TRANSPORT IMPACTS

The question keeps repeating in my head … to mention the environment or not to mention the environment. The ultimate reason we need to get people out of their cars is due to the perverse environmental and social impacts which often lead to very serious costs which are diffused throughout the world.

However, the reason why people may choose to change their travel behaviour doesn’t have to be for the underlying “important reasons” – the truth is, we just really, really need to get people out of their cars anyway we know how. We also have to avoid making rebellious enemies in the processing, avoid attacking people’s perceived fundamental rights such as their sense of freedom, control, ability to care for their family and other factors people hold dear.

Currently, people I talk to always come up to me with their “completely rational” reasoning for taking a car everywhere. If you start trying to put extra factors into their reasoning that they may have overlooked or underestimated, they tend to get very defensive. They start to attack you with why they drive and why their rationality cannot be tampered with – why they cannot and will not be swayed and they feel justified (and don’t even think about persisting here, because you will just get called an arrogant, self-righteous **** who can’t possibly understand how it is to live like them). Ouch, it hurts me every time – so I have instead taken to using phrases like “yes, I know what you mean” and “I guess I’ll have to try and think of some solutions to make our transport system better for you”

There are many other reasons that people can choose to get out of their car (personal finance, health, stress, time, personal safety) and there is the potential for large scale infrastructure and servicing projects to make it even more favourable to use alternative transport. The question is, should we accept peoples current state of rationality and work around this, or should we encourage people to question how they think about what is rationality, or should we forget this concept altogether and try and think about other, more normative reasons for people to take action.

Personally, I feel like the second two options are more interesting (and more challenging), but at the end of the day more rewarding. If people are given the capacity to reassess the reasoning for behaving in a certain way, they have opened their eyes a little wider. If we continue to pander to the way people view the world through their half shut eyes, we will continue to require excessive projects to be implemented and a constant fight against peoples “natural” tendency towards the car in this context.

The method for opening their eyes is yet to be uncovered. In my experiences, people open their eyes wide for a number of reasons – when they’re shocked (a big natural disaster), when they are about to take a large bite (making big, life changing decisions – where to live), when they are dead (when irreversible environmental changes happen), when there is a lack of clarity that they’re trying to see through (actively stepping back from society trying to understand why we behave the way we do) and also when we are looking at something so beautiful we can’t take our eyes off it (realisation of the beauty and wonder of nature).  Maybe we can learn a little from this when we are trying to improve peoples understanding of transportation systems and how their behaviour matters.

Well, at then end of the day I still don’t have the answers, but I hope my blog helps some people open their eyes a little bit (or maybe it just makes them go cross-eyed).