EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A Pedestrian World: Competing Rationalities and the Calculation of Transportation Change

Jason W Patton
Additional contact information
Jason W Patton: City of Oakland Community and Economic Development Agency, 250 Frank Ogawa Plaza, Suite 3315, Oakland, CA 94612, USA

Environment and Planning A, 2007, vol. 39, issue 4, 928-944

Abstract: In this paper I examine pedestrian-motor-vehicle conflicts in US cities as competing forms of rationality based in particular values, techniques, and material forms. The kernel of dispute is the transportation engineer's focus on ‘traffic flow’ in allowing motor vehicles to move as efficiently as possible versus the pedestrian advocate's desire for ‘place’ as the intimate context of urban life. I consider the City of Oakland's Pedestrian Master Plan as a challenge to the mandate for traffic flow operationalized by the Transportation Research Board's Highway Capacity Manual. These values and techniques shape intersections, pedestrian crossings, street corners, and other taken-for-granted material forms in the urban built environment. Within the constraints of shared right-of-way, these competing rationalities are negotiated through spatial and temporal strategies that, historically, have resulted in the hierarchical ordering of the automobile over pedestrians in the US city. However, a growing emphasis on walking, bicycling, and public-transit-riding is reshaping the predominant values, techniques, and material forms to facilitate street design for multiple transportation modes.

Date: 2007
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a389 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:39:y:2007:i:4:p:928-944

DOI: 10.1068/a389

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:39:y:2007:i:4:p:928-944