Our Frame on Congestion Valorizes Speed

Another problem with the congestion frame is that it tends to a binary. We valorize its opposite, free-flow and unconstrained speed.

Front page story from Monday

You might remember this from very early in the Pandemic.

March 28th, 2020 - via FB

We have now something of a real world experiment.

via Twitter

Strong Towns has a theory:

Prior to the pandemic, overwhelming levels of traffic congestion artificially reduced speeds for much of the day and, in doing so, artificially reduced the number of traffic deaths compared to what would be experienced in free-flow conditions. The more congestion and the longer it lasts, the more fatality rates go down.

When the pandemic began, that congestion went away, allowing the drivers that remained to exploit the full operating capacity of the roadway that had been overengineered for them. Speeds went up, along with the number of random interactions, which is the fatal combination. [italics added]

Congestion has safety benefits. It's harder to attain lethal speed in congested conditions.

More than that, our autoism enjoys an artificial separation between egregious speeding and routine speeding. One is the action of bad actors, something to be condemned; the other an ordinary and even banal act, what most people crave to do, and something to celebrate.

We should see more of a continuum, and there is a new source for data the paper could employ. They could look at speeding on both highway and city street.

Even the Police said "eye-opening" (2020)

Another link might be the to way our autoism celebrates speed, reckless driving, and cars specifically designed for that. So much car advertising shows dangerous behavior and has a disclaimer, "professional driver on closed circuit, do not try this at home," etc. Speed is ubiquitous in car advertising.

"high-performance" or just dangerous?
(from January)

Our congestion frame and wider culture of autoism hinders thinking clearly about cars and their costs. If the paper wants to follow-up, there are many avenues to go down and dots to connect!