Riding the Subway: Community Interaction in the City of Automobility

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Riding the SubwayCommunity Interaction in the
City of Automobility?

• Sabrina Lau
• P4T Conference
• Vancouver, June 14-16, 2006

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• Traveling alone inside a metal shell with
  windows (i.e. single-occupancy car travel) is
• not conducive to social interaction.
• G. Lyons, 2004

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Automobility

• A manufactured object
• The second biggest item of individual consumption
• A machinic complex

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Automobility

• The dominant culture
• The dominant cause of environmental resource
  depletion
• A quasi-private mobility

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The Phenomenology of Automobility

• Great flexibility, yet very coercive
• Nation of Strangers
• Private-in-Public Space

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The Phenomenology of Transit
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Transit Love It or Hate It?
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The Phenomenology of Transit

• Cult of Transit-Lovers
• The importance of eye contact
• Public Space the venue for human interaction

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Public Transit and the Collective Experience

• Reclaiming Streets and Public Spaces
• In Defense of Collective Rights The Bus Riders
  Union

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Reclaim The Streets
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Bus Riders Union
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We are working to write a new chapter in the
civil rights and environmental justice movementa
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
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Conclusion

• Transport does not merely serve society it
  shapes
• society, as in turn society shapes transport.
• - G. Lyons, 2004.
•