A couple of days ago, Essex Highways released a press release about their plans for rolling out electric vehicle charging in the county, and used the opportunity to ask people where they thought the chargers should go. Their survey is pretty minimal, but there was enough in it to raise my concern.
I’ve long been frustrated by the pavement parking of cars and how temporary road signs are placed on the footway rather than on the road they relate to. Cars already dominate urban space. In the rural town where I live, especially in the older parts built before the automobile, the streets are cluttered with private vehicles. The nearest pavement to my house is unusable – cars park on its full width to allow free access to vehicles on the road, so pedestrians have to walk on the road too. One of my neighbours has an EV, and the charging cable stretches from his boundary wall across the street to his car.
There’s a sci-fi saw, often attributed to Frederik Pohl, that ‘a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam’. You don’t have to be a futurist to see the trip hazard in the electric car rollout. Motornormativity —the assumption that car-centric infrastructure is the default—demands that any new space requirements for the automobile be carved from the realm beyond the car. When Essex Highways asked ‘where should the chargers go?’, the assumption is clearly that the person being asked is a motorist, an EV owner seeking on-street charging for their machine. The ‘where’ is not ‘where in the public realm, if anywhere, should we put this new chunk of motorcar infrastructure’, but ‘which streets shall we impose this pile of gubbins in?
Continue reading “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?”
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