Abstract
Traffic engineers have long viewed transportation challenges with the cold calculating approach of physicists. Borrowing from the physical sciences, transport and traffic modelers famously have likened travelers to particles in a liquid (Lighthill and Whitham 1955), with the goal of using insights from physics theories to optimize the flow of travelers—usually in motor vehicles. Examples of this underlying philosophy abound, with one of the most notable being the level-of-service (LOS) metric used by traffic engineers to describe the quality of motor vehicle traffic service as measured by traffic flow or delay.
In contrast, geographers and social scientists are more likely to see travelers as humans, with all of the personal, social, and political entanglements that come with them. Their fields have recorded how physical mobility influences (and is influenced by) social mobility, quality of life, and community.
Like oil and water, these groups do not typically mix, so arguments made in one domain often fall only on sympathetic, familiar ears. As a consequence, transportation professionals may continue to plan and engineer cities in auto-centric ways that come with unintended, negative externalities, while social scientists may find it difficult to find the vocabulary or understand the processes at play in order to make salient their findings and arguments against motordom.
In Law, Engineering, and the American Right-of-Way, Prytherch embarks on the ambitious and useful task of seeking to reconcile these distinct fields and philosophies. As he puts it, “any rethinking of the street, and rights and justice among the mobile, in theory must remain firmly grounded in the details of engineering and law in practice” (p. 2). Prytherch focuses on the street as the place where the ethics and justice considerations of “New Mobilities” scholars and transport geographers intersect with the concerns of transport modelers, engineers, and lawyers. He shows these “technical experts” how American transportation systems touch on issues beyond mobility such as safety, equity, and fairness, while simultaneously giving geographers and social scientists the background, knowledge, and language with which to operationalize their theories and concepts in a way that transportation professionals can understand.
Prytherch is well qualified to bridge this gap, having written about this topic since the early 2010s. In 2015, he served as coeditor with Julie Cidell on the volume Transport, Mobility, and the Production of Urban Space, and he has written several peer-reviewed papers in this area over the past decade. A political and cultural geographer with a specialization in urban planning, Prytherch teaches in the Department of Geography at Miami University.
Prytherch organized the book into ten chapters divided into three parts: an overview of mobility justice concepts and theories; a description and critique of the U.S. transportation legal, engineering, and planning practices and tools; and a synthesis of modern approaches to rectify the auto-centric biases of U.S. transportation practice. Before Part I, Prytherch’s begins with chapter 1, an introduction elaborating on the book’s focus—the privileging of the automobile in American legal, planning, and engineering processes, policies, and tools—before briefly sketching out the roadmap for the chapters to come. He then segues to Part I, a single chapter (chapter 2) supplying an overview of how transport geographers and New Mobilities scholars have challenged the notion that transportation should be exclusively focused on motor vehicle movement. Prytherch provides a survey of early alternative approaches to transport studies, such as the time-space geographies of Hagerstrand and the street ballet of Jane Jacobs, before introducing the New Mobilities paradigm and its emphasis on the political nature of transportation. He follows with a description of scholarship on the street as a legal landscape and then segues to the logical extension to arguments of streets as sites for social justice, citing the heavy influence of Rawls. He concludes with the thesis that a just street is a space that
Prytherch then devotes Part II, chapters 3 through 6, to describing the legal and engineering systems that have engendered the current American right-of-way. Part II is where “the rubber meets the road” as the author introduces and critiques the Uniform Vehicle Code (National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws and Ordinances 2000), which describes which types of travelers are legitimate users of the road (defined as serving the “purposes of vehicular travel” [p. 44]) and the rules defining their interactions. Prytherch shows how these legal definitions dovetail with engineering and design standards as laid down by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Transportation Research Board, prescribing design for the “operational efficiency, comfort, safety, and convenience for the motorist” (pp. 82–83), as well as the car-centric traffic control instruments and methods described in the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration 2012). These chapters are dense with detail and insights into the minutiae of these technical documents that privilege the automobile over other forms of travel.
Though the book is normative in its definition of what a just street should be, Prytherch takes a decidedly educational rather than prescriptive approach in Part III. In this part’s three synthesizing chapters (chapters 7 through 9) and one concluding chapter (chapter 10), he introduces modern legal, engineering, and advocacy approaches that seek to bring about a more just street. These include the efforts of the Complete Streets Network to spread “complete streets” policies and ordinances as well as new engineering guidelines for bicycle and pedestrian facilities from AASHTO and the more “radical” bicycle and urban design guides from the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO). Finally, Prytherch highlights how support for mobility justice can be activated through advocacy efforts, from the national level (e.g., 1980s fights for freeway removal, modern-day efforts to spread BRT) to the local (e.g., ghost bikes, PARK[ing] Day). Through these examples, Prytherch provides the interested transportation technocrat, advocate, or scholar with ways to immediately engage in current opportunities as well as inspiration for future efforts, though he steers clear of making any clear recommendations of actions to take, consistent with his pedagogical rather than prescriptive tone.
This book shines as an introductory primer for a wide-ranging audience. For a transportation planner with little or no knowledge of the work of transport geographers or social scientists on defining and studying mobility justice, the first chapter of the book provides a compact but excellent introduction to the field, with a lengthy reference list to consult for more information. The book is even more useful for a transport geographer. For this audience, Prytherch’s description and critique of the legal and engineering underpinnings of the American auto-dominated transportation system in Part II provides a natural introduction for how they can begin to grapple with this system, too.
However, at times throughout the book and especially in chapter 2, the author may have reduced the realistic scope of this book’s audience by adopting some of the terminology and diction that is commonly used by New Mobilities scholars and transport geographers. While at times evocative, creative, and playful, at others moments this style can become bogged down and requires multiple repeat readings to attempt to understand the meaning of a phrase or sentence (e.g., “Analyzing and effectuating,” “cognizable claims,” “geographical unevenness” [pp. 20–21]). Likewise, the author at times assumes a familiarity with different philosophies (e.g. “positivism” [p. 14]) that readers may not possess. It is my hope that non-geography audiences, such as professional planners and engineers, will nonetheless invest the time to read through some of the denser sections, as they will likely walk away with valuable insights to make them more effective practitioners in service of all travelers.
In light of its content, emphasis, and thorough coverage of a complex topic, I anticipate this book will have its strongest impact in graduate-level courses in a wide range of programs, from transportation geography, sociology, and community development to law, urban planning, and civil engineering. For instructors whose syllabi already includes works from the likes of John Urry, Mimi Sheller, Tim Cresswell, and Karen Lucas, this book will make a strong contribution, especially for a U.S. audience. It is also worth noting that since this book was published, other work has come out that is similarly critical of the role of U.S. law in creating a car-centric transportation system (e.g., Shill 2020), which could be added to a course reading list to complement this book’s coverage.
In sum, this book largely achieves its goal of bringing a common understanding to both sides of the rift between traffic engineers and social scientists. Prytherch and I share the hope that this knowledge of “the other side” can make them more effective practitioners, researchers, and advocates in the creation of a mobility system that equitably serves all travelers.