Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way

Imagining a More Just Street

David Prytherch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319757056
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia urbana

This book explores the geography of the everyday roadway and contemplates how regulation and design shape our streets. People may question the hegemony of cars, but reimagining public streets is a major conceptual and technical challenge. Drawing from "new mobilities" and transport studies, Prytherch addresses how streets are structured by policy standards; what it means to have a right to the street; and how a more just street would look—in both theory and practice. He summarizes key traffic statutes, case laws, and engineering manuals, and interprets these in relation to mobility rights and justice. At its core, the book moves beyond criticism to highlight emerging movements which aim to develop more complete and livable streets for everyone.

© The Author(s) 2018

David PrytherchLaw, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Wayhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75705-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

David Prytherch¹

(1)

Geography, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA

Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of the city, are its most vital organs. Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets.

— Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities ( 1961 , p. 29, with permission of Penguin Random House)

Public space must be understood as a gauge of the regimes of justice extant at any particular moment. … Utopia is impossible, but the ongoing struggle toward it is not.

— Don Mitchell in The Right to the City ( 2003 , p. 235, reprinted with permission of the Guilford Press)

End Abstract

Rethinking the Street

Streets have a profound yet often underestimated role in shaping the urban experience. They are the conduit and stage for the choreography of everyday life, often conducted at high speeds and with life-or-death consequences. Public rights-of-way comprise a surprisingly large proportion of our cities. We travel them as thoroughfares and experience them as public spaces. Streets connect people and places, they divide.

Despite their significance to the social life of the city, however, we often see streets as infrastructure and entrust their design to engineers. We experience interaction with others as “traffic,” internalizing and taking for granted the rule systems that mediate that interaction, at least until an accident or police enforcement. And we take this social order—its efficiencies, inequalities, and indeed bodily risks—as routine. The roadway is at once banal and technocratically complex, making it hard to study and even harder to change.

We are, however, fortunate to live in a moment when urbanists and scholars are confronting and rethinking the street. After a century in which roadways were the little disputed academic domain of motorists, planners and advocates for alternative transportation (and school children, the aged, and disabled) are openly challenging the automobile-centric biases of roadway engineering, arguing for “Complete Streets” designed for users of all modes, ages, and abilities. Simultaneously, the long hegemony of traffic engineers and regional scientists is challenged by the so-called “New Mobilities” scholarship in the social sciences and humanities, which offers a critical perspective on the spatiality and politics of transport, helping interpret streets not merely as spaces of flow but also of politics and rights and ethics. Never in recent memory have so many sought to reimagine the roadway’s social relationships and design, or suggested so much potential to transform how we imagine and experience them.

But any attempt to reimagine the street raises basic questions, practically relevant as they are complex. How exactly are streets designed and regulated, and how do these shape social and spatial relations among the mobile? What does it mean to have a “right” to the street? And what would a more equitable and just street look like, in theory and practice? Amidst vibrant scholarly debates about the “politics of mobility” (Cresswell 2010), we must better understand how struggles over roadway spaces—aptly called “street fights” by scholars and planners alike (Henderson 2013; Sadik-Khan and Solomonow 2016)—help give the street its shape, and define mobility rights and justice. And while mobilities scholarship is thankfully unbound from traditionally technocratic or positivist approaches to transportation, it cannot escape their enduring policy relevance. Any rethinking of the street, and rights and justice among the mobile, in theory must remain firmly grounded in the details of engineering and law in practice. Such engagement is critical for both social scientists interested in the street’s “power geometries” (Massey 1993) and those planners and activists who seek to change them. The burgeoning Complete Streets movement, for example, presents a unique opportunity to better define the possibilities—and limits (Zavestosky and Agyeman 2014)—of multimodal design for promoting greater justice, on and beyond the roadway. But the relevance and outcome of such policy debates are inextricable from the legal and design “rules of the road” that so powerfully structure the geography of streets.

This book therefore seeks to elaborate a theory of mobility politics, rights, and justice on the public street, grounded in the powerful but understudied frameworks of traffic law and engineering. Amidst widening debates about ethical dimensions of transport, social scientists and planners alike may benefit from a clearer articulation of what we mean by mobility rights and justice, grounded in a more detailed understanding of those legal and engineering systems that structure the social life and spatiality of streets. And as planners and activists question the auto-centric biases of urban and transport policy in the US, there is a need for both a framework to understand mobility justice and a facility with the technical expertise that might produce different, and perhaps more just, outcomes. This book therefore attempts to pair the conceptual power of critical mobilities scholarship with the problem-solving potential of planning and design.

This book stands not alone but on the shoulders of an impressive host of others. Most broadly it joins vibrant and growing conceptual debates among scholars in the social sciences and humanities on the socio-spatial politics of mobility (Urry 2007; Canzler et al. 2008; Cresswell and Merriman 2011; Cidell and Prytherch 2015, among too many others to name). Among these a number of scholars have focused on important questions of mobility rights, ethics, and morals (Bullard and Johnson 1997; Bergmann and Sager 2012; Blomley 2011). At the same time, empirically rich accounts reveal the intense intermodal politics of the city street, both past (Norton 2008) and present (Furness 2010; Henderson 2013). And planners offer policy solutions to transform auto-centric roadways into Complete Streets (McCann 2013).

I seek to connect and extend such diverse writings on mobility politics and rights first by articulating a workable theory of mobility justice on the roadway. While many writings on the politics of mobility highlight struggles for the right to the city and its streets, defining mobility justice—and a socially just street—presents a conceptual challenge demanding closer attention. Planning for alternative modes and complete streets likewise can be informed by a framework for interpreting mobility as explicit questions of rights and justice. Mobility theory and policy alike might benefit from more careful articulation of what exactly it means to speak of mobility rights and justice on the public street, and how these fit within broader debates about the “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1996; Purcell 2002; Mitchell 2003; Attoh 2011) and social justice (Delaney 2016).

At the same time, I argue that any reimagining of a more just American street requires knowledge of those legal and engineering processes necessary for operationalizing it. Here, insights from planning and design offer much to social scientists. Scholarly debates in transport and mobility, whether the positivist models of regional science or abstractions of critical social theory, must be grounded in the engineering and regulatory mechanisms that give actual street spaces material and social shape. Any person critical of typical streets and social relations upon them, whether scholar or practicing planner, would do well to become versant in the laws that define street spaces and who has the right to be mobile (and who must yield), as well as the design practices that materialize these relationships in asphalt, concrete, and roadway markings. Knowledge of traffic codes and engineering manuals is a powerful tool for identifying impediments and opportunities for progressive change, and strategies for actualizing a more just street. At the same time, it helps manage expectations for what we can reasonably hope to change through established arenas for activism and policy. This book shares the critical commitment to confront wider social injustice on and beyond “incomplete streets” (Zavestosky and Agyeman 2014), but with the planner’s strategic and pragmatic emphasis on the incremental art of the possible.

As scholars and planners rethink the nature of mobility and the street, I suggest we might best understand what Jason Henderson calls “street fights” as struggles for street rights and street justice, articulated socially and spatially through the principles and practices of traffic regulation and roadway design. This project starts with conceptualizing more clearly what rights and justice mean to the mobile upon the public street. And it assumes the “right to the city” (Mitchell 2003) and social justice are in significant measure defined by the street and its complex socio-spatial relations, and the regimes of justice or injustice legislated and designed into them.

The Route Ahead

The book is designed to unfold sequentially in three parts.

After this introduction, Part I considers what exactly is “A Right to a More Just Street.” Chap. 2, “Rethinking the Street as Space of Mobility, Rights, and (In)Justice,” draws from wide-ranging debates on the politics of mobility—in transport geography and mobilities studies—to approach the street not merely as infrastructure for movement but also as social space. Linking innovative writings on mobility to those on politics and representation in public space, I interpret everyday circulation on the public street through an explicit rights frame to argue that the “right to the street” is simultaneously about physical movement, safety, and accessibility. And while the task of delineating rights claims to the city and its streets remains critical, perhaps the greater challenge is defining what we mean by a more “just street.” This requires situating emerging writings on mobility justice within a broader literature on social justice generally in political philosophy, critical geography, environmental justice, and disability studies, and the law. We must not only connect mobility justice to social justice more broadly, but also define the possibilities and limits of more just or complete streets vis-à-vis the eternal and boundless struggle against social inequality (Zavestosky and Agyeman 2014). This chapter therefore offers an encompassing—yet necessarily bounded—concept of mobility rights and justice on the everyday street.

Part II of the book explores the traffic law and design systems that have traditionally—at least for the last century—shaped the use and design of American streets. Because the social order of the street is codified by law, Chap. 3, “Legal Geographies of the American ‘Right-of-Way,’” explores the legislative frameworks that create and define streets, and how particular assumptions about mobility give shape to streets and ongoing struggles over them. I trace changing legal and design assumptions about what roadways are for and whom they should serve, set in context of the historical evolution of the American street as a physical and legal space for cars (Norton 2008). I provide a critical review of the national Uniform Vehicle Code (UVC), which defines the nature and purpose of the public roadway as a legal space of mobility known as the public right-of-way (or “ROW”), who constitute legitimate “users,” and how the ROW should be allocated for particular modes of travel. Analyzing model codes and example state statutes in relation to mobility justice reveals how such laws codify the asymmetrical and unjust power geometries of automobility. Mobility injustice on the American roadway is, it turns out, built upon a very firm statutory foundation.

In Chap. 4, “The Contested Right to the Right-of-Way,” I ask: What exactly does it mean to have a legal right to the ROW? This chapter begins by examining the critical role statutes play in regulating everyday mobility on the road as “traffic,” and how legislative assumptions and language mediate social relations among users. I return to UVC and state statutes modeled upon it to explore how laws construct mobility as a legal right to the ROW known as the right-of-way or “right to proceed” in preference to others, anticipating and seeking to mediate conflict between intersecting (and potentially colliding) bodies. Because the term right-of-way confusingly refers to both a legal space and the legal right to it, I will distinguish between the ROW (the roadway) and right-of-way (the right to proceed upon it). Legal analysis shows how such statutes construct the power geometries of the street around the preferent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. A Right to a More Just Street?
• Part II. Traditional Traffic Law and Design
• Part III. Reimagining and Redesigning the American Street
• Back Matter