The Intersection That Taught Me Critical Theory

Things like short walk timers and unplowed sidewalks are a form of inequality

Snow seems to inspire urbanists and land-use folks; it occasions a lot of commentary on the built environment. There’s the phenomenon of “sneckdowns”—when snow effectively reduces the width of a road, often revealing that all that width isn’t necessary and could be better utilized. There’s commentary like this, pointing out something that never occurred to me: a lot of what makes a snow day peaceful and quiet is the relative absence of motor traffic:

Vlado Vince @mejs

Incredible how quiet this city gets in a snow storm. Imagining how much healthier and enjoyable life would be here if we regularly had streets with less cars and more quiet.

And then there’s what inspired this headline: the fact that despite both being public rights of way, the sidewalks often don’t get plowed as reliably as the roads—or worse, the sidewalks are used as a dumping space for plowed snow.

There’s a tendency sometimes for urbanist/pedestrian advocacy language to sound vaguely Marxist, in the sense that it looks at motorists and pedestrians in the same frame as Marxists look at capitalists and workers (I wrote about that at more length here). When I first started following this stuff, honestly this turned me off a bit.

For example, sometimes you’ll see stuff like this, a genre of tweet I dislike a lot, usually where a wife uses her husband to make a political point at his expense:

Nicole McGrath🚶🏻‍♀️🚲🚌 @nicole_mcheinz

My husband has listened to me rant about unsafe drivers for years but now that we walk our kid to school & he has close calls firsthand, he rants w/ me. Even well-meaning people just don’t get how *constant* the threat is until they experience it themselves.

In the replies, someone compares this—not being able to understand how dangerous walking or biking can be, if they don’t regularly do it—to being a white person trying to understand being black in America.

Well, that isn’t going to do much to help make urban design issues palatable to certain conservatives. But I’ve come to see that this critical theory/quasi-Marxist frame of analysis is in fact a useful way of analyzing how people utilize the built environment. Because if people who walk and bike—who have a full right to the right of way—nonetheless find their infrastructure poorly maintained and their ease of travel and even their lives threatened, doesn’t that issue transcend mere individual choices?

In other words, this is what got me to stop seeing this kind of commentary as left-wing politicking and as to start seeing it as accurate and descriptive:

This might look navigable, which it is, if like me you’re young and able-bodied. Even then it’s a chore. But if you’re old, are in a wheelchair or using a cast, are walking somewhere with a stroller or young children, etc., it’s pretty much impassable. If this is not an issue for you, it’s probably because you don’t need to navigate this landscape. Walking infrastructure is poor, so those who have a choice avoid it, making the problem less visible to them, and also making it into something of a class issue.

In summer, the same thing happens except instead of snow, it’s overgrown weeds or tree branches cutting into the sidewalk. Here, for good measure, is a bit of sidewalk where the unlucky pedestrian is sandwiched between three lanes of cars breezing by at 50 miles per hour on one side, and a guardrail on the other.

Take a look at this. I’ve driven through the intersection below dozens of times. It’s a crowded, tricky, and not very fun to drive, and it’s also in the middle of an area where a lot of people walk to go shopping. This is the tragic result. These are not isolated incidents reducible to bad individual choices, whether by the motorist or the pedestrian; there’s a concerning year-over-year increase in pedestrian fatalities going on in this country.

Action Committee for Transit @actfortransit

Pedestrian Moges Alemnew Webete, age 70, was killed at New Hampshire Ave/Elton Rd in Hillandale on 1/17/22, 367 days after pedestrian Mark Henderson, age 66, was killed there. He was the 1st pedestrian road death & 6th #TrafficViolence death in Montgomery County, MD, in 2022.

I used to think that talking about these issues in the language of class or inequality was reading ideology into reality. But I now realize that if your only response to this is “people should watch where they’re walking,” you’re missing a lot of what is actually happening.

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Related Reading:

The Path of Most Desire

What If I Want to Walk?

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