I was recently reading Peter Norton’s “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City”, which is a history of the conflict between “motordom” and other street-users in American cities in the 1920s. This was a time when automobile ownership was fast increasing – very similar to the situation in India today. My thoughts upon reading this book, I find, were very similar to yours.

Norton traces three “technological frames”. Pedestrians still saw streets as public spaces, which is what streets were before automobiles began claiming them, and they disliked cars because of their danger. Engineers looked for efficiency – they disliked the tendency of cars to take too much space and preferred streetcars for their efficiency in throughput. Motorists wanted, more than anything, freedom, even at the cost of rebuilding the streets for the purpose of the automobile.

America spent decades trying to appease motordom before transportation planners and engineers realized that this was impossible. Planners then went back to the old engineering philosophy of traffic control (now called TDM) for which they found justification in the theory of market failures. In other words, they still sought efficiency. Don Shoup, the parking guru, for instance, quotes Garrett Hardin as support for his argument against free parking.

But even this view does not quite see streets as public spaces. It was the traffic control engineers who first removed street vendors from American streets – on account of efficient pedestrian movement. And even now, the New York Street Design Manual, the bible for sustainable-transport people, and full of recommendations for bus lanes and cycle lanes, has only passing references to street vendors (and no mention of the homeless).

So we must ask ourselves how we might make the fight for BRTs and cycle lanes a fight for reclaiming the public spaces that streets are meant to be.

On a related note, here’s a discussion paper I wrote for the Kaohsiung Share/Transport Conference – “Are streets meant for travel alone?“

This is tej prakash soni

I work at Greater Kailash Part-2 and every day i come from bhajanpura to chraag delhi.

I leave the office around 7:30 P.M.

actully i go to I.S.B.T.(Mori Gate) and i wait for Bus No. 423 but i am so surprised .

The Route No.423 AC/non Ac Buses so Poor Servises.

Some time 3 and 4 Buses comes together but mostly this route no. Bus arrived on the chirag delhi Stand 1 and 1/2 Hours late.

Yesterday(15/3/10) I was waiting for Bus no. 423 i had been waiting for this bus for 7 P.M. and Bus came around 8:30 p.m. 1:30 hours late.

I think DTC Department are eating public money .

my english would not be upto the standard but you will definately understand i m trying to say.

today i left from home (chirag delhi) to reach lajpat nagar market but after waiting for 40 mintues one non-ac route no 522 bus came (i need to change the next bus from andrews ganj) which is already full, we are around 20 peoples who want aboard the bus but only 12 – 14 people make it because first driver stop the bus before earlier the expected place of stopage.

as i m not abe to run and do acrobatic stuff (i got my injured in accident while coming from office after doing night shift from noida to delhi, i m not not able to walk properly and my speed of walking is slower then a 5 yr child). so i become a spectator only to see the bus passing by side in front me.

the people who left behind is one uncle who aged more then 55yrs, one aunty who having child around 3yr old, one uncle who using walking stick to help himself to walk and aunty with him.

at red light a person was requesting to driver to open the doors and let the other people come inside. first there was enough space to get in all of us but driver didn’t listen at all.

other thing which was disturbing was the LED display for bus proposed timing, now i heard the all the DTC buses is equiped with GPS system but they signage was showing 13 minutes waiting time when i was come to the bus stop and till when i left the bus stop to go back home.

other important thing is the frequency of route no 522, there is so much crowd and users who use this route to their day to day commutting but govt didn’t act yet after so many requests sent to them to increase the frequency and no of buses on this route.

419 and 423 route pass 5 times (AC, Non-AC) infront of mine before 522 comes.

I think the whole idea of BRT is simply how to eat the public money. we can all the words which are sysnomous of curruption, bad management, negelance.

i hope this will change for alteast where this plan is proposed.

Thanks for this post. Many things to think about at length. Just an initial response. One of the things I find most interesting is how you open up this discussion about the “public”. To paraphrase from your essay, one of the things you gesture to, profitably, is the way in which the modernist imagination of the city as totality brings with it a foundational violence, but also, precisely because the city is conceived as a social unity, however contested, it meant that utilities etc had to be thought of on a city-wide basis. Therefore mass transit systems, water/electricity/sewage provisions, public parks, social housing.

But this “public” has always been contested. So the evictions, demolitions and the clearing of land along the Yamuna to build the Common Wealth games stadium, the selling of land in the cities under eminent domain to the DMRC which then sells it to Reliance and Sahara, the clearing of shops around the Jama Masjid are all done in the name of the “public”. Now obviously we all know who and what constitutes this “public”. So we could say that the land cleared along the Yamuna should be used to build low-income housing. It can be a fantastic architectural experiment by the city. Float a tender, invite submissions and get really imaginative, low-cost housing solutions. But somehow river-side views are to be reserved for the elite out on promenade. Anyway….

But my question is not one of masking alone, where private or sectional class interest masquerades as public interest, and so all we can do is make this apparent through a statistical game. And this is actually how even Aman, for instance is forced to argue where he has to say that since 62% of commuters take the bus, the “public” ire against the BRT is in fact the loud screeching of the privileged upper-classes. This is of course absolutely true, but is this the only way we can mount our arguments when we speak of this “public”. The ways in which the definition of “public” has been whittled down from some supposedly all-inclusive point in the past…

Now, this “vision” or some version of it also lay at the heart of the Nehruvian planning exercise. And by now we are familiar with the critiques of this process that Solomon Benjamin, amongst others, have made. The question of course is how are arguments to the “public” to be made today?

A