Conveners
Unprotected Modes on Contested Ground: Histories of Traffic Activism and Politics
- Yegor Muleev
Description
European Road Safety Observatory defines pedestrians and cyclists as unprotected road users, vulnerable amid modes of greater speed and mass. It also points out that walking as mode of mobility is particularly important to children and cycling to adolescents. This session focuses on the history of these so-called unprotected traffic modes and the politics, activism as well societal discussions that aimed at defining their place and role in the system of mobility during the 20th century.
The question of unprotected modes can be seen as one of the main unsolved problems during the entire history of motorized traffic. For example Peter Norton and Peter Cox have in their research demonstrated how pedestrians and cyclists were already in the interwar period disciplined to give way to the car traffic. During the post-war era the focus shifted more to the vulnerability of the cyclists and pedestrians. Children were seen as an especially problematic group among the road-users. Child fatalities and accidents were an important motivation behind new solutions for traffic mode separation or in some cases, for example in the Netherlands, also for improved cycling infrastructure and the establishment of slow streets in housing areas. However, children and other vulnerable groups were also increasingly restricted in their mobility, due to the danger from motorized traffic.
This session will look at different historical cases of unprotected modes as a political question. How did pedestrians and cyclists, as well as children, become defined as the vulnerable road users and what were the political reasons and implications of this definition? What political and activist means were used to challenge the system of automobility in the name of the unprotected modes? What was their role in political discussions and decisions about traffic? The session organizer will facilitate discussion between the presenters and the audience on the way in which unprotected modes can contest the dominant systems of mobility, based on the historical examples.
In Europe, the priority of motor vehicles on the road was decided in the interwar period. Confined to the sidewalks, the pedestrians became "other road users". Throughout the 20th century, pedestrian leagues sought to defend the safety of pedestrians in a motorized environment. In the context of motorization, the battle of the pedestrian leagues from the 1920s to the 1970s is similar to that...
Walking and cycling are seen as “vulnerable modes of transport”. Children in particular are - and must be - seen as vulnerable road users. Because of their own limited competences and their sometimes erratic behavior, “children in traffic” to a large extent means children as road victims. How has this understanding evolved? In the 1960s and 70s there was a lot of discussion about the dangers...
In the 1960s and 1970s, the rapidly growing personal motorisation changed the urban environment in Helsinki, as elsewhere, to an unprecedented degree. Having been considered earlier as a neutral and/or desirably modern phenomenon, growing passenger car traffic was now turned into a topic of political debate and conflict, and also increasingly treated as an urban problem. Two groups that were...
