Motonormativity: How social norms hide a major vehicle use public health hazard
By Ian Walker School of Psychology, Swansea University ; Alan Tapp Bristol Business School, University of the West of England; Adrian Davis Bristol Business School, University of the West of England Transport Research Institute, Edinburgh Napier University
Introduction
Many rural shire residents with lived experience as pedestrians, cyclists, livestock owners and nature protection enthusiasts of unsafe road speed limits, vehicle noise pollution, and dust and greenhouse gas air pollution now have an explanation for why their appeals and petitions to shire bureaucrats to take action usually fail. It’s called the Motonormativity syndrome practiced by vehicle speed limit policy makers , engineers and ecologists when asked to consider the consequences of motor vehicle driving on other members safety using the road, on pollution and on wildlife welfare. Submissions and petitions to councils surrounding these issues on rural roads outside town boundaries usually go answered or answered along the lines ‘it is not in our jurisdiction to act it’s up to the state Transport Department’. So the residents are compelled to wait for the next frightening close collision call or collision, to put up with the noise and air pollution, and smell the rotting wildlife carcases. This article explains how the Motonormativity phenomenon has become part of most road safety bureaucrats way of thinking. – Patrick Francis.
Summary
Decisions about motor transport, by individuals and policy-makers, show unconscious biases due to cultural assumptions about the role of private cars – a phenomenon we term motonormativity (also called Institutional Car-ism’ or Car Blindness). The concept describes how car dependency is created and reinforced, and how the health hazards of cars are downplayed and obscured. It also provides a framework to describe social privilege conferred onto motorists.
We suggest that this motonormative thought style is as endemic amongst government and the medical profession as in the general population. This means core public health and sustainability issues are being systematically neglected by policy makers. It seems that normal judgement criteria can indeed be suspended in the specific context of motoring. People within policy setting roles need to recognise their own unconscious biases, to work towards providing objective judgements of the consequences of vehicle travel and to build these into their day-to-day work.
The motonormativity phenomenon
Here in the United Kingdom, like in many societies around the world, we are in the midst of environmental degradation and no fewer than three parallel health epidemics thanks to the easy hypermobility afforded by private motor vehicles. We have an epidemic of collisions, with 1752 deaths and 25,945 serious injuries in 2019, the last year before the Covid pandemic; we have an epidemic of physical inactivity – responsible for 22-23% of coronary heart disease, 16-17% of colon cancer, 15% of diabetes, 12-13% of strokes and 11% of breast cancer – despite 24% of car trips being under 2 miles and so mostly amenable to walking or cycling; and we have an epidemic of pollution, with vehicle exhaust fumes causing cancer, heart disease and diabetes at such levels that estimates have put the UK air pollution death toll at 40,000 per year. Even a future switch to electric vehicles would address only one of these three epidemics. It is clear we must acknowledge a simple fact: transport issues are not just environmental issues: they are also inherently public health issues.
A society’s ability to tackle any public health or sustainability issue appropriately will depend on people at all levels – from policy makers to medical practitioners to the general public – being able to judge the situation rationally and objectively. Overestimating or underestimating the seriousness of an issue can lead to panic or complacency respectively. We suggest that, in the specific context of individual motor transport, we have a cultural inability to think objectively and dispassionately.
This arises because of shared, largely unconscious assumptions about how travel is, and must continue to be, primarily a car-based activity. We label this phenomenon motonormativity. This term is chosen to draw parallels with other problematic cultural expectations such as heteronormativity. In heteronormativity, majority heterosexual people automatically, but inappropriately, assume all other people fit their own categories and thereby fail to accommodate the needs of minority groups. In extreme cases, such normalities can lead to minority groups being obliged to live according to the practices of the majority even when this goes against their will.
Motonormativity, in a similar way, leads to such issues as town planning predicated on the assumption that access will be by car, and to the minority who choose not to use cars being forced to accept the harms arising from other people’s motoring whether they like it or not. Critically, at the level of the individual, we suggest motonormativity leads people who are thinking about the specific topic of driving systematically to suspend the ethical and moral judgements that they would apply in other contexts. This sort of double-standard is at the core of the public health challenge we wish to raise here.
One place we can easily see motonormative double-standards is the widespread acceptance of law-breaking… provided it is law-breaking by drivers. Speeding, for example, is an illegal behaviour practised by most drivers that is widely indulged by the public, the media, and the justice system. The treatment of speeding and dangerous driving can be contrasted with other infringements of law that are much more socially disapproved, such as littering, graffiti, public drunkenness, or street-noise (unless that noise comes from motor vehicles, of course).
But if motonormativity were just the casual acceptance of illegal and antisocial behaviour we would be writing for a criminological audience; perhaps more serious is that motonormative thinking is also endemic in the medical and sustainability worlds and their surrounding policy spheres. It is at the root of how we address vulnerable road user injury by asking what the victims were wearing rather than why they were expected to mix in the first place with vehicles carrying thousands of times more kinetic energy; it is why we permit essential facilities to be placed in out-of-town locations when millions of UK homes have no car.
In Great Britain in 2015, 84% of cars were found to be exceeding the limit on 20 mph (30 kph) roads and 52% of cars were speeding on 30 mph (50 kph) roads.
It why smoking inside cars to protect children’s health while ignoring the toxins and particulates inside those same cars from engine emissions; and (to return to public health) a motonormative mindset is why general practitioners routinely ask their patients about diet, smoking and drinking, but never about how they travel – despite us long knowing that this is a better predictor of early mortality.
National opinion poll
First, we wish more systematically to demonstrate our claim that normal standards of judgement can be altered in the specific context of motoring. Using a national opinion poll with a large sample, we devised five simple questions about motoring and then changed one or two key words in each so that we had a parallel set of questions where the underlying principle was identical, but now referred to a non-motoring context. If people’s judgements were made by rationally applying general principles, the change in wording should not matter and the motoring and non-motoring contexts should be judged equivalently. But if people treat motoring differently from other topics, we should expect systematic differences when judging
2157 members of the UK public (1025 male, 1132 female) participated in this study. Full or provisional driving licences were held by 1828 participants and 316 had no licence. When asked about personal driving, 1509 said they drove a motor vehicle once a month or more and 648 did not.
Five questions
Five questions were constructed to ask about facets of motoring behaviour. These were chosen to cover a range of motoring issues in a way that allowed one or two key words to be changed to alter the subject of the question to a non-motoring domain. The questions were initially selected by the authors to cover a range of health and risk issues related to driving, and the question forms were refined in discussion with the opinion pollsters.
The responses to the motor and non-motor forms of the questions are shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 – Agreement with motor (N = 1053) and non-motor (N = 1104) question forms. People responding ‘Don’t know’ have been omitted (31 or fewer people per question)
Consequences
Our survey showed that people can go from agreeing with a health or risk-related proposition to disagreeing with it simply depending on whether it is couched as a driving or non-driving issue. In the most dramatic case, survey respondents felt that obliging people to breathe toxic fumes went from being unacceptable to acceptable depending on whether the fumes came from cigarettes or motor vehicles.
It is, objectively, nonsensical that the ethical and public health issues involved in forcing non-consenting people to inhale air-borne toxins should be judged differently depending on their source, but that is what happened here. It seems that normal judgement criteria can indeed be suspended in the specific context of motoring, as we suggested.
Prentice and Miller argue that the ease with which a behavioural phenomenon can be triggered is an index of its true magnitude. The ease with which effects appeared in this study was striking: in the final question the UK public went from 17% agreement to 75% agreement just by changing two words in the question whilst leaving its underlying principle unchanged.
It is notable that in most cases, people responded the same whether or not they were themselves drivers. This implies that motonormative thinking is not just the assumption that everybody else is like oneself; rather, the results are consistent with an even more extreme situation in which minority non-drivers have internalised the mindset of the majority drivers.
Given all this, we believe the phenomenon seen here requires a psycho-socio-cultural explanation if we view individual psychology as part of a wider framework of cultural and social influences. Such an approach fits closely with the Social Ecological Model, first outlined in the context of child development by Bronfenbrenner. This account proposes that there are multiple layers of influence stretching out from individuals, through families (micro system) to wider societal structures (meso system), physical infrastructure (exo system) and national cultures (macro system). Adapted to the context of driver behaviour, the model is illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2 – The social ecological model, representing the multiple influences on an individual, presented here in the context of driving behaviour influences .
Driving influences versus reality
Figure 2 illustrates a mutually reinforcing multi-level series of influences that shape an individual’s views on driving, and thereby create a motonormative mindset.
Specific examples might include:
• Micro system: Children observe that cars are commonly used even for short journeys; they are given toy cars to play with; they absorb their parents’ driving styles through observation.
• Meso system: Speeding, aggression and mobile phone use observed on the road are internalised through descriptive norm processes .
• Exo system: Transport systems make car use easy, even for short journeys, by absorbing externalities, subsidising parking, providing priority over other modes, providing ineffective public transport alternatives; traffic safety laws are unambitious and poorly enforced; car design facilitates and normalises distracted driving (mobile communication devices and entertainment) and potentially makes spaces outside the car feel threatening.
• Macro system: Discourses and narratives about driving are shaped through representations in news media (which under-report traffic crashes and present them as less important, and less preventable, than injuries from other sources); through advertising, which substitutes the reality of driving (congestion, unpredictable arrival times) for images of pleasure and control; and through entertainment, which promotes dangerous and antisocial driving through the imagery of heroes in films (James Bond) and television (Top Gear) .
The specific influences outlined above will vary from one person to another, but the social ecological approach provides a general account of how, as a result of the interplay between individual psychology and wider social and cultural influences, motonormativity might be created and maintained such that our respondents applied different standards to driving and other activities that are objectively comparable.
Normalisation of deviance
Naturally, we are not the first to view these issues from the outside; other people have commented how, were cars invented today, no device killing 35 people in the UK each week would be permitted in our streets, however convenient. So another way to look at what we are talking about here is as an example of normalization of deviance over the past century – or, in more colourful terms, we find ourselves in the same sort of uncomfortable state as the slowly boiled frog.
Figure 3 “Our call to action now is for decision makers to become aware of their own individual and institutional unconscious biases and how these have health and quality of life implications for others.” Photos: Moffat lane Romsey just 30m outside the town boundary is a default 100km/h speed limit local government managed road shared by vehicles and pedestrians – Patrick Francis
It is because every Westerner alive today knows only a world where motoring’s problems are the norm that is it so difficult to see with fresh eyes the issues with, for example, a system that demands one hundred pedestrians yield to one motorist, or with allowing children to have toy cars whilst prohibiting toy guns, or with the first author’s GP assuming he will drive to a pharmacy only 400 metres away…
Our point is not just that the cultural lens of normalized car-centric thinking exists, but also that it specifically masks environmental and public health crises like those outlined at the start of this article by making the public and the people who look after the wellbeing of the public apply inappropriate judgement criteria in areas with profound health implications. We provided national-scale data from a large sample because it was important that the existence and power of the phenomenon be shown as clearly as possible.
Our call to action now is for decision makers to become aware of their own individual and institutional unconscious biases and how these have health and quality of life implications for others. We each need to ask whether the criteria we use when making a decision about transport would be applied equally if we were looking at any other domain. For example, would we teach children that it is their responsibility to dress properly to protect themselves from sex abusers, as we currently teach them it is their responsibility to protect themselves from dangerous drivers? Obviously such reflexivity becomes increasingly important as we move from individuals to policy makers.
Just as it was only through recognising shared unconscious prejudices that the UK’s Metropolitan Police began to address its problem with ‘Institutional Racism’, national-level institutions – perhaps above all the government and the medical profession – need to address what our colleague Charles Musselwhite once termed the ‘Institutional Car-ism’ underpinning their own thinking.
Progress will start to be apparent when car adverts carry ‘Please use responsibly’ warnings like adverts for alcohol or gambling, and when pedestrian crossings are redesigned so that walkers no longer need to stop and ask permission to cross a road on which inactive and polluting motorists are automatically given priority. The extent to which these suggestions currently sound outlandish is an index of motonormativity, revealing the extent to which our society is failing to apply objective and dispassionate risk analyses.
Our specific call to government and medical professionals is to begin (a) auditing all decisions from the viewpoint of a person who does not drive and (b) incorporating the harms from motoring – particularly physical inactivity and pollution – into day-to-day practice.
Addressing (a) will involve, amongst other things, viewing decision panels that include no active-travel commuters with the same suspicion we are beginning to apply to all-male or all-white decision panels; it might also involve seeking systematically to recast all transport decisions into non-transport parallels, like we did in our survey, to ensure the underlying principles are viewed objectively.
Addressing (b) will include treating inactivity arising from over-reliance on the car as a medical problem, somewhat akin to prescription drug addiction (wherein patients similarly cause themselves long-term harm through their over-use of a helpful agent); lobbying for reductions in traffic toxin and noise emissions; and scrutinising patients’ transport behaviours with the care currently given to arguably less harmful lifestyle choices like alcohol and tobacco use.
Conclusions
Our ability to address the multiple harms arising from over-use of private cars will be determined by our ability to judge these objectively. In this study, a large representative sample of the UK public judged questions entirely differently depending on whether they were framed as driving issues or non-driving issues, even though the underlying principles were identical in both cases.
This provides evidence of how driving automatically receives systematically biased treatment across society so as to favour the needs of a majority – an effect we term motonormality. We argue that our results arose because individuals have their views about motoring shaped over their whole lifespan by a multi-level series of external influences ranging from observing their parents’ driving while growing up to mass-media discourses about how it is not only normal but even desirable to drive short distances in antisocial styles.
Finally, we suggest that this motonormative thought style is as endemic amongst government and the medical profession as in the general population. This means core public health and sustainability issues are being systematically neglected by policy makers. People within such roles need to recognise their own unconscious biases, to work towards providing objective judgements of the consequences of travel and to build these into their day-to-day work.
Sources: The above article is an edited version Motonormativity: How social norms hide a major public health hazard, December 2023 by Ian Walker et al University West of England Bristol.
