On many stretches of the Interstate Highway System, pedestrians, bicycles, non-motorized vehicles, and horses are all banned. (In some remote areas, they’re actually permitted.) You’ve probably seen the sign noting this at the freeway entrance; the horses bit is the part that you might remember, because who would ride a horse on an Interstate Highway anyway?

But the other part—that we have certain types of roadways where walking and biking are expressly (no pun intended) prohibited—doesn’t really register as anything in particular. And it shouldn’t—because it makes total sense. It’s neither safe nor efficient to walk on an Interstate Highway. The simplicity of the road, with no other road users but cars to look out for, is part of its usefulness. The Interstate Highway is like the Platonic form an environment built for cars.

Nobody has to demand that we ban pedestrians or cyclists here because, except in those remote areas where it doesn’t much matter anyway, it isn’t something anybody would really question.

What about the inverse of the Interstate Highway: a core downtown street in a dense city? Why is the notion of banning cars in this environment viewed as radical, or really as any sort of controversial idea at all? Isn’t it basically exactly the same common sense as banning pedestrians on an expressway? I think so. I’m not sure how this became such a hot-button issue in the first place.

I read this piece recently by Nicholas Boys Smith, the president of Create Streets. He starts by warning that his article “may annoy everyone,” and goes on to offer some nice words about cars:

First off: cars are great. They give the population at large immense liberty to move around the country, the countryside and the suburbs with comfort, ease and relative safety. They empower and liberate their users. They can particularly help those with goods to deliver or physical challenges to overcome. Those who foolishly campaign for cycling or for public transport (both causes I support very strongly) by insulting not just cars but their drivers (and I fear many do) should hardly be surprised that both main political parties adopt rhetorical positions on the side of the majority.

But. This is, sort of, an anti-car piece. He makes the basic argument I’ve made here that all of this is not hating or disliking cars—or fighting a “war” on cars—but about where cars are appropriate to prioritize. “War on cars” is simply not an accurate way of describing the deprioritization of cars in downtowns, any more than those rules on the Interstate Highways represent a “war on walkers.”

This is kind of technocratic, but it’s also philosophical: we’ve forgotten what cities are all about, and so we don’t see the basic reasonableness of reducing cars within urban cores. We understand very well what highways are for, but we don’t fully understand what cities are for, or even what they are.

Boys Smith concludes:

Don’t hate cars. Don’t wage a war against motorists. But don’t wage a war for them either. Instead fight the battle for place and for happy and healthy, prosperous and productive neighbourhoods. All the evidence suggests that voters will thank you.

I suspect progressives won’t like this. Their answer is that we’re not waging a war on motorists. We’re accused of doing that for advocating perfectly reasonable restrictions on cars in cities. We just want walking and biking to be easy and safe. We want to not be killed by cars. The inconvenience you might face as a motorist is more upsetting to you than us being injured and killed for trying to get around.

I understand that. The thing is, if you don’t walk or bike much, or if you do so only recreationally, you really have no idea how rough it is out there. Driving insulates you from the constant low-level danger, and sometimes deadly danger, of actually getting around without a car. And so the first exposure a lot of ordinary drivers ever have to anything like urbanism or bike advocacy is this shrill, hostile, progressive-sounding, seemingly left-wing political advocacy. And for a lot of people, that’s a signal that there’s no real point here. Oh, so this bike stuff is just another fake leftist social-justice issue.

Circumventing that reaction is very important if we want to get anywhere with making great cities for everyone.

That was, frankly, my own reaction years ago when I first started seeing these angry bike people on Twitter talking about how they’d like to punch out some motorist’s window for parking in a bike lane, or whatever. If you’ve only ever driven anywhere, the prospect of someone breaking your car window is far more real to you than whatever harm you might be inflicting by parking in a bike lane.

The bias in favor of cars—motorists are mature, respectable people who have somewhere important to go—is very hard to break through. And as genuine and understandable as it is, a lot of the progressive framing of this stuff fails to get this across. At least to a conservative audience, which is the audience I try in particular to reach.

So that’s my pitch: where cars go and don’t go is a simple question of the right tool for the job. You don’t drill with a screwdriver. You don’t ride a horse on I-95. And you don’t drive in the urban core.

What do you think?

Related Reading:

The Near Occasion of Speeding

Urbanism Without Cities?

No Harm, No Foul?

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