with the powerful social norms that surround these behaviors. And while public health, sustainability, and social justice may be a planner’s aims, accessing and manipulating perceptions of social norms in the attempt to shape individual transit and transportation behaviors raises serious issues of equity that must not be overlooked. Without considering the relationship between social norms and the unequal transportation options available to different types of city-dwellers, planners run the risk of falling short on their own agendas for improving society. This is perhaps doubly troubling because transportation has such tremendous potential to advance equity, and yet so much history of benefitting the wealthy while leaving the poor behind.
As an example, the movement to normalize bicycling in urban environments (one in which I am an enthusiastic partisan) is frequently upheld as a means of increasing personal liberty—locomotive, financial, and existential. The logic is hardly far-fetched: there is no secret about the costly Catch-22 of car ownership for the urban poor; the myriad pro-social benefits of dense bike ridership for cities; or the empowering pleasure of riding a bike. Ridership is comparatively low throughout the developed world, however, where bicycling is frequently seen as second-class transportation; in many places, bicyclists still face a sharply uphill battle for legitimacy in road-sharing, equal protection under the law, and support in policy and infrastructure. Accordingly, elevating the public perception of cycling as a high-quality means of transportation has been mission-critical, and an increasingly multifaceted effort is devoted to re-coding the social norms of city-dwellers. Examples abound: events like Bike-to-Work Day and Critical Mass, the high-visibility advocacy of organizations like New York City’s Transportation Alternatives, and bike paraphernalia imprinted with slogans like “A Small Statement Against Oil Wars” are all efforts to help shift normative cultural perceptions about which transportation behaviors are socially approved, popular, and morally correct—and which are just the opposite.
The problem is that realistic transportation alternatives are not evenly distributed across our urban populations: the financial flexibility and locational favorability of wealthier individuals gives them far greater access to a wider range of path and mode choices, including cycling, than the urban poor. That means that progressive efforts to shift the locus of social and moral approval towards bikes and transit are also stigmatizing the only realistic transportation choices available to those who are the most marginalized and least empowered to choose.
Bike-to-Work Day, to pick just one example, relies on several strong assumptions that not only predominantly describe the middle-class and wealthy, but in many cities patently exclude the lower working class. For the event to be feasible, an individual must, of course, own a bike, or live in a neighborhood selected for access to a bike share service; they need to be able to count on a secure place to store it or lock it up on both ends of the journey; they need to live within a certain distance from their workplace; and they must be connected by safe, legible, and contiguous bike infrastructure. The event excludes those who live far from their worksites; whose neighborhoods have only dangerous or uncertain bikeways; who grapple with the fixed-cost/marginal-cost quandary of car ownership; and who may not have the physical space to store or access a bike.
In terms of its target audience, Bike-to-Work Day works as an organizing tool because it asserts bicycling’s legitimacy in the commuter space and inculcates a set of social norms about biking’s relationship to civic participation, social capital, and communal responsibility. By the same token, however, it runs the risk of further marginalizing or even implicitly villainizing the poor as perpetuating an un-enlightened set of commuter behaviors, irresponsibly clogging the streets and befouling the air, and eschewing a communal civic enterprise. If biking is socially approved, popular, and morally correct, then non-biking is disapproved, backward, and ethically wrong. What can get ignored is that bike commuting, like transit, is not an equal opportunity option.
However pro-social a planner or activist’s aims might be, therefore, their interventions must be designed in ways which avoid the oft-repeated trope of stigmatizing the poor for being poor.
One promising way out of this loop is to address social norms on the community level, rather than targeting individual behaviors, by working closely with community organizations. Although individuals may lack the power to select equally from different transportation modes within a system that provides access to few realistic alternatives, communities with structures for self-organization may be better positioned to respond: at the community level, there is a greater potential for developing communal resources, such as facilitating carpools, car shares, or bike shares; moreover, there is greater leverage for bringing about changes in infrastructure or policy to expand the modes and paths that are available for people to choose from. Communities can lobby for expanded bus access, bus rapid transit, or bike lanes. One powerful example comes from the Brownsville Partnership in Brooklyn, which between 2011 and 2013 brought the concerns of local residents to the city Department of Transportation and successfully negotiated for 10 miles of new bike lanes to connect their neighborhood with Prospect Park. In the case of Bike-to-Work Day or similar events, bicycle organizers can work more closely with community organizations such as this one to ascertain what residents’ desirable routes are, help make them secure, and increase access to bikes in ways that respond to community needs.
Planners must use all the tools available to them to build greater momentum behind the movement to reduce our reliance on car and plane travel. Behavioral theory provides an excellent set of approaches, including the recoding of social norms, that can foster behaviors with more pro-social outcomes. But planners must remain aware of the systems of inequality that are patterned into our urban environments in order to make sure that their interventions can ultimately open for everyone new avenues toward the personal, social, and environmental benefits that lie at the heart of transportation equity.