Riding the Subway: Community Interaction in the City of Automobility?

1. Riding the Subway:Community Interaction in the City of Automobility? Sabrina Lau P4T Conference Vancouver, June 14-16, 2006

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

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

4. Automobility • The dominant culture • The dominant cause of environmental resource depletion • A ‘quasi-private’ mobility

5. The Phenomenology of Automobility • Great flexibility, yet very coercive • Nation of Strangers • Private-in-Public Space

6. The Phenomenology of Transit

7. Transit: Love It or Hate It?

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

9. Public Transit and the Collective Experience • Reclaiming Streets and Public Spaces • In Defense of Collective Rights: The Bus Riders Union

10. Reclaim The Streets

11. Bus Riders Union

12. “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

13. Conclusion “Transport does not merely serve society: it shapes society, as in turn society shapes transport.” - G. Lyons, 2004.