🚗 🧠 / "Motornormativity" / Critical Car Theory
Shining the light on "Motonormativity: How social norms hide a major public health hazard" a "study" by Ian Walker, Alan Tapp, and Adrian Davis
“BIKE PEOPLE BELIEVE ALL THIS”
-President
1
Dr. James Lindsay of
made Twitter, er X, thread on how to make a Critical Theory out of anything.He also turned it into a podcast for
too.What was his example of how to make a Critical Theory out of anything?
Cars.
If only Dr. Lindsay know of what was to come just a few years later…
Last year, technology website The Verge published an article with the headline, “Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving.” The website Greater Greater Washington has a similar article titled, “New study shows dangers of chronic ‘car brain.’” The same author who wrote that piece published her work as well on the propaganda rag Streetsblog under the title, “The Dangers of Driving Are Way More Normalized Than We Think.” Across the pond, the rag The Guardian screamed, “‘Motonormativity’: Britons more accepting of driving-related risk”
Forbes didn’t miss out on the action either with, “Car Blindness Normalizes Dangers Of Motoring, Reveals Study,” and even The Atlantic contributed to this dogpile carpile with “Everyone Has ‘Car Brain’”
Even the blog Jalopnik, known for their enthusianism for all things cars jumped in with, “We Don’t See The Dangers Of Driving Because Cars Have Brainwashed Us.”
On the insane asylum that is Reddit, under the special zone that is r/Fuckcars, there are dozens of search results for the term “car brain.” One patient even insists “car brain” is ruining his romantic relationship.
All these articles and most of the Reddit posts cover or derive their delusions from one thing: a study by the British academic and activist Ian Walker and co-authored with Alan Tap and Adian Davis entitled, ”Motornomativity: How Social Norms Hide a Major Public Health Hazard.”
This, uh, “study”, asserts that everyday people suffer from motornormativity which is often coloqually called “car brain.” It was published in late 2023, almost a year after the above articles, in the journal International Journal of Environment and Health. Of course, like most academic studies, despite the deep subsidization by we the people of both academia and the academic publishing industry, the article itself is paywalled and not even available on , cough, SciHub, cough.
But a pre-print is located below.
Any citations and critiques of the study here are made using the readily available pre-print version.
If the latter half of motornormativity sounds familiar, that’s because it’s incredibly close to the term heteronormativity.
Definitions vary, mostly in excessive length , but Teen Vogue (sorry but yes the magazine that tried to tell its audience how to have… oh never mind) provides probably the most direct definition: “of, relating to, or based on the attitude that heterosexuality is the only normal and natural expression of sexuality.”
They continue with a wall with a bit of commentary:
It has to do with what kinds of identities and experiences — namely, cisgender and heterosexual ones — are presumed to be the “default” in our society. And, as a practice and a belief system, it leaves a lot of damage in its wake.
Heteronormativity doesn’t just harm the queer folks whose realities are diminished or outright omitted by it. By operating under a construct that only certain identities are “normal,” it sets up other groups — across races, ethnic groups, and abilities — to be similarly othered. In other words, when we decide it’s okay for one or two select identities to be given “default” status, that leaves a whole lot of people on the margins.
Motornormativity, otherwise known as car brain means virtually the same thing but with a few words substituted out for one another.
Translating:
“of, relating to, or based on the attitude that driving motor vehicles is the only normal and natural expression of travel or transport.”
It has to do with what kinds of identities and experiences — namely, car driving ones — are presumed to be the “default” in our society. And, as a practice and a belief system, it leaves a lot of damage in its wake.
Motornormativity doesn’t just harm the bicyclists/pedestrians/public transit/etc folks whose realities are diminished or outright omitted by it. By operating under a construct that only certain identities are “normal,” it sets up other groups — across transportation conveyances, races, ethnic groups, and abilities — to be similarly othered. In other words, when we decide it’s okay for one or two select identities to be given “default” status, that leaves a whole lot of people on the margins.
Present, per Walker and his co-authors, is an unconcious bias on all levels from individual motorists to policy-makers with regards to the use of private motor vehicles.
Walker, in an interview with the Podcast War on Cars even admits the term motornormativity comes directly from the concept of heteronormativity:
As you probably can tell, we stole the name based on heteronormativity. This idea where a minority’s told you’ve just got to live this way because it suits us by a majority. And so we were very much thinking of that when we chose this name motornormativity.
Here’s how Walker and his co-authors in the, er, study, introduce motornormativity:
A society’s ability to tackle any public health or sustainability issue appropriately will depend on people at all levels – from policy makers to medical practitioners to the general public – being able to judge the situation rationally and objectively. Overestimating or underestimating the seriousness of an issue can lead to panic or complacency respectively. We suggest that, in the specific context of individual motor transport, we have a cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately. This arises because of shared, largely unconscious assumptions about how travel is, and must continue to be, primarily a car-based activity. We label this phenomenon motonormativity. This term is chosen to draw parallels with other problematic cultural expectations such as heteronormativity (e.g., Kitzinger, 2005). In heteronormativity, majority heterosexual people automatically, but inappropriately, assume all other people fit their own categories and thereby fail to accommodate the needs of minority groups (e.g., a school that specifically asks for ‘mother’s name’ and ‘father’s name’ fails to accommodate same-sex couples). In extreme cases, such normalities can lead to minority groups being obliged to live according to the practices of the majority even when this goes against their will.
The authors blabber for several more pages about the concept. They insist that the usage of motor vehicles contributes to “no fewer than three parallel health epidemics,” one being collisions , another being physical inactivity, and an epidemic of pollution from car fumes. It’s a sheer surprise they don’t use the phrase traffic violence anywhere.
They lecture us further: transport issues are not just environmental issues: they are also inherently public health issues.
Hear that
?And:
Naturally, we are not the first to view these issues from the outside; other people have commented how, were cars invented today, no device killing 35 people in the UK each week would be permitted in our streets, however convenient.
The term “car brain” is missing from the study but Walker had no shame using the term both in his interview with The War and Cars, and on social media. He describes “car brain” as, “the cultural blind spot that makes people apply double standards when they think about driving - is real, measurable and pervasive.”
They further assert:
We suggest that, in the specific contexof individual motor transport, we have a cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately.
Well let’s see about that.
How exactly do Walker, et. al., arrive to their idea of motornormativity?
Are these actual academics with an interest in the truth? Or are they woke activist hacks?
Let’s dig in!
Walker and his compadres did (his words) on Twitter, “something deliberately very simple: we had an independent polling agency contact a representative sample of 2157 people across the UK and ask them five questions”
Let’s ignore the fact for a brief moment this was a sample size of only (apparently) the Brits and Walker et. al. are asserting their “findings” scale to other countries, cultures, etc.
The sample consisted of a “motor form” with 1053 people and a “non -motor form” of 1104 people or 2157 total people. They defined a driver as someone who operates a car at least once a month. Both “drivers” and “non-drivers” answered the questions on a five point scale from Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, and Strongly disagree.
The “motor form” questions were as follows:
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
It’s okay for a delivery driver to bend a few
health and safety rules in order to keep their
business profitable.
Risk is a natural part of driving, and anybody
driving has to accept that they could be
seriously injured
There is no point expecting people to drive less,
so society just needs to accept any negative
consequences it causes
People shouldn’t drive in highly populated
areas where other people have to breathe in the
car fumes
And the “non-motor form” questions:
If somebody leaves their belongings in the
street and they get stolen, it’s their own fault for
leaving them there and the police shouldn’t be
expected to act
It’s okay for a chef to bend a few health and
safety rules in order to keep their business
profitable
Risk is a natural part of working, and anybody
working has to accept that they could be
seriously injured
There is no point expecting people to drink
alcohol less, so society just needs to accept any
negative consequences it causes
People shouldn’t smoke in highly populated
areas where other people have to breathe in the
cigarette fumes.
However the “drivers” and “non-drivers” did not necessarily receive the sets of questions pertaining to their prefered mode of transport. That was presumably (and to their credit) to insert some randomness into the study.
Anybody can see these questions contain an immense amount of bias though, right? They also want to scale this sample size of Brits to virtually the entire human population.
Final results pooled Strongly Agree, Agree Strongly Agree, Agree with each other and Disagree, and Strongly disagree with each other. They ran the results through Chi-squared tests and concluded2 their whole “hypothesis” about “motornormativity.” (Stats dorks, or maybe
can critique what they did here.)Walker et. al. asserted the motoring public were “accepting of driving’s problems” and such may be an example of pluralistic ignorance. Such pluralistic ignorance (recall the entire morality or lack of for driving was already framed and primed by the authors) is in their words, “would be that most people feel uncomfortable knowing that driving harms or inconveniences others, but each person (perhaps because they routinely see such behaviour) assumes they are unusual in feeling that way and so does not publicly express their true feelings.”
Walker et. al. keep going with their activism on full throttle":
Our call to action now is for decision- makers to become aware of their own individual and institutional unconscious biases and how these have health and quality of life implications for others. We each need to ask whether the criteria we use when making a decision about transport would be applied equally if we were looking at any other domain. For example, would we teach children that it is their responsibility to dress properly to protect themselves from sex abusers, as we currently teach them it is their responsibility to protect themselves from dangerous drivers (DfT, 2009; see also Roberts & Coggan, 1994) Obviously such reflexivity becomes increasingly important as we move from individuals to policy makers.
One’s ‘gotta wonder, are these clowns serious, or is this another attempt at an academic hoax paper by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and
- the individuals famous for the Grievance Studies Affair?Such an idea could (and is) taken seriously though among Platitude-driven and Cluster B(ike) Activists who operate almost purely on Woke ideology.
To cite an earlier piece, Her Name was Maia.
Platitude-driven bicycling advocates tend to adhere to the Woke3 religion too, with its tenants mapping well onto onto Shellenberger andPeter Boghossian‘s chart, Woke Religion: A Taxonomy3.
There’s original sin (motor vehicle usage, suburbia, Capitalism, even white supremacy / whiteness , white supremacy again), guilty devils (“drivers”, “vehicular cyclists”, straight white men, old white men, old white men again), myths (streetcar conspiracy, Robert Moses’ racist bridges, general 1619-Project type historical revisionism), sacred victims (“people who bicycle/walk/roll” “intersectionality”), The Elect (bicycle non-profits, Streetsblog, NACTO, People for Bikes, LAB), taboo speech (traffic accident, personal responsibility), purifying rituals (“die-ins”, saving the planet, Vision Zero) and purifying speech (“crash, not accident” “traffic violence” “transportation/mobility justice”).
But with all do respect to President
, not all of us bicyclists believe the bullshit of Critical Car Theory or these Woke tenants.Yes, this not the correct usage of the terminology but there was no scientific method at all in this study. The authors went shopping for any evidence to support their ideology.
