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Transport language, framing, norms - The language we use to talk about transport matters. If not the language of individual users, definitely the language of researchers, designers, politicians, authorities, education institutions, and journalists. The way we frame various concepts changes the messages around them. Repeated use of certain framing creates norms. Norms reinforce themselves. The discourse changes, the standards shift, the expectations are altered.
I will go through a handful of examples and outline various issues they all manifest. The concepts we look at are: vulnerable road user, traffic safety, traffic accidents, saving lives, and micromobility. They all share a side-effect, i.e. they trivialize the negative effects of cars and normalize our reliance on them.
In framing theory, the way an issue is phrased shapes the way the audience understands and responds to it. A go-to example would be a (Caltrans) message to the pedestrians to wear hi-viz (“Walk with a flashlight and wear a reflective vest at night to make it easier for drivers to see you.”). It communicates that the people outside of the cars have a responsibility to protect themselves from the dangers of cars even though they bring zero risk/danger into the situation. It shifts responsibility and frames the problem as individual rather than systemic. It suggests that a human being in their natural form (not fortified in a vehicle) is under-equipped to participate in the transport system. In short, a communication like this is a form of a nudge. It shifts the defaults and slips in implicit assumptions and implications.
Traffic safety framing of the road violence problem is another example of normalizing the violence – it is what appears to be standard and default in this framing. The fact that we need to introduce safety into an otherwise natural system makes safety an added bonus. Traffic accident is rarely an accident, yet we water down the seriousness of it right at the start. Saving lives manifests the same issue as traffic safety. We choose to talk about the reduction of n-k deaths instead of talking about k (extra) deaths. And we do this without even knowing n. It normalizes a level of violence.
If we choose to understand the transport system through Foucault’s power “theory”, we arrive at the observation that it is difficult to view failures (deaths, incidents, conflicts and events in general) as individual errors. The individuals operating in the system as social subjects are solving their immediate situations with reasonably good decisions. Any structural issue arising from this “dynamical system” is just that, a structural problem not an individual problem. Attributes such as “dangerous” or “vulnerable” aren’t individual attributes. If a pedestrian happens to be more exposed to the dangers of the system, it is the property of the system that it exposes users to the levels of stress/pressure/danger that causes damage to some of the participants. Calling those affected vulnerable harms the discourse.
We establish a background on Foucault’s take on power, we touch on agency versus structure problem in social theory, and from there we establish individual versus system phrasing issues. We then combine this take with normativity and further framing issues to illustrate the counterproductive terminology we use to speak about traffic today and briefly discuss alternative approaches.
