Toban Black

Exerpts from a piece that Anna Letitia Mumford wrote
for the blog fifty car pile-up -

“Contrast the reaction of the authorities to the blockage of vehicular traffic in the [major 1999] Seattle [protest] and [later] Iraq war protests to the typical police reaction when sidewalks are obstructed by construction or bikelanes are occupied by double-parked vehicles.

There is nothing inherent in the overwhelming primacy given to privately owned vehicles on our public streets. Rather it is the result the cumulative effect of less than a hundred years of … policy decision-making that has favored automobile owners.

Imagine in the next hundred years, the potential of our bicycle and pedestrian advocacy efforts to … [claim] our streets [while] re-engineering our communities to make car ownership less convenient.

One way to create these changes is to physically occupy the contested space.”

“By increasing the presence of bicycles on the street, we not only increase our safety, but we can also begin to normalize bike commuting in public opinion – look at Copenhagen for example.”

“Who’s streets?
Our streets.”

That writing is from a blog post titled “Who’s streets? Civil disobedience and public space”

(Perhaps I’ve hacked the post up too much with those square brackets and sets of dots; yet, I generally am only using those brackets to post an abbreviated exerpt that still makes sense.  In the process, I made a couple of tweaks to bring the text more in line with my own point of view, but only in minor, subtle ways — even though my edits might seem very disagreeable.)

—

Here are a couple more blog posts about claiming public spaces -

Steve Lambert on The Anti-Advertising Agency blog -
“Whitewashers from NYSAT”

Marc on the Wooster Collective blog -
“New York Street Advertising Takeover” Brings Art to Over 120 Illegal Billboards in NYC”

—

To return to transit and pedestrian issues -

Brad Aaron has posted about dangerous driving in these recent entries on Streetsblog -
- “Another Pedestrian Dies, Another Killer Driver Walks”
- “Revolving Door Keeps Spinning for City’s Drunk Drivers”

—

Here are a few posts on my blog about commercial car culture, which (in these cases) mainly has promoted these vehicles through forms of street advertising -
- “Great cars”
- “Full Throttle”
- General Motors automobiles in Oshawa, Ontario

On Streetsblog, Brad Aaron also has posted about a car advertisement that glorifies dangerous driving -
“Mercedes: Reckless Driving Is Smarter“