42 Bromptons (folded) to one minivan

One of my guiding principles is to make “transportation” when used in city and other planning and projects include ALL the ways people get around urban areas rather than transportation signifying only cars and trucks and then struggling to include other sorts of mobility with special terms: public transportation/transit (buses mostly), non-motorized transportation (bike/ped), etc. You know, just like “astronaut” should be gender-neutral. The Complete Streets model is, of course, one strategy encompassing both a planning philosophy and a shift in language for describing streets and their functions.

In pursuit of better ways to talk about transportation and land use which might help get to better ways to design and build the infrastructure, I’ve stumbled upon a new favorite blogger – in addition to considerable expertise on transit and transportation planning, Jarrett Walker also provides thoughtful commentary on the finer points of language and rhetoric on his blog Human Transit.

Like this post: Avoiding car-centered language which is a tidy analysis of a City Transportation Language Policy memo from West Pam Beach, Florida.  The memo is refreshingly direct in identifying car-centered vs objective language:

Biased: The problem is speeding traffic. The traffic queued back for one mile.
Objective: The problem is speeding motor vehicles. The motor vehicles queued back for one mile.

 

Or, more simply If you mean “car,” say “car.”