Riding the Subway:Community Interaction in the City of Automobility?
Sabrina Lau
P4T Conference
Vancouver, June 14-16, 2006
“Traveling alone inside a metal shell with windows (i.e. single-occupancy car travel) is
not conducive to social interaction.”
– G. Lyons, 2004
Automobility
A manufactured object The second biggest item of
individual consumption A machinic complex
Automobility
The dominant culture The dominant cause of
environmental resource depletion
A ‘quasi-private’ mobility
The Phenomenology of Automobility
Great flexibility, yet very coercive Nation of Strangers Private-in-Public Space
The Phenomenology of Transit
Transit: Love It or Hate It?
The Phenomenology of Transit
Cult of Transit-Lovers The importance of eye contact Public Space: the venue for human
interaction
Public Transit and the Collective Experience
Reclaiming Streets and Public Spaces In Defense of Collective Rights: The Bus
Riders Union
Reclaim The Streets
Bus Riders Union
“We are working to write a new chapter in the civil rights and environmental justice movement—a grassroots group that wins a well-known civil rights suit, but then has the guts and commitment to enforce its provisions for a decade to build a clean-fuel, world-class mass transportation system in the most air polluted and auto-dominated city in the U.S. which, until we arrived on the scene, had the worst mass transit and bus system of any major U.S. city.” -- Bus Riders Union Overview, 2006
Conclusion
“Transport does not merely serve society: it shapes society, as in turn society shapes transport.”
- G. Lyons, 2004.