Here’s a quick share of an article on how allies can turn into enemies in cities where they have bad street designs:

https://substack.com/embedjs/embed.js

To quote from the article:

“Car culture thrives when we’re too busy blaming each other to notice its grip. The more we quarrel over scraps of space, the safer its dominance remains.

People walking, people on bikes, people on scooters, people in wheelchairs, parents with prams, toddlers and children: we are natural allies. Our fight is not with each other, but with a system that has normalised highways in cities, lethal SUVs and endless parking as the status quo of urban life.

Culture shifts slowly; the design of cities even more stubbornly. But solidarity can be rebuilt, not through polite appeals, but by refusing the script. By exposing the blame games. By demanding that cars, not people, yield the space, the attention, the scrutiny.

Every quarrel between walkers and cyclists is a gift to car culture. The sooner we stop fighting each other, the sooner we can fight the real enemy.”

I must add though that there seems to be an assumption or presumption in the case of such articles that are written from the experiences of developed countries that urban planning is okay and the problem is with traffic engineering. Thus, the tendency is to make traffic engineers the bad guys here. Context is quite important because in developing countries, urban planning might be flawed from the start and the street designs are the product of poor planning. It is easy to miss that traffic engineers in a country like the Philippines do not necessarily dictate street design. It begins with the planners and architects who often are praised when things are done right but shift the blame to traffic engineers when their (planners’ and/or architects’) designs fail.

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