Your Neighbors Support Car Dependence Less Than You Think

A new paper by Ian Walker and Marco te Brömmelstroet, which you can read for free here, digs into why so many people accept the assumption that driving a car an essential activity that cannot be judged the way other activities are. For example, the authors wonder why more Americans agree with the statement:

People operating dangerous machinery should be responsible for any harm they cause.

than with the statement

People operating motor vehicles should be responsible for any harm they cause.

This bias, called motonormativity, is easy to see when following, for example, the debate over (de)congestion pricing in New York City.  Opponents repeatedly claimed that a vaguely defined “working class” would be devastated by the proposed charge of $9 to drive into Lower Manhattan, even though the people actually driving into Lower Manhattan are wealthier than average and abundant public transit options are available.  A notion that getting to work is impossible without driving, which is broadly true in exurban and rural areas, was projected into the densest place in the United States, a place that only functions because so many people already don’t drive. This motonormative notion was enforced throughout media coverage of the issue, not just in the predictably rabid New York Post and in much of the radio and television media, but even in the New York Times, where subheads like “See what it will cost you” reminded us that even in the densest and most transit-rich of US cities, all readers are assumed to be motorists, or to care about them.  

In the new paper, the authors go beyond whether motonormativity exists — which many previous studies that they cite have established — and dig into what causes it.  Using a broad survey of over 650 people each in the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, the study finds correlations between motonormative attitudes and:

• the social norms of close personal contacts
• the social norms of other people
• the infrastructure and physical environment, and
• the perceived attitude of the government.

There are interesting differences among the three countries.  The Dutch, for example, are the only ones who perceive thee infrastructure surrounding them to be less supportive of cars than of other modes of travel — and they’re right.

The most interesting finding to me, though, was that people tend to assume that people around them are more supportive of cars than they are, an example of the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance.  Our everyday life is full of reinforcements of motonormativity — my doctor’s office in inner-city Portland provides car directions but not transit directions — so it’s not surprising that people wrongly assume that their support for alternatives to driving in a minority view.  Very car dependent places like Los Angeles routinely vote big taxes for public transit.  A crucial share of people appear to be resentfully car-dependent — forced into car-dependence by their circumstances and thus behaving in a way that may superficially appear “car loving” — but actually longing for alternatives, if not for themselves than for their community at large.  We must never presume that people in cars are car advocates.

I strongly recommend this paper.  Even if you don’t have the statistics knowledge to follow the technical part, parts 1, 4, and 5 are an easy read and full of useful insights.