Carism and Social Injustice

This article was generously shared by Arlene Tigar Mclaren, links for this article, and further information about the writer are posted at the bottom of the article.

Carfree!
After giving up our car almost a year ago, we wondered if we were carless or carfree. We’ve been surprised not only how painless it’s been to be without a car, but also how liberating. Without a car, we are free to explore other forms of mobility that are pleasurable and convenient. We rely now primarily on walking and public transit and occasionally use car rentals and carsharing such as Modo and car2go in Vancouver, Canada. Since the area in which we live is reasonably well designed for walking, biking, public transit and car sharing, these alternative options easily rival the car as desirable forms of mobility.


Auto domination
The bad news is that due to their subordination to the private automobile these mobility alternatives are severely limited. Separated sidewalks and bike lanes are well and good but are built to accommodate the automobile as an all-encompassing system that shapes land use and transportation options. If public transit and railways were the main forms of motorized transport, they could be far more effective than they are rather than being the second cousin to the private automobile and commercial truck.

For the past century in the West, the automobile has dominated all other forms of transportation in hearts and minds, in social interactions and spaces, in culture, design and art, and in the political economy. Authorities protect at almost any cost the automobile – and its commercialized counterparts such as heavy trucks – as a way of life despite the fact that they do not serve all citizens equally.

Authorities protect the automobile, not people
Those with influence and power who design land use and transportation systems, provide funding for them, support the automobile and trucking industries, make the laws and uphold and enforce them are predisposed to favour the private automobile. They are biased towards cars and against pedestrians, cyclists, public transport and railways. In a word, they engage in ‘carism’.

This bias is no more evident than in the ways that political and legal systems uphold a culture of complacency and turn a blind eye to carnage on the roads. According to World Health Organization statistics (which are under-estimates) about 1.3 million people die annually around the world from motor vehicle collisions. These statistics are mind-boggling and the tip of the iceberg inasmuch as: an estimated 50 million people worldwide suffer serious injuries each year from motor vehicle collisions; countless others suffer minor injuries; and many more experience near misses.

Are there any other dangers that authorities view with such complacent indifference as traffic deaths and injuries? None spring to mind. Despite the fact that private and commercial motor vehicles are the most injurious forms of transportation to human (and animal) health and safety, they are protected rather than the other way around. Even more troubling is the fact that, if authorities adjudicate blame, they often punish non-motoring, vulnerable victims.

Three recent cases – one in the US state of Georgia, a second in Foshan, China and a third in Toronto, Canada – help to illustrate carism and social injustice. This handful of tragic events reveals how the legal, political, economic and spatial environment is biased towards supporting the domination of private cars and commercial trucks on public roads and against pedestrians and cyclists.

Carism, racism, sexism and class inequality
The bias towards motor vehicles and against pedestrians could hardly be more vividly portrayed than in a 2010 Georgia case in which a prosecutor charged Raquel Nelson with vehicular homicide. She was not driving a vehicle. She was a pedestrian crossing the road with her three children after they had gotten off the bus. Rather than walk 3/10 of a mile to a crosswalk and another 3/10 of a mile back – she had packages with her, as well as her children – she tried to cross the street to her apartment building right across from where the bus let her off. When her 4-year-old son broke away from her and ran into the road, he was struck and killed by a driver who had been drinking.


The man driving the car, Jerry Guy, fled the scene after the collision but later admitted to being the driver. He had previously been convicted of two hit-and-runs in 1997. He served six months in prison and the remainder of his sentence on probation.

What happened to Raquel Nelson? According to court records, the state charged her with three misdemeanors: second-degree vehicular homicide, failing to cross at a crosswalk and reckless conduct. An all-white jury convicted Nelson (an African-American). Although the prosecution did not recommend jail time, each count carried a potential sentence of one year in jail -- for a total of 36 months.

Nelson’s case attracted national attention from parents, the NAACP and transportation advocates who argued that she was being unfairly pursued for trying to cross the road as would any other pedestrian. In July 2011, Nelson obtained a victory of sorts. A judge sentenced her to 12 months of probation and 40 hours of community service and also said she could seek a new trial.

CNN’s Erin Burnett Outfront program picked up the story on November 14, 2011, the day that Nelson’s lawyer filed an appeal to drop all charges. Burnett referred to the story as tough because of the situation where crosswalks don’t exist and busy roads run through poor neighbourhoods. The CNN legal contributor Paul Callan said the case is brutal: “Here's this poor young mother who has lost her son, her 4-year-old son run over by a hit-and-run driver and they charged her with vehicular homicide because she wasn't crossing at the crosswalk”. While Burnett wondered about racism being at work with a white jury convicting a black woman, Callan replied: “To me, it's more carism than racism” and explained, “The Georgia suburbs are built for the automobile. You know, they are big roads. They are fast roads. No crosswalks, minimal crosswalks. And she's someone who is poor. She relies on public transportation”. 



This case where a mother loses her child to a speeding car and in her grief is charged with vehicular homicide even though she was not the driver suggests that something is terribly wrong with the justice system. Callan’s use of the term carism helps to reveal how judicial and governing authorities privilege the automobile system at the expense of other forms of transportation. Municipalities continue to build roads with inadequate pedestrian crossings or sidewalks and governments vastly underfund pedestrian safety infrastructure, yet the court pointed the finger at a mother, blaming her for the death of her son on a road that was designed with no regard for pedestrian safety. As a poor African-American woman, she was caught in the intertwining forces of sexism, racism, classism and carism of an unjust judicial and political-economic system.

Motorized traffic is lethal to children
A collision that took place in China similarly illustrates how motor vehicles dominate other forms of mobility, resulting in terrible consequences. In October 2011, a child’s traffic injury, which was caught on video, was so shocking that it touched millions of people in China and reached the western media. In a local market street, a toddler, Yueyue, was struck by a hit-and-run driver of a delivery van and then run over by another hit-and-run driver. As she lay bleeding on the road, 18 passersby ignored her. Eventually a woman rescued the two-year old and called to her parents who were working in their nearby shop. They had not noticed that their daughter had wandered onto the street. She survived only to die a week later.

The media asked what this incident reveals about the soul of China in which passersby ignored the injured child. The case raises questions also about how private motorized traffic in every part of the world is taking over market streets and public space, and endangering pedestrians and children without adequate safeguards.


Because of carism, it is up to pedestrians and cyclists to accommodate to the risks posed by the car. Parents are forced to be forever vigilant and keep their children off streets and inside contained areas. As a result, children lose their independence and freedom to explore. When tragic collisions occur, a culture of complacent indifference flourishes.

Death and complacency
In Toronto, a recent collision between a cyclist and truck provides yet another example of how authorities are biased towards motor vehicles. On November 7, 2011, cyclist Jenna Morrison and pregnant mother of a 5 year old tragically collided with a truck turning right on a major Toronto street. Morrison was pulled under the truck and crushed beneath its back wheels.

According to the Globe and Mail, the incidence of death and injury as a result of collisions with heavy vehicles in Canadian urban areas is high: from 2004 to 2006, 77 pedestrians and 24 cyclists died and 1,410 people were injured from such collisions. Even though a 2010 report commissioned by Transport Canada shows that cyclist and pedestrian deaths and serious injuries involving trucks declined in Europe since side guards were introduced on the sides of most trucks in the late 1980s, Canada has not required side guards.

Parents in Canada who have lost children in similar collisions have been campaigning many years for mandatory safety guards. NDP MP Olivia Chow has tried three times to introduce a private member’s bill urging the federal government to require side guards. In 2006, the City of Toronto requested that Transport Canada mandate truck side guards. Prominent Toronto neurosurgeon Charles Tator has called for the federal and provincial governments to look more closely at the issue.

Transport Canada and the Canadian Trucking Alliance have so far been unimpressed with the research evidence and calls for action, upholding a culture of complacency about pedestrian and cyclist deaths. They claim that the evidence about side guards improving safety must be iron clad before they take action, even though the economic cost of side guards is not high and would clearly save lives. One would imagine that if any evidence suggests that truck safety guards are effective, responsible politicians would insist they be made mandatory. And some politicians are, just not enough.

Carism and social injustice
Here are three cases (and there are so many more) of families and children who have lost loved ones as a result of how motor vehicles dominate the roads. Such tragedies, which occur regularly and predictably, are not ‘accidents’. They could have been prevented yet the social and political responses to them are disturbingly inadequate and unjust. Carism, as a bias towards the automobile, helps to explain why authorities punish non-motoring, vulnerable victims, fail to protect children in the public space of roads, and are extraordinarily complacent in their indifference towards preventing traffic deaths and injuries.

Motor vehicle injuries and their consequences are only the tip of the iceberg of how the automobile dominates and diminishes daily life. People experience near misses as a daily contingency of walking, driving or cycling in a highly trafficked environment and must go to great lengths to avoid threats to themselves and others for whom they are responsible.

More generally, as the dominant mode of travel, the automobile disenfranchises those who do not drive whether due to age, ability, income, lack of opportunity, or choice. Carism has undermined what it means to be a citizen and needs to be challenged as a form of social injustice. If alternative kinds of mobility to the automobile had adequate public and political support, they would be far more egalitarian and accessible for all ages and walks of life.

Arlene Tigar McLaren is Professor Emerita at Simon Fraser University

She is the co-author of:
Car Troubles: Critical Studies of Automobility and Auto-Mobility. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

For links to referenced stories or the author:

Georgia, Beijing, Toronto

Arlene Tigar McLaren