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.