Motonormativity

The status-quo is a powerful thing and with some bold exceptions, the UK is in the grip of a status-quo that has been a century in the making – motorisation. It has permeated culture at many levels, whether or not somebody actually owns or drives a motor vehicle. It is embedded to the point where we now have a word to describe this phenomenon – “motonormativity”, otherwise known as “car brain”.

The term comes from recent polling-based research by Walker, Tapp and Davis; “Motonormativity: How social norms hide a major public health hazard”; which essentially found there to be a cultural blind spot which sees people, including non-drivers, applying double standards when they think about driving and which is real, measurable and pervasive. For example a statement was made which said “if somebody leaves their car in the street and it gets stolen, it’s their own fault for leaving it there and the police shouldn’t be expected to act”. The polling had 87% of people disagreeing, whereas the same statement with car replaced with “belongings” had 37% of people disagreeing.

It’s a fascinating piece of research which almost seems obvious when you consider how driving as a mono-cultural mode of transport has been something many people have lived with their whole lives and in many cases, we are into the second and third generations of people who’ve known nothing else. The causes of this are myriad and include matters as diverse as the relentless advertising of driving as freedom, the town planning process, long waiting times at pedestrian crossings and the light sentencing of people who kill and hurt others with their cars. In other words, people are so used to cars and driving being everywhere, the idea of their world being something different is unimaginable, disconcerting and potentially frightening with the feeling of loss being real.

What has this to do with Active Travel?

First is the term itself “Active Travel”. It doesn’t actually tell us about the modes involved which are walking, wheeling and cycling. However, the use of the word “active” will cause some people to immediately switch off because it sounds like effort. Of course, it is some effort, but we are talking about some fairly basic human movement here, not running a marathon for each trip. Secondly, is that with some noble exceptions, the ability for people to walk, wheel and cycle for everyday trips has not had 100 years of political, technocratic and cultural support in the same way driving has.

When you stop to think about it, the motoring status quo has in-built advantages. The general UK approach is to allow people to drive and park when and where they like unless otherwise managed or controlled; both feeders of this evocative freedom which is so often lacking in reality because of congestion and demand exceeding capacity. We have national rules about driving on the left and nationally-set speed limits, but pretty much everything else requires a local traffic authority to introduce a traffic order to alter this presumption. Such changes are seen by some as a threat and immediately sets us up for confrontation, cost and delay in trying to rebalance our streets to other modes.

Another enduring facet of motonormativity is the thought that walking, wheeling and especially cycling are the transport choices of freeloaders who haven’t paid the same level of fees to access their chosen modes as those who drive, and therefore should be treated as second class citizens. What this misses of course is for those who are able to choose between driving or active travel, driving is often the easier choice, in terms of the infrastructure that make these modes accessible, whereas walking, wheeling and cycling do not. Sure, there are usually footways next to roads in built-up areas (including villages), but their width and quality are highly variable and a walking and wheeling network is far more than just having footways. For cycling, things are even bleaker because even if we do have some roads and streets suitable for most people to cycle, such conditions are incredibly disjointed and variable.

Although nominally, we have motoring networks and pedestrian networks (with the variable level of service mentioned above), retrofitting cycling can be very challenging. We rightly shouldn’t be taking space from walking and wheeling, so we’re immediately creating a threat to de-facto motoring space which in turn creates that feeling loss, even with non-drivers.

If it is not linear cycling space on roads, it’s area-wide treatments to reduce traffic volumes. Despite us doing the latter very well for decades when we called it “traffic management”, we’ve the current fashionable culture-war around so-called “low traffic neighbourhoods”, and the push back against the driving free-for all is very much a push back against motonormative culture.

So how do we better make the case for walking, wheeling and cycling?

It’s a tough question that professionals, politicians and campaigners have been wrestling with in recent years. We often operate within a discourse where hard data and facts are less important and so while we need this in the background, we should be occupying the same space as those who sold driving as freedom. Stories are important in making the case for investing in and supporting walking, wheeling and cycling because people need to see people like them participating before they’ll accept that they could emulate them.

The Bike is Best campaign is a great example of using marketing to tell stories. They might not have the budget of the car manufacturers, but the campaign manages to punch above its weight by showing people from all walks of life cycling for basic utility transport and talking about giving people transport choices. The messages which don’t cut through are those which criticise people for their current transport choices and the ones that do are where we honestly talk about freedom and the best tool for the job. It’s also interesting to look at the polling because people really do support motor traffic reduction and reallocation of road space to active modes. A 2020 Department for Transport survey revealed that 8 out of 10 people support measures to reduce road traffic and two-thirds support reallocating road space for active travel.

Economically, the access-all-areas motoring network is already established so that things like pedestrian crossings and cycle tracks are seen as walking and cycling infrastructure which must be able to economically wash their own faces. The problem is that retrofitting can be costly as well as controversial so that investment in walking, wheeling and cycling is seen as a nice to have, where we can fit it in, and so long as we don’t take any motoring capacity. If we turn this proposition on its head, we can start to see that infrastructure to support walking, wheeling and cycling is actually motoring infrastructure because the only reason we need it is because the prevailing conditions created by motorisation are so hostile. Therefore, any use of benefit to cost ratio in this regard immediately appears nonsensical and it pushes us to think about better ways to consider and prioritise interventions to provide a basic level of service for walking, wheeling and cycling at the network level we have for cars.

We can and must move faster to enable people to walk, wheel and cycle either as their main local mode of transport or to feed public transport in a way which is as coherent and ubiquitous as the motoring network. The “how” isn’t the main problem with Active Travel, it’s the “why” which we need to crack. It’s using those diverse stories about people being able to have transport choice, independence and freedom which will pique the interest of the public and policy makers, the facts can come later.

Words by CIHT Technical Champion Mark Philpotts

Mark is a civil engineer and a technical specialist with Sweco UK Ltd with nearly 30 years of experience working in areas as diverse as bridge management, development management, utility installation, traffic engineering, highway engineering, highways maintenance and engineering consulting. However, sustainable travel has always been the area of work within which he has been the most happy; especially those small-scale, local schemes which can make a big difference.

CIHT Statement

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the CIHT or its members. Neither the CIHT nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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