Notes
So here are my honest thoughts about this aff – it’s awesome, but not very strategic. And by that I mean that I think that the evidence is surprisingly good, and that it makes some really interesting arguments and stuff. However, this aff will have a hard time beating the states CP, the K of bicycle advocacy, or just a DA and case. So I think that if you want to read this aff for the season, you need to put some serious thought into how you will defend against those arguments. All of those problems are solved by being shady about framework stuff, but that is ultimately not a sustainable strategy. Basically what I am saying is, is that this file is a great basis for an aff, but if you want to be successful, you need to modify it to be more strategic.
Couple of things to know:
Automobility = cars and stuff. More generally it’s any kind of machine that move without human power
Velomobility = human-powered cars
There are two different visions of building bike infrastructure. The first is to build bike lanes, which basically just takes currently existing roads that cars drive on and adds lanes specifically for bikes. The second is to build bike-paths that are distinct and separate from roads that automobiles travers. The aff is about bike LANES and in fact many of the cards critique the construction of bike paths because it is a vision of space aimed at separating different vehicles and relegating the bicycle to a marginal place.
This aff really doesn’t have a fed gov key warrant. I suggest you have some critique arguments to get around that.
There are lots of elements to this aff that have only been minimally explored. For example, the obesity, citizenship, warming, and neolib portions are sections that we have done research on, but are not quite ready to be advantages. I included all this stuff in the file to give people who are researching this aff as basis to go on when doing further research. So as they are in the file, those sections are not so useful except in specific circumstances, however they are possible directions to be explored by those of you who are playing along at home.
Also there are a couple of authors in here (Cox, Bonham, Horton, Spinney) who almost exclusively study bikes. I did not have time to look into everything that they have ever written, but if you are working on this aff for the season I suggest you start by looking at their CV’s. (CV = curriculum vitae)
Suggestions:
First, you should listen to the songs Bicycle Race by Queen and Bike by Pink Floyd. Both are excellent pieces of music.
Second, if you want to do work on this aff for the season I suggest that you find the book “Non-Places” by Marc Auge. It has some sick cards, and it is referenced by basically every aff article. Unfortunatly the two copies owned by Michigan have been missing/were stolen a few years ago and they have not replaced them yet.
You should think carefully about how you underline the cards in this file. Lots of them are way over-underlined, but with an aff like this it’s obviously not really about reading a bunch of cards so much as establishing your argument credibly. That said, you must really really think about which parts of the cards to underline, both because there are many different parts and because the decision to exclude something may be a bad idea.
FAQ’s
Q: should I read a plan with this aff?
A: if you want to. Your choice, not mine.
If you have questions, please email me.
-- parker cronin
University of Michigan
Also
Automobility 1AC
What is a road? The road is an interesting space because it is essentially a non-space – we understand destinations but for the most part people understand the road as simply the place in between destinations as opposed to a place in and of itself. The way that we organize our infrastructure is crucially important to understand how a society understands itself, and in addition to that it has important implications for what societal values we want to express spatially.
The automobile currently dominates that space – cars are inseparable from modern life in that they transport us to and from destinations and also are the spaces that we inhabit when we are between those destinations. We eat, sleep, and even die in these machines. Understand the hegemony of the car over modern transportation is essential to understanding how the spaces that we inhabit between other spaces operates
Talsma 2010(Mattew, geog @ U Toronto, “Technologies of the City and Technologies of the Self: Lessons from the Road”
The car has become inseparablefrom contemporary life. We take the car to school, to work, to the market and to the mall. We can ‘drive-thru’ a restaurant to pick up food, or food can be delivered to us by car. We drive for leisure and pleasure: we take the car for weekend getaways or on more extended ‘road trips’. We love our cars. We make love in our cars. Some of us are born in cars; some of us die in cars. In a final testament to the automobilized life, the funeral procession delivers the recently deceased by car to the gravesite. It is impossible to deny the omnipresence of the car in virtually all we do.The automobile’s transformation of the physical landscape has been equally profound - from the gigantic urban furniture of highways and expressways that cut through and between our cities, to the massive extraction industries operating in the hinterlands to provide the raw materials to build and fuel our vehicles. Where ship-building of earlier centuries saw widespread deforestation, modern transportation has required us to delve deep into the earth for material resources. Outside each of our homes is a roadway with moving cars, and each car is connected to multiple and distant regions spanning the globe, sometimes with devastating consequences1.The driver, the car and the asphalt; the truck stop and the tire yard; the love-affair and the addiction; car ads on TV; rubber trees and oil refineries; governance regimes and the newtechnologies of the road – together these comprise the 'system of automobility' (Urry, 2004).This system is an enormous complex, requiring untold effort and energy to construct and maintain, all undertaken in order to provide a medium for the flexible and smooth movement of the 'human-in-machine'.It is difficult to fathom the scale of the transformation that automobility has wrought when we consider that the humble debut of the ‘horseless carriage’ was little over a century ago. That wehave achieved so much so quickly can only attest to the popularity of the automobile. The car provides unmatched autonomy and freedom of movement for the individual. Where we associate freedom with the absence of constraints on our spatial mobility, the car has literally liberated the modern citizen.But despite the positive and popular aspects of automobility, the ascension of the automobile cannot be considered as wholly inevitable. As an enormous economic engine, and thusenormously profitable, automobility has many vested interests. Over the course of the 20thcentury, alternative transport options were displaced not only by marketplace victories, but alsothrough the concerted efforts of powerful players. There is evidence that shows, for example, that General Motors created demand for the automobile by purchasing and then either dismantling mass transit systems or converting them from electric to diesel power (Flink, 1988;Alvord, 2000). Manipulation to secure the dominance of the automobile was not only in the interests of heads of industry, but, as Virilio suggests, in the interests of government as well. The mass production and mass consumption of automobiles became an important social solution for the management of a restless and potentially dangerous population during the 1930s depression (Virilio, 1986).These vested interests and manipulations aside, the automobile owes much of its commercialsuccess to its immense popularity as a mode of transport. The automobile has been received so favourably and with such fervour, that the automobilization of North America (especially) over the last century has appeared as a natural progression. One of the likely reasons for this is theassociation between the automobile and freedom. Many commentators (notably Lomasky, 1997and Rajan, 2006), have remarked on the commonalities shared between automobility andliberalism: those qualities the car provides – freedom and autonomy – are precisely those idealsso valued by western-liberalism. Because the lifestyle-mode of automobility has succeeded in delivering those basic liberal ideals of freedom and autonomy through enabling unrestricted movement, the car has become thoroughly integrated into a discourse of natural rights.The freedom to drive has become an essentialized component of a set of taken for granted rights in liberal society. An important result is that liberalism is both achieved and reproduced through automobility. The liberating achievements of automobility, though, are not without costs. Many havecommented on the negative externalities associated with the dominant culture of the car. The deleterious effects on the urban environment, regional land-use, health and safety, the global aircommons, and the social spheres of family and community have all been well documented(Adams, 1999; Jacobs, 1964; Kunstler, 1994). The automobile has not only transformed our environment, it has also transformed our subjectivities, our ways of knowing and being in the city, our ways of communicating, and our relationships with others.The political costs associated with the automobilization of peoples and places are less understood. The dramatic social and environmental impacts of automobility must surely have a political analogue. It is with the political consequences of automobility that I am concerned with here. This thesis examines how automobility may enable or constrain political possibilities. How has the dominance of automobility prefigured what is appropriate, permitted and possible in our cities? This research looks at how the automobilization of both landscapes and lives has altered the political terrain and reconfigured possibilities for political action – asking: what political avenues have become blocked? Have any new routes opened up?
Mobilities are created, limited, explored and enacted through legal praxis that define what is proper behavior within the public sphere – laws concerning the regulation of bicycling can help to resist those limitations and create broader and more inclusive forms of mobility
Blickstein 2010(Susan “Automobility and the Politics of Bicycling in New York City” International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchVolume 34.4 December 2010 886–905)
Cresswell (2006: 735) has argued that mobilities are produced through the lawsuch that ‘particular modes of mobility are enabled, given license, encouraged, and facilitated, while others are, conversely, forbidden, regulated, policed and prevented’.Mitchell (1996: 129) shows ‘both how ideals of inclusion are compromised by the exercise of (legal) power, and how the use of space (either in conformance with lawsor transgressing them) in turn helps recreate the legal contexts within which public spaces reside’. Mobilities are similarly produced through law and actively reshaped through political struggle, which in turn has the potential to influence the legal construction of mobility as well as its material practice. Given the relationship among the regulatory frameworks, political struggles, and material practices surrounding mobility, it is important to explore how this plays out in specific places, particularly in light of recent policy efforts at the local scale, such as New York City’s adoption ofPlaNYC 2030, to move toward more sustainable mobility practices.The local scale is also particularly salient because most decisions about street design, land use policies, access and parking are made by local governments. In particular, policies to expand bicycle infrastructure are made and implemented locally. Additionally, while trafficlaws governing cycling are somewhat fragmented with both state level and local codesin effect, the policing of traffic in the United States is carried out almost exclusivelyat the local level. As a result, both the regulation and politics of cycling are quitelocalized.As the dominant mobility system in the United States, automobility has eroded the viability of other mobilities, including cycling and walking (Whitelegg, 1993; Shellerand Urry, 2000). Given that public streets are places for movement as well as part of the traditional public forum in which free speech and free expression rights have historically been ‘protected’ (Mitchell, 2003), the dominance of automobility in prioritizing the use of streets for maximizing the flow of motorized traffic has eroded the free speech/free expression potential of public streets. In response to automobility’s subordination of alternative mobilities, bicyclists in particular have created new forms of protest2,including Critical Mass bicycle rides.Started in San Francisco in the early 1990s as a monthly group bicycle commutethrough city streets, Critical Mass (CM) spread to over 300 cities worldwide in the decade that followed. In their purest form, CM rides are non-hierarchical, without any formal leaders or sponsor. CM rides are typically held on the last Friday of the monthas a sort of roving happy hour. Once a group is assembled at the ride’s starting point, bicyclists temporarily take control of the streets by stopping traffic at cross streets and proceeding en masse, typically without a predetermined route or destination. However, while automobility has spurred new forms of protest (Sheller and Urry, 2000; Furness,2005) like CM, what assumptions are embedded in the laws, regulations, legal interpretations and police practices governing protest, and how do these work together to erode the potential for alternative mobilities and citizenships to flourish? Mitchell(2005: 85) notes that ‘little research has been conducted into how laws — specificlaws, suites of laws, regimes of legal regulation — shape access to public space andtherefore the kinds of political actions that are either legally possible or just part ofnormal, everyday life’. At the same time, sociologists and geographers have identifiedan increase in the use of ‘zero-tolerance’ policing practices to control movementwithin public space (Mitchell, 2003; Vitale, 2005) and convey messages about thelegitimate uses (and users) of public space (Belina and Helms, 2003; Hubbard, 2004;McPhail and McCarthy, 2005; Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005; Herbert and Brown, 2006).Given the lack of scholarly research on how regimes of local regulation influence the politics of mobility and the noted increase in more aggressive policing practices, it is important to explore how these two processes work in tandem to support, or alternatively suppress, particular forms of mobility.Geographers have argued that not only are law and space mutually constituted, but that the enforcement and interpretation of laws are influenced by socially and culturally informed ideas about public space and spatial context (Herbert, 1997). WhileHerbert (ibid.: 40) acknowledges the importance of police discretion in lawenforcement, he asserts that ‘the law is a very real presence in ongoing policepractice . . . [and] is a primary means by which officers define a situation’. Thisargument that police exercise their discretion through the lens of the law assumes notonly that discretion is delegated down the chain of command, but that police know thelaws that apply in specific situations and enforce them accordingly. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, if we are to explore the interplay among laws, policing and space, the underlying sociospatial order to be maintained through regulatory practices needs to be examined (Fyfe, 1997). In this article, I explore how police practices work in tandem with laws, regulations and legal decisions to reinforce automobility as the dominant sociospatial order of public streets. The policing and regulatory frameworks that structure protest reinforce automobility as the dominant mobility and citizenship system. Scholars have noted how protest permits and policing tactics limit speech through exercising control over where parades or protests occur and, increasingly, the extent to which movement is allowed altogether (Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005; Vitale, 2005). By controlling the space of protest and therefore its visibility, these practices limit the enactment of particular identities, communities or visions to broader audiences(Marston, 2002). Focusing on the relevance of flow to social movement activity, Sheller (2001) calls for greater attention to the ways in which contemporary actors move through space during collective action and how that movement is enabled, circumscribed, and/or impeded. At the same time, scholars have identified two related trends in the policing of protest. The first is a shift from a more cooperative approach in which organizers and police agree on terms of engagement in advance of protest events (known as the ‘negotiated management’ style, see McPhail et al., 1998) to a more inflexible, top-down, aggressive approach in which police dictate the rules of engagement (‘command and control’ style, see Vitale, 2005). The second is an increase in groups that refuse to talk to the police and/or to apply for permits, attributed to the proscribed nature of protest under the ‘negotiated management’ approach (McPhail and McCarthy, 2005; Mitchell and Staeheli, 2005). The ‘command and control’ approach to policing protest is characterized by emphasis on the control of movement and access to protest sites, a disproportionate show of force, an inflexibility to changing on-the-ground conditions, the ticketing of minor offenses (particularly those that would typically be overlooked), and the use of force for even minor violations (Vitale, 2005). Vitale (ibid.) also notes how the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has eliminated discretion over ticketing and the use of force at lower levels of the police command hierarchy. However, the majority of scholarly work on the policing of protest and permit schemes has focused on very large demonstrations. To what extent has the shift to a more adversarial approach to policing protest been applied to smaller forms of protest, particularly mobile forms of protest? Additionally, how are local laws and rules governing protest being rewritten in an effort to codify this ‘command and control’ ideology, thereby suppressing not only the mobility of protest generally, but in the case of CM, the ability of bicyclists to experience and enact an alternative mobility vision?