Episode 151: More Motornormativity with Marco te Brömmelstroet, aka “The Fietsprofessor”
Doug Gordon: If you’re a fan of this podcast, you know there are a lot of problems with cars, and one of the biggies is what they do to the environment. And with all the climate misinformation out there, it can be really hard to know what to believe or even what to do. Luckily, there’s an excellent podcast that’s all about this very issue. It’s called The Climate Denier’s Playbook, and it’s hosted by our friends Rollie Williams and Nicole Conlan. I happen to have Nicole right here.
Nicole Conlan: I happen to be here with you, Doug. Hi.
Doug: Hey. What a coincidence. I am a huge fan of your podcast, but since I have you right here, let me hit you with a hypothetical. Let’s say I am sitting next to you on an airplane, and I’m one of those annoying guys who ignores that you have your headphones on and you clearly want to zone out, and I start asking you, “What do you do?” What would you tell me The Climate Denier’s Playbook is all about?
Nicole Conlan: Well, first thing I’d wonder is why we weren’t taking a train. But then I’d tell you that my co-host, Rollie and I are both comedians with master’s degrees. Mine’s in urban planning, and Rollie’s is in climate and society. And in each episode of the podcast, we take on a major climate denial talking point and deconstruct it so that listeners are better equipped to fight back against misinformation campaigns.
Doug: Like the idea that more carbon is good for plants, or offshore wind turbines are killing whales.
Nicole Conlan: Exactly. And we’ve even done episodes on why electric cars won’t save us, and the absolutely wild conspiracy theories about 15-minute cities.
Doug: I love it, and I know our listeners will, too. You can find The Climate Denier’s Playbook wherever you listen to podcasts, so go check it out and download a bunch of episodes for your next long plane ride.
Nicole Conlan: Train ride.
Doug: Right. Train ride. God, why don’t we have good trains in this country?
Nicole Conlan: Ooh, actually, that’d be a really good episode.
Doug: This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon. Earlier this year, I interviewed Marco te Brömmelstroet, a professor and chair of Urban Mobility Futures at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam. Marco and Professor Ian Walker, who’s a former guest of the podcast, have added to the discourse on motornormativity with a new study. It’s a phenomenon we’ve talked about on the podcast before. And if you’re new to The War on Cars and are wondering what motornormativity is, well, just give this one a listen.
Doug: We originally released this episode as a bonus for our Patreon supporters, but after a bunch of requests we decided to drop it into the general feed so everyone can listen. It’s the kind of thing you’ll get as a Patreon supporter of The War on Cars, which you can become by going to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and signing up today, starting at just $3 per month. In addition to bonus episodes, you will get ad-free versions of regular episodes, access to our Discord server, presale tickets for live events, merch discounts and more. We are an independent podcast, and really depend on listener support, so thanks for signing up. Again, that’s Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod.
Doug: And in case you missed it, our new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, will be published by Thesis, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House, this October. You can go to LifeAfterCars.com to learn more and to pre-order your copy. Now, enjoy the episode!
Doug: This is the War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon. So you might call this episode the latest in an accidental series on motornormativity. Motornormativity is a shared bias whereby people use different standards when judging things related to cars than when judging other topics. Back in episode 99, we had Professor Ian Walker on the show to talk about what we called “car brain.” That was about his and his colleagues’ research into the phenomenon. Then in episode 140, we welcomed Dr. Tara Goddard on to discuss her research, which replicated Dr. Walker’s UK-based studies in a US context.
Doug: For this episode, we are continuing the conversation around motornormativity. We’re also going to dive into language as a way of seeing our built environment and the choices we make, and consider the future of our communities. Okay, so our guest for this episode is a return visitor to The War on Cars. It’s Marco te Brömmelstroet, also known as the Fietsprofessor online. That’s “Fiets,” as in the Dutch word for “bicycle.” Marco holds the Chair on Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam. He’s also the founding Academic Director of the Urban Cycling Institute, and in his research he uses Dutch cycling culture as a lens to study the two-way relations between mobility, the city and society. He is also the author, with Thalia Verkade, of How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives. And as I mentioned, we are welcoming him back to the podcast. He last appeared on episode 65, “Where are the Bike Lanes In Lego City?” Marco te Brömmelstroet, welcome back to The War on Cars.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be back.
Doug: Yeah, it’s been a long time since the Lego episode. I am biased because I produced that one. Still one of the most enjoyable conversations I had on the show.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But still, Lego does not have bicycle lanes. Well, it does and doesn’t, right?
Doug: Not as many as they should.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: No, exactly.
Doug: I want to get right to your new study. It’s called “Why do cars get a free ride? The social-ecological roots of motornormativity.” You co-authored it with Professor Ian Walker, who I just mentioned at the top of the show. As the title suggests, it looks at the factors that create motornormativity, that give rise to the biases that we talked about with Professor Walker, with Professor Goddard. Could you perhaps explain the aim of this study, and how you and Ian Walker decided to go about it?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Well, it started with you. So it started with Ian’s talk about his work on your podcast and elsewhere. And I was listening to it, and it triggered my thinking, especially when he raised what at that time was a hypothesis that he found motornormativity, he found this generic bias towards the norms that we apply around cars. And in the conversations online, he suggested that it might have something to do with the physical environment in which people live that sort of reproduce these biases or even enforce them.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And there he mentioned the notion that it might be very different in the Netherlands. And that triggered me, so what I did is I sent him an email and said, “Okay, I’m going to bet a bottle of wine on it that if we would study this phenomenon in the Netherlands, we would find a similar or even stronger motornormativity. Because I think it’s not only the physical environment, it also has to do with the history, the cultural history of the country. And that cycling in the Netherlands might even hide the problems of the car even better, because we also have this alternative.” So he really liked this idea, and he said, “Let’s try to study that.” And normally, you would then apply for funding and it would be years later. But within a year, we managed to secure crowdfunding. It was—the total cost of the study was €5,000 that we could use to get the data on this from three different countries—the US, the UK and the Netherlands. That allowed us to not only study motornormativity across these contexts, but also try to figure out what was causing them, so this social spatial structure that we used to try and figure out what were the causal variables explaining it. And as it also happens often in research, we found a lot more.
Doug: So let’s get into the nuts and bolts of how you conducted the study. You mentioned that you looked at it in three countries, the US, the UK and the Netherlands, and got an international sample of a little over 2,000 people, and asked them a series of questions, some of which were from Professor Walker’s original study, others were sort of copies of that, but with different language, and then a kind of new set of questions that got really into where they were getting ideas from. But before we even get into that, I got to admit, I’m surprised that you thought it would be even worse in the Netherlands, because I think, as an American, and Professor Walker living in the UK, two countries where the built environment just screams cars everywhere, we would assume that people in the Netherlands have fewer of these biases, that people on bikes are seen to be having the same rights as people not on bikes, and people in cars, you know, when we think about things like strict liability for crash victims and things like that. So I’m surprised that your instinct was this has got to be worse. And perhaps all of the cycling, all of the infrastructure, might be hiding in a worse way the motornormativity you experience. Can you explain your thinking behind that before we get into the results?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Well, the first, so everybody was surprised, and actually the study finds that I was not exactly correct. But it led us to expand the idea that it cannot only be the physical environment, it also needs to be social-cultural. So we needed to have a wider lens to understand this. So that was one thing. But when Ian also said, “Well, this cannot be true,” I asked him, “What do you think that the average car ownership in the UK is if you compare it to the Netherlands?” And most people would not notice, but in the Netherlands, the average car ownership is higher than in the UK.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So what actually happened in the Netherlands, long story short, at least when I tried to summarize the last 50 years, is we had the opportunity to really fight the car-based traffic engineering mindset that was taking over our cities until the 1960s and ’70s. But we didn’t. We, in the end, folded back this idea of cycling as an alternative. It folded back into traffic engineering, and cycling became a part of the mainstream traffic engineering, which made it so successful at the first place, but also takes out the whole activism, the whole idea that there is a radical alternative.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So in the Netherlands, I would assume that people take it even more for granted that the system around us, which is still very car dominated, with over—with around 10 million cars now and a higher per-capita car ownership than many countries around us, we are suited in an environment where it seems to be all solved, right? You can also bike, so why would you even have an activist group? Why would you even ask critical questions about cars? Why would you even question paying for parking of a car? Because also in the Netherlands, in most parts of our cities, parking your car in public space is still free—or at least for the owner. It’s not free for society.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So I have several examples, but for instance, also in my house, I live here in a relatively suburban development in the middle of the country, where in front and behind my house, the municipality offers me free parking for a car. So I, on average, have 1.7 free parking spots for cars. And all my bikes need to be in the shed behind the house. So in that sense, I think that on many levels we still see cycling as a niche. It is a niche that became part of the mainstream, and therefore we successfully developed it, but it’s still a niche.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And my key point is that I think that the truce that was signed in the ’70s that says okay, let’s be on the table for cycling came with a cost. And the cost was that we lost the radical activism. It doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t have people blocking streets in the Netherlands. Actually, if you would do that, your biggest opponent would be the Dutch Cyclist Union, because they are now also part of the regime that wants everybody to free flow everywhere, also on bikes.
Doug: This is why I love talking to you, because I think sometimes my goal as an advocate is to be seen as not all that radical.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Mm-hmm.
Doug: But what you’re saying is that if you lose that radical side, then forward progress might not happen in the way that you want, or you can get stuck in a certain narrative, which I think is a big part of your research.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah, exactly. So what you see in the history of social movements is that you always need all of it, right? So you need people that are willing to sit at the table to do the negotiations. But these people have a much better position if there are also people outside screaming, shouting or even using violence against objects. So we know this from history, that almost all big, progressive changes happened by having all of that. And I think this is one of the hidden—the hidden costs of what the Dutch did. We got a lot. We have 27 percent of all trips in the Netherlands are by bike. And everybody loves that, and it’s great, and we should cherish it, but it’s also already 27 percent for more than 20 years now. So we’re stuck, basically. We’re stuck in a system where everybody got its own place.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: At the same time, we became very rich, so we have a perfect bicycle infrastructure, but we also have a perfect car infrastructure, and we also have a perfect train infrastructure. It’s a very expensive truce, and it’s still costing the lives of two people every day. In the Netherlands, also small country, 70 million people, 80 million people, around 70 heavy traffic crashes every day. More than other places, I would say. It seems to be taken for granted. It’s something accepted. We have road safety organizations, but all of them are paid by the car industry, and nobody finds that disturbing or weird. So I think that we lost that momentum, and it lures us into thinking that everything is fine, which it isn’t.
Doug: And that gets to your study, because one of the questions you asked relates to what government should do to prevent such tragedies. Let’s get into some of the basic questions. In Professor Walker’s original study, you know, one of my favorite questions that he asked was something along the lines of: People shouldn’t smoke in areas where other people will be exposed to cigarette fumes, versus people shouldn’t drive in areas where other people will be exposed to car exhaust or car exhaust fumes. Not surprisingly, in a UK and US context replicated by Tara Goddard, lots of people agreed with the “Don’t let other people breathe your cigarette smoke” question or statement, and very few people agreed with the car exhaust statement. Your study asked similar questions as the previous studies, and you did a variation on the smoking question related to loud music. You asked if people agreed with a statement: People shouldn’t play loud music in highly-populated areas where other people have to hear it. And also people shouldn’t drive loud cars in highly-populated areas where other people have to hear them. So in this instance, you weren’t looking for how did people respond to either question. You were just trying to establish a baseline of motornormativity since it was sort of already established in the previous studies.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And that’s the whole point, right? You can still explain that people look differently at smoking than at car fumes, but if this bias is replicated over several different questions that, by the way, in this study also everybody filled in. That was also an innovation compared to the last one, where there were two different groups randomly assigned to questions. Here, everybody filled in all the questions, so we could really develop an individual measure of motornormativity. That was important because that measure we could then compare with how people observe themselves in relation to their families, friends and their spatial environment. So we really needed to figure out—we needed to use the different questions, slightly altered questions, to develop this individual indicator of motornormativity.
Doug: One of the groups of questions that you asked was to establish an idea of how people perceived support for non-driving options. So there were parts of the questionnaire that had things like, “I think it is important that people can travel by car,” versus, “I think it is important that people can travel without using a car.” Then you were also trying to establish what people thought about other people’s beliefs and their perceptions of them. So, “My close family and friends would think it is important that people can travel by car,” versus, “My close family and friends think it is important that people can travel without using a car.” Can we talk about those baseline questions and why they were so important? You were talking about that a little bit. I want to see what you were really trying to get at as we get to the results.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So what we were interested in was to figure out what were the explanatory variables, the causal variables that might give us some understanding of how this motornormal activity is strengthened. And we use this framework, which is called the social-ecological roots of it, to deep dive into that. And the idea was that our modeling exercise would then allow us to basically pick apart what are the reasons that people develop motornormativity. And these questions that you just asked, these two questions of what is your own perspective on things compared to your relatives, could give us a measure of do you think that you are more or less inclined to certain ways of thinking around motornormativity?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But what the study actually showed us is that as always in social reality, the relations are in two directions. And this brought us to something very interesting. So we found that people over, I think two-thirds, around 66 percent of the overall population, think that they are more supportive of policies that help people to travel without a car than average.
Doug: This was my favorite part of the study because yes, right, you can’t have two-thirds of people being above average. That’s not how averages work. [laughs]
Marco te Brömmelstroet: No.
Doug: And it speaks to—and we’ll get to this—I think a real problem with how we think about changing our cities. Because I think a lot of our listeners out there, myself included, really do go around thinking, “I’m a weirdo. People don’t think like I do. And it will be impossible to change this mindset.”
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah.
Doug: But in reality, more people agree with me and our listeners than disagree. And I thought that was really maybe the most interesting part, and the one that opens up the most questions about what we do.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah, it was quite funny that—so the study was mentioned in a large Dutch newspaper, NSA. And the journalist then put on LinkedIn, put a link to the article, and added a short survey asking people if they also support more or less cars in the city. And exactly the same happened, right? In that poll that he posted, I think it was almost 90 percent of people agreed with the statement of having less cars in cities. But in the comment section, of course, the people that were against it were the loudest. And that’s the whole point, right? So the minority that is against progressive changes in all domains of life, they have the loudest voice because they have something to lose, but they also get all the attention. Because they have a loud voice, they get all the attention. And that attention in the media, again, reinforces the idea of the majority, that they are a minority because they don’t hear their own views represented in the public debate.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Because again, that brings us back also in the Netherlands, why I think it’s stronger here is especially here, you don’t have an activist leftist group that makes certain that on every table we also hear about that side of things, right? So that’s why it’s so important to figure out better ways as a government to bring those voices to the table.
Doug: Which we’ll get to, because I do think it’s fascinating. But what you’re describing is a concept called “pluralistic ignorance.” What is pluralistic ignorance, and how does it relate to what we need to do?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Well, pluralistic ignorance is a concept that is studied widely in all kinds of domains, and the consistency of it is striking. So pluralistic ignorance basically predicts that in all kinds of progressive changes in society, there is a large majority of people that would support it, but that majority thinks that they are a minority. And this leads to a very predictable dynamic, that when there is a controversial policy or plan, the loud minority gets a lot more attention, creates this, what is called the “hill of hysteria.” So there’s a lot of idea everywhere that people are against it. Then often—or not often, sometimes the policy falters, sometimes the policy is actually put in place against this idea that there’s a resistance. And what you then often see in studies is that there’s much more support afterwards than before it.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So examples from our field, relatively recent, are that people seem to be against low-traffic neighborhoods until they live in one, and then they are suddenly—they don’t Want it to go. So it’s the status quo bias, right? So suddenly you are aware that you have something to lose, so you voice yourself. Or a more recent example, congestion charging in New York, where there also seemed to be a lot of resistance up front. And now there’s, I think, looking at from this side of the ocean, it seems to be that people sort of feel sorry that it might actually be canceled again. So pluralistic ignorance is this concept that a majority of people would support progressive change, but they think, wrongly, that they are a minority.
Doug: I want to pick apart what you said a little bit, because I think it’s helpful as an advocate to figure out what to do. So in the case of congestion pricing, public polling, not people screaming in community board meetings or just the comments section of a newspaper, but public polling did show majority opposition. So I don’t even think that you can say that there was a kind of silent majority or this pluralistic ignorance at play where a lot of people were in favor of it, but they just thought they were alone. I think it really was sort of like you’re saying with low-traffic neighborhoods: until they actually experienced it and understood the benefits firsthand, something clicked, now they get it.
Doug: But what you’re describing in your motornormativity study is a bunch of dispersed individuals, each of whom thinks they’re alone. And if only they would speak up or talk to each other and be like, “Oh, you’re not a weirdo? You’re like me? And that guy over there, he believes it, too?” And then suddenly you have this group. So that speaks to a fundamental problem we have, which is that we can’t change cities until people experience things and we activate the latent support, the pluralistic ignorance kind of goes away.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah.
Doug: But there are some policies that people just are reflexively going to oppose until they experience them firsthand.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Exactly.
Doug: Right. So how do we—or let’s say how do governments get out of the community board meetings and do that stuff, and find the ways to advance progressive transportation policies, understanding on the one hand, people have to experience it first, but in the catch 22, they can’t experience it first until we pass the policy.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah. So there are a number of ways that planning can try not to get hijacked by this mechanism. Well, there are multiple, right? So maybe even four. So one is an enlightened despot, like somebody who says, “I’m going to do it, and you will see.” And in a way that is partly what seems to be happening currently in Paris, where a mayor clearly stated up front that this was the plan that she had for the city, was elected, and now basically says, “I have a six year mandate, so I’m going to push as far as I can on making the city a 15-minute city or city that people can live a good life in without being dependent on fast mobility.” That was the promise. There’s a mandate, let’s go.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: That’s one option, but I think it often backfires, right? So it can actually lead to fueling the resistance to that, you could say. So it’s a dangerous one. The second one is—and I think that’s an important one that we also use now more and more in the Netherlands is you have to ask people the honest question. And often in polling or referenda, the question is simplified into: Are you for or against paid parking? And what happens then also in polling is that people are also sometimes thinking that—so they don’t want to be that person, so they think—the example that I have here, I have lots of data on making school environments car free. Individually, many people think that’s a good idea, but they don’t want to be that person that says it to other people. So they say—because in the Netherlands, still most children still go by bike or walking to school, so they are a large majority. But school directors and parents are unwilling to go to this loud minority with cars to say that they can’t be there. They don’t want conflict, they are conflict avoidant.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So what you need to do there is ask the full question. So if you ask people not are you for or against paid parking, but instead ask them: What do you think is important in our public space, and you have to tell us within—so there are tools for that. It’s called the “participatory value evaluation,” where you ask people, “Okay, tell us which of these 10 dimensions that are all important on the street you think are most important, but if you want more attention for one of them, something else needs to go because space is limited.”
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So basically, you present to the citizen the full dilemma of what street design or mobility design is about. And then people show that they are very aware of the trade offs, and they will show you. In the Netherlands, what you often see is that then suddenly people have much more value or attach much more value to safe playing conditions for children, for instance. They’re never in a mobility plan, but they are, of course, a crucial element, right? So if you want children to have more playing space and more autonomy in a city, which apparently people want, then asking the question, “Are you for or against paid parking?” is a false question that presents a false simplicity. So that’s the second thing. You should ask better questions.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: The third one, and you already hinted at that, and we know it, is street experiments. So we need to figure out ways that we can let people experience this. And the example that comes to mind are the ciclovías in Southern America especially, where you, every week in some cities, can experience how the city is different. And you become aware of things, so you create the groups, you create people that start to understand that things can be different.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And the fourth one—and that’s my favorite—is to show that this hill of hysteria is a single hill and you can actually go around it. And how do you go around it? By developing different narratives and having people understand. Because the narrative that we talk about—the war on cars is, of course, a pun, but I say to deputy mayors, like the forbidden words in societal debate should be “cars,” “systems,” “parking,” “streets,” “mobility,” “public transport.” These are, for most people, not the listeners of this podcast, but most people find it incredibly boring. But as soon as you start talking about the autonomy of children or the physical, mental, and social health of elderly, suddenly many more people are willing to step up. And I think that’s the way to circumvent the dynamic of pluralistic ignorance. Because pluralistic ignorance especially becomes strong if it’s about a topic that you already think other people have a position in. But if it’s suddenly about the autonomy of children, you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute. I don’t see people that are very much against the autonomy of children.” So it’s much freer for people to express their real opinion.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So I think, especially there, I think there’s a huge opportunity to stop making mobility plans and to start making plans for public space that are much more inclusive for these narratives that people actually care about. And then I think we will find that this majority might even be bigger than the majority that we found, because we know the dilemmas. We know—as scientists, we know the costs of how we have designed our streets in the last decade. But that’s a hidden cost, right?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Every city in the world has a deputy mayor of mobility, but very few cities have a deputy mayor on children. So that’s a huge opportunity to shift the narrative, to shift our—the ways that we talk, to attract different audiences to the table.
Doug: I want to get back to the study. So you mentioned that you were wrong.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Mm-hmm.
Doug: It did show that the Dutch show lower levels of motornormativity than people in the US and in the UK. But the larger point of the study was to show where motornormativity comes from, the various systems at the very intimate personal level, at the cultural and political level, that influence how we think about mobility.
Doug: I think there was one area in which you were right, because you did show that in the Netherlands, for example, in rural areas, not perhaps that surprisingly, motornormativity was much different. So it shows that even there, more exposure to car-based infrastructure, et cetera, does influence one’s decision making. But you noted four mutually reinforcing social, physical and cultural environments that explain how motornormativity develops, and really I think how any idea about progressive policy is influenced.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So we present the conceptual framework, as academics do, as if they are four different separated entities. But they, of course, are meshed, so they’re also nested inside each other. So it’s very, very hard. And that’s also what the model in the end shows, that all these things influence each other. So there’s no singular influence from each of these four environments. They all sort of work towards—they all work in the same direction, which also shows the—it shows the difficult challenge that we are facing. It’s not that if you just change the conversation with your friends, then magically motornormativity is gone.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: That’s also why I think it’s most interesting to go to the outer layer of this nest, which is the cultural environment. And the cultural environment, I would say that that’s something that I deeply believe in, is that if we do not challenge the imaginaries, the worldviews, the assumptions that are in our cultural environment, then we will never achieve the transition that we all think is necessary. But at the same time, I also think that it’s a necessary condition to challenge those cultural assumptions, but it’s not a sufficient condition. So we need all of these things to start moving, but if we only focus on the inner workings of these embedded systems, we will maybe achieve a shift towards different types of mobility, but we will not get back to the streets as they once were, the remaining spaces between buildings that would serve many different functions.
Doug: So I guess that gets to this question that’s related to what we were talking about before, which is individual action versus institutional change. And we do need a larger cultural institutional change if we’re gonna reframe the conversation around our streets. But again, there’s another catch 22, that it often happens that we can’t have the institutional change until people as individuals experience for themselves, have this a-ha moment. They travel to Amsterdam, let’s say, and see that people can live just fine in a different way without a car. So with the idea that these systems are working in every different direction, what do we do?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Hmm.
Doug: I mean, that’s what I keep coming back to with your study and what you guys ask, which is: What do we do with this information? And it does tie back to your other research of looking at a street as not just throughput, as not just a traffic sewer. You know, I think I’ve heard you talk a lot about the language that we use about traffic and streets, about …
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Traffic arteries.
Doug: Right, arteries. You know, I’ve seen you say, “What is the worst thing that can happen to a street? It can get jammed or clogged.” This is the language of sewage.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah.
Doug: How do we change that conversation, where we’re avoiding those words, because language is a way of seeing, and we’re replacing them with new ways of talking and seeing?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah, I think for me, that’s the biggest pitfall is that people ask me that question, and that I’m also inclined to then say, “Oh, this is a more beautiful language,” or “Let’s focus on cycling,” or whatever. But again, I think it’s a pitfall. So for me, it’s even one level deeper. So how Movement, the book with Thalia, started as a journalist—actually started like this. She came to me asking questions about how cycling could solve congestion. And then we sort of tumbled forward into but wait a minute, why are you asking this question? Where does it come from? Why is congestion so important for you as a journalist? Why are you not writing about other things that are important?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And so we tumbled and tumbled and tumbled, and I think we ended up even one level deeper in—it’s based on the work by Donella Meadows. Actually, I advise everybody to read her work, Thinking in Systems. And she comes to this realization that the deepest layers are the worldviews and assumptions on which we build systems. Systems do not exist. They are just figments of the imagination. And we need them because then we can work on them, but maybe—that’s what Thalia also keeps on suggesting still—is that is the problem. The problem that we think and we simplified holistic ecologies of streets until the 1920s. Not that long ago, Mulberry Street in New York was the street where all kinds of things happened. And that’s no longer possible because we simplified it. We created the technocracy around it. We created traffic engineers. They didn’t exist. We trained them, we gave them the language, and that created this state of affairs that now seems to be solid, rock solid in stone.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But if you think about it in this way, it’s only 100 years ago. And our cities are much older. So it’s very unlikely that in 500 years from now, our cities will still be around the same concept of mobility. It’s very unlikely. And also it’s very unlikely that it will be faster or cheaper or more comfortable, because the resources that were required to build this system in 500 years from now will not exist. So we need to get to terms with that in the longer time frame, our cities are much more dynamic than we think. So they seem to be fixed, but they’re not. They’ve radically changed in the last two generations.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: My father grew up in the Netherlands without the existence of cars, almost. So one generation, two generations. It’s very hard to see that that changed so rapidly. And I think that’s the first thing that I want to show people is it has changed. It didn’t—it wasn’t a law of physics. There were choices behind it. And that’s step one, right? Is to realize that there’s choices behind it. That’s what we want the book also to bring to people, to realize this. It’s already opening up doors in your mind that were closed until that point. So for many people, realizing that the street is designed through choices and not by some expert in a white coat is enormously liberating.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And then the second thing that we then—what I want to do is to show people that if you want to challenge those choices, the strongest weapon that you have is language. And the example that I often use is that we also still talk about—well, you know, right? Closing streets, opening streets. Everybody laughs like, “Ha ha, you’re framing it.” No, but closing streets is just as much a frame as opening street is. Cutting streets. Why is it not stitching tissue? If you show this to people, that’s where I think as an academic, my work stops showing people that they have the freedom to think about different ways of talking and thinking.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: There’s also a great TED lecture about it by Lera Boroditsky on how language shapes the way we think. And she also says that the ultimate gift that you give yourself through this knowing that language shapes the way you think, is that you can actually shape the thoughts that you have. And as such, you can shape the conversations you have. Which can be radically different, but only if we challenge, as experts, as engineers, but also as citizens, that we need to talk about streets in the way that we have done and that created the problem in the first place. So that’s for me—that’s—that’s, for me, a given.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But that’s my academic work. I’m also an activist. And what I do as an activist with our Lab of Thought, we try to collect funding through all kinds of sources. For instance, this article with Ian Walker was crowdfunded through the Lab of Thought, so it was members of the Lab of Thought were supporting this study. And we do all kinds of these, what we call unsolicited provocations. So we develop all kinds of interventions, not as solutions, but all the interventions that we make, they have the goal to basically shock people or to disrupt their ways of thinking.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So we developed a car that you can turn into a picnic table, because in the Netherlands, as elsewhere, you’re not allowed to put a picnic table on a car parking spot because it’s not a car. So instead of fighting that, we said, “Okay, but what if the car is a picnic table, so now it can no longer be towed?” Developing that, and then with the idea that after you have seen that, you can no longer not see it, right? So you can no longer take it for granted that the street is like it is.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: I think—this is what I think needs to be done much more. And again, if you go back in the ’60s and ’70s in the Netherlands, that’s what happened back then. The bicycle was an almost magical symbol, not because it solved congestion, but because it offered people this almost magical shock of what if being on the way is not something negative that you want to minimize as much as possible? What if being on the way is actually where life happens? Like, these kinds of questions. That’s why artists came with the bicycle. Like, painters, poets, they all use the bicycle as a symbol for that. So I think we need to go back to that more magical conversation, almost, where the magic here is in using different narratives, different worldviews, different lenses.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And one thing that I think is beautiful—and also I found it in a work by a Dutch consultant, I think, and his book is called Voerde Wissel, or Changing Words. And in Dutch, that also means disagreeing. But he shows that you can find a powerful counternarrative, not in negating the existing narrative, but by developing a story that forces the opponent in defense. So they need to then relate to your story. So instead of saying, “I want a car-free street,” you can say, “I want autonomous children.” So now the traffic engineer has to argue why autonomous children cannot happen.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Well suddenly, he doesn’t have the tools for that anymore. So you suddenly free up the entire conversation. And that’s, I think, a trick or a gift, I think, that we are underutilizing this powerful weapon.
Doug: Yeah, I was thinking about that when you were challenging the question about open or closed streets. We here in the US have been advocating for the use of the idea of open streets, of course, because they are open to children, they are open to elderly people, everybody in between, and they are closed to vehicles, to cars. But what you’re suggesting is to go a layer deeper and to not have this binary, they’re either open or closed, but to really have a larger framing, a different name for it—if we can wrap our heads around what that name is—for what we want that street to do. And like you said, almost put people who want to maintain the status quo, put the onus on them to defend it.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Again, even in the Netherlands, you will probably not believe this, but even in the Netherlands, it’s perfectly fine as a politician to hate cyclists, especially if they are on fat bikes or if they are—if they wear Lycra. It’s perfectly fine to hate cyclists. You can perfectly do that. But it’s very hard to hate children politically, right? So you suddenly really change the conversation. And we already have now convinced five different municipalities in the Netherlands to put as the central goal in their mobility transition plan, not to shift away from carbon or from cars, but the central goal is to make it possible that all kids from the age of eight can go to school by themselves, because that’s in the United Nations Treaty of the Children’s Rights.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And what they all find is that when they put that in—so all five of them, all five municipalities never experienced this, but the new mobility vision was accepted unanimously. And that’s, I think, again, this point of pluralistic ignorance. Like, if you talk about these things, it becomes very visible. And yes, it’s framing, but so is a traffic plan, or so is a car-free plan, or a bicycle plan, or a car plan or whatever. Free parking, self framing.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But one thing that I find important here is that my problem with open streets is not so much the dichotomy. I think the—what I think is important here, if I understand the language on which I tried to build my work, is that we need a multiplicity of language. So the problem that I fear is that—or that happens if the professor comes, is that they ask me, like, what should be the right language? Or so I show them this, and then it’s often afterwards, these awkward moments of, “Oh, we say these languages, and Marco thinks that we shouldn’t say it.” That’s not the point. The point is that we use one language, and therefore we oversimplify something which inherently is complex—public space—which also inherently has dilemmas. So also the open street doesn’t solve all the dilemmas. Public spaces need to fulfill all kinds of different goals, and they will also change over time.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So the whole idea that we can engineer it, that we can simplify, that we have an expert, the technocracy, that we no longer need to have conflicts with our neighbors, that’s the problem. We need to have much more. It’s weird that in the Dutch situation where you have multiple political parties, that if you look into their mobility paragraphs, they’re incredibly similar. They are only slightly different. When I ask them, “Okay, but your political parties are based on different norms and values, right? Yes. So how does this come back in the mobility paragraph?” Well, for them it’s just sort of a technical byproduct. And I try to show them no, it’s the essence, right? If you want to attract votes, as Anne Hidalgo showed in Paris, you need to start telling a different story, because also there people said, “She’s crazy, it’s political suicide.” And she was reelected.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And one of the things that we are currently doing is we are compiling, trying to compile a book of examples throughout the world. Many people probably know the example of the mayor of Pontevedra, who went against death threats to make the city center of Pontevedra car free, then got reelected six times. The mayor of Ljubljana, also against death threats, did it. Was also reelected, I think, four times. The mayor Anne Hidalgo in Paris is an example. Deputy Mayor Filip Watteeuw in Ghent, in Belgium. In the ’80s already, the traffic circulation plan in Groningen, where also the politicians on TV were threatened with death by their political opponents, these same mechanisms, this pluralistic ignorance, the motornormativity, the notion that the hill of hysteria, the idea that these changes just cannot happen is not new. It happened all the time. And there are many examples of how to overcome it.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But it’s not easy. And I think one way, what we can do also as activists, is to also show politicians that there is a large group of people that care about other things than just parking a car. But it shouldn’t be about parking a car against—for or against parking a car, for or against paid parking. We should show them that where the gold lies is in changing the conversation, and talk about other things that we think are important in public streets, public spaces.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So to give one more example, actually data that comes from the US but is replicated in the EU, that around 70 percent—seven-zero percent—of children from the age between zero and eighteen experience mental health problems that require professional help. Seven in ten. There’s clearly something broken. And we also know from The Anxiety Generation [The Anxious Generation] and other books that what is broken are many things. But even in that book, it becomes very clear that public space plays an essential part in what is wrong with our children. And I think as soon as you make that explicit, many more people will start connecting the dots, as again happened in the ’70s in the Netherlands—stop the child murder, stop killing children. That’s when people really understood that they needed to fight for something.
Doug: Yeah. As an aside, we have a chapter in our upcoming book. I was in Ghent and spoke to Filip Watteeuw, the Deputy Minister for Mobility. Literally, the morning that they flipped the switch on their traffic circulation plan, he went out into the streets, rode a bicycle with the journalist, thought that it was going to be political suicide. “I will have a journalist following me while people scream at me and call for my head on a stick.” And the opposite happened. People said, “This is wonderful. Why didn’t we do this earlier? I’ve always wanted something like this,” et cetera.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And he had 20,000 additional votes in the next election.
Doug: Right. It was incredibly popular.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But important there is also that he did it in a way that was radical but also feasible. And that same happened in Groningen. It was also overnight. In 1977, two young deputy mayors, I think they were both 24 years old, they implemented 1,300 traffic measures to create the first traffic circulation plan of Groningen. Similar dynamics, but also afterwards, their political party got a very unusual absolute majority vote. But also in both cases, it was done in a way—that’s, I think, very important. It was not done in a dichotomous way, right? It was done in a way that could be taken back. It could have backfired, and then we would have learned a lot. But it was possible to take it back. So it was also feasible in that way.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And that’s something that I think we often lack. And I think again, New York is a prime example where Sadik-Khan actually made that point, right? You have to—this idea of tactical urbanism as a way of not only improving the world, but maybe as a way to learn and to experiment. And to also acknowledge that we can be wrong, right? It’s because otherwise it’s this, “You’re wrong, you’re cars, you’re stupid. We have this better way of living.” I think that’s also potentially problematic, again, because it oversimplifies. It’s not that simple. It is complex.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And the fact that we created technocracies that have difficulty of facing complexity, that is the problem. For me, really the problem, not only in traffic, but in many domains of life. We have cut things into silos, into pieces, gave it to a technocrat so people could mind their own business. Traffic is boring. It’s an expert thing, and I don’t have to bother about it, only if it’s—if it takes away some of my privileges. And there, I think, is having a different conversation part sounds easy, is crucial, but it’s not simple. It really requires us to, on all levels, have a rethink of how we do things.
Doug: It is interesting, as you’re talking about Ghent, as well as they handled everything and the different processes by which they arrived at the final outcome and how successful it’s been, it still was called the “traffic circulation plan.”
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah. Yeah.
Doug: Right? So it still was called—you know, using this idea of arteries or sewers. It wasn’t presented as, “Look, the outcome has been more kids biking to school by themselves, more people of all ages biking in general. Car trips have gone down, car ownership has gone down per household.” But it still was this idea of our city is just jammed. It can’t handle another car. We’ve got to figure something out. So even there, the language was not sufficient to talk about the various complexities, and for perhaps political reasons, that if they had started with other things, they might not have succeeded in the way they did.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: But who knows, right? So I talked to him, to Filip Watteeuw, the deputy mayor there, and I told him about the experiment that was happening two years ago in Amsterdam, where they also experimentally cut a traffic artery. And he was, like, literally putting his hand to his face. It was like, “Oh, my God. They didn’t call it a cut, did they?” Because he knew that—he also talked about five zones in Ghent that were cut. And he said that was the biggest mistake. “I should have never called it ‘the cut,’ because it’s not cutting, it’s stitching or mending.”
Marco te Brömmelstroet: It sounds trivial, but I think—I would predict that it would have made matters a lot easier if he would be talking, because one of the things in the Netherlands, one of the key things that cities are now facing, is they introducing paid parking, or basically stopping subsidized parking and getting market mechanisms back in place. And many cities then run into the technocracy, needing a referendum on this. And so the legal frameworks require that they then do a referendum. Often what you see is that then a minority shows up, a majority of the minority is then against, and that is then put in the newspapers as, “Oh, everybody’s against.” Which, of course, is not true. But if I then ask a deputy mayor, like, what, in the whole setup of the referendum, what was the position of the elementary schools? And they look at me like, what do you mean? Well, there are, in an average city in the Netherlands, there are like a small city already has around 60 elementary schools. They represent basically all children from the ages from four to twelve in your city. So what was their position? We don’t know. We didn’t ask them. So how—what? It’s crucial, right? They should be a crucial voice that you should bring to the fore.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: And I think again, this happens because in our minds it’s indeed still a traffic circulation plan, so we are still talking to the same people. So this pluralistic ignorance, I would say, is so deeply ingrained in how we do things that I keep on telling deputy mayors that in the next election cycle, the first thing that they should do is stop having a deputy mayor of mobility. They should stop having that. We also don’t have a deputy mayor of sewers. So it’s—but it’s so ingrained, it’s so solidified. It will not be easy. It sounds crazy, but everywhere where it happens, you see that it’s—that it’s liberating that we can—and not liberating as, oh, suddenly we solve everything. But we have very different conversations. We bring very different voices to the table, and we then see that there’s actually a large majority of people that understand that we have to do things differently in our cities.
Doug: So along the lines of language, I’ve heard you talk about specific terms that we use—we’ve talked about some of them in this conversation—and how they do and don’t work. So for example, low-traffic neighborhoods sounds good. Everybody wants to live in a low-traffic neighborhood, but then it sort of forces this question to the people who live just on the other side of that. Well, does that mean I’m now living in a high-traffic neighborhood?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Exactly.
Doug: Like, are you pushing—are you pushing the traffic that was in your neighborhood to mine? What can be done about something like that? What are your thoughts on a topic like that?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: What we—what we have done as activists here, again, as an unsolicited provocation, in the Netherlands, we had something similar, which was called zero-emission zones. And there was a lot of fuss about that. So city centers became zero-emission zones. They put signs up telling vans especially that they need to be zero emission. And what we actually did is we designed opposite signs, and we put them on the street saying, well, basically you’re saying that the rest of the city is a full emission zone. So why is that acceptable? I think, again, turning that around and saying, why is it even acceptable that still the large majority of the citizens of your city are living in areas where apparently emissions are perfectly fine?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Because the logic is often—indeed, it’s what scientists recently called “scope incumbencies.” So it’s this idea that we are very—challenging the system, we are doing radically innovative stuff. But even most scientists that claim that are incumbent in their scope, so they are unable to think outside of the scope because of funding mechanisms, because of how our brains work. So we actually need to be more playful, to bring in people that can help us—artists, I don’t know. People from other domains.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Again, it’s a good reason to change narratives, to bring children to the table because it shows the absurdity of indeed also of low-traffic neighborhoods. I often say that again, I live in a suburban neighborhood in the middle of the Netherlands,1,300 houses. I’m bored. I’m an academic, so I often walk in my neighborhood and I count stuff. And I count—I walk in my neighborhood, 1,300 houses, and I counted exactly zero helicopter platforms in my neighborhood. Zero. And then I went on the site where people sell their houses, and nobody claims that their house is in a helicopter-free neighborhood.
Doug: [laughs]
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So why is it that low traffic is such an important indicator? Well, that’s because we have high traffic everywhere else. But people don’t identify themselves with low or high traffic. So why not call it—why not say that cities are low child? We have a lot of low-children streets or low-children neighborhoods. So who invented that? Who ordered it? Who wants this? Again, it’s a bit of a play of words. It’s a bit playful, and it sounds trivial, but it’s not. Like, “low-traffic” neighborhood is still incumbent. It’s still making us focus on traffic as the most important dimension, which it isn’t, but which we keep on reinforcing.
Doug: I think that’s why I really enjoy talking to you and your research. You have these Dutch radical provo roots to your thinking, that there is—we think of radicalism as, like, standing up and screaming and protesting, but there is a lot of humor and creativity in it.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: No, but I would even also turn that around. What is radical is that we have simplified our public spaces to serve only one goal. And we don’t ask people for this, we just do it for them. There has been no vote on it, there has been no referendum on it, but we have turned our entire country into a centrifuge where people are being—traveling from A to B through ugly environments. That is radical. And asking for safe environments for children isn’t radical.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: So that’s—and again, I understand that it sounds—in some contexts, this sounds too playful for an academic, especially. But I do think that there’s so much in between where we can be more powerful if we use that freedom of thinking—or at least where we don’t like. Like, if you want to talk in traffic models, fine, be my guest. But don’t think that that’s a law of physics. It is a choice to see streets as sewages that need to serve throughput. You can still do it, but it’s a choice.
Doug: And one final question: Have you sent Ian Walker his bottle of wine?
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Not yet. So I’m not even sure if he remembers. So if he listens to the podcast, I will.
Doug: All right, well, we’ll tell—maybe we’ll tell him not to listen to this one and you can get off scot-free.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: [laughs] Or cut the part where I talk about the bottle of wine. That might be smart. No, but it’s well deserved. And at the same time, I do still stand behind the reasoning, and to go deeper into this, because obviously that’s also what scientists do, right? We studied something, we found it, but there’s so much more to uncover.
Doug: Well, I found the study really fascinating, and I think it does open up all of these questions, many of them encouraging, because if you’re finding that even in the US, 66 percent of people believe that they support car reduction strategies and alternatives to driving more than the average person, that suggests there is a ton of untapped potential to reach these people. Now we have to do it in all these creative ways that you’re talking about, and rethinking language and really just questioning the fundamental nature of our thinking.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Yeah, I have a final catch-22 for you on that, because I think—I think Thalia Verkade did a very good job as a journalist to write a book that helps people sort of following this Alice in Wonderland through the rabbit hole kind of experience of becoming aware of these questions. But how do you—how do you make people read a book about mobility who are not interested in mobility? Right? So that’s, for us, a trick that we haven’t solved yet. We get the best reviews on the book by people that said that they got it as a surprise gift. But the most people that read it are already in our bubble. So how do we reach the people outside of the bubble that are not interested in our bubble? I think if we—if we solve that riddle, I think we will unlock this 66 percent potential.
Doug: Marco te Brömmelstroet, thank you so much for coming back to The War on Cars.
Marco te Brömmelstroet: Well, thank you for having me. It was an excellent conversation.