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TRANSPORT REVIEW FOR H&N 12 "Freedom To Go: After The Motor Age" by Colin Ward (Freedom Press, #3.50) "Releve Provisiore de Nos Griefs Contre le Despotisme de la Vitesse" (Alliance Pour L'Opposition A Toutes les Nuisances, BP 188, 75665 Paris Cedex 14, France, 15FF) Transportation policy lies at the vanishing point of command-based politics. The political class's pretense to represent a "general interest" implodes under pressure from each particular interest (e.g. for or against road and rail development schemes). The cartels and corporations pay scant regard to the planning pretensions of the politicians, and rational behaviour seldom results from the sum of all individuals' behaviour, bringing unforeseen results (new motorway; my car trip; their traffic jam). The delusions of administrative politics are therefore evident, and can be opposed with no wider programme than that of a pressure group defending a particular community's interests. But can the issues be developed in a way which opposes administrative-technical fixes without positing another set? The two present pamphlets, both stand outside command politics, and can be viewed from this perspective. The French pamphlet appears, at least, to intervene in a particular struggle: opposing the construction of a south-east arterial route for the TGV high-speed train through further communities. However, the pamphlet consists largely of denunciation of the cult of speed and suppression of distance by those whose use of the TGV allows them to enlarge the commuter dormitory belt around the metropolis. Much of radical theory followed Marx in favouring the city over the country. The metropolis was the focal point: its growth had cast everything into flux, initiating new behaviour patterns which were understood to define the public and the private. Some proclaimed a new urbanism which would breach these divisions, but the substance of these proposals should they spread beyond small vanguards (themselves a metropolitan conceit) remained unclear. The current pamphlet plays a familiar tune: quality replaced by quantity, true need by false, a monotonous standardisation of life. Well and good, unless it merely fulfills an obligation to map preconceived ideas onto reality in a way which triggers recognition in a tiny number of people. Another danger lies in producing well-meaning and sensible proposals outwith any movement towards their application - the sort of administrative politics without power which can be associated with the Green Party. Ward's pamphlet skirts that danger. It provides a handbook synthesising histories of the public and private, the social and personal aspects of various forms of transport. The theme is caught up in State structure and funding, as prestige projects (like the TGV) are pursued to enhance the image of the State, and in the interplay with corporations' activities. As Ward describes, the "realm of freedom" based around the private automobile resulted from State reluctance to impede the corporations' dismantling of US city transport systems as well as from the underwriting of motorised freedom by funding road programmes. Like his other writings, however, such conspiratorial origins of the Motor Age are balanced with recognition of the specific activity which people make in their lives. For example, Ward remarks on the intensive interest in tinkering with cars (reflected in many Custom Car type magazines at the newsagent), despite such activity being far from his or our interest. Such recognition of the creativity involved in hobbies is more open to, for example, the impulse towards "hotting" stolen cars than would be an attention to the banality of the totality which could ignore such activity, act as a parody civil liberties lobby by decrying heavy-handed policing, or celebrate hotting as a crack in the capitalist monolith. There is certainly an awkwardness in Freedom To Go, one which appears in any attempt to propose positive goals while withholding consent from those in power. Ward highlights the extent to which contemporary palliatives, such as pedestrianisation and traffic calming devices, offended against town planning orthodoxy but have since become a new "good practise". Not that the adoption of such programmes represents a victory of the convivial over the planners - control is not relinquished, merely remoulded. The highest profile traffic calming programmes are those around army checkpoints in Northern Ireland. Pedestrianisation is predominantly introduced in town shopping streets and the effect, rather than restoring the multiple use of space which preceded the domination of motor traffic, is often to dedicate the area to consumption by day and leave it unsafe to walk alone at night. Ward recalls the campaigns against higher public transport fares in London (and Glasgow) with free transport a worthwhile goal, both in the local transport infrastructure and in potential wider benefits. As well it might be, but the past decade has seen different or even contrary impulses at work. In particular, deregulation of bus services had the ostensible purpose of allowing market mechanisms to provide a better provider-purchaser service. Beyond asserting that the true goal was different, any revived campaign for free mass transport would need to define "public" control on a level other than that of the municipal. To step back from the security and guarantee against reformism apparently provided by the idea of a banal totality requires recognition of the forces at work, the interests of the administrative strata and their propensity to co-opt, and also of the difficulty of finding a rooted position, outwith the circling rhetorics of anti-social and social oppositions. The developments of mass and individual transportations both formed and weakened our communities, such as they are. From Here & Now 12 1992 - Nocopyright