18 January 2023. Roads | Men
Taking a more critical look at road decisions. // Andrew Tate is a symptom of too little feminism, not too much
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1: Taking a more critical look at road decisions
I’ve been reading Tom Standage’s book A Brief History of Motion (2021), and at some point I’ll do a review of that here. But the long story it tells, across the 20th century, is of the way in which the car industry colonised public road space, and largely excluded other road users from it.
And a bit more: although the ‘predict and provide’ approach that dominated road planning and building for 40 years or more is giving way to alternatives—‘decide and provide’, or ‘vision and validate’, depending on who you are reading—it’s remarkable how many road building decisions still look like ‘predict and provide’. Especially when ‘growth’ gets waved around in a vague way as a policy priority.
(Julian Opie (2002), ‘I dreamt I was driving my car (country road)’. (C) Julian Opie.)
So it’s good to note a report just out from the self-assembled Independent Road Scrutiny Panel, chaired by my sometimes colleague Glenn Lyons and funded by the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund.
I’ve not had much time to dive into the detail yet. But the panel asks seven questions about road investment decisions to which they think that the current investment frameworks are not paying enough attention. They’re good questions, and the executive summary summarises them well, so the first thing I’m going to do here is just pull these headline questions out of the report:
Decarbonisation: What would make us feel confident that decisions on future road investment, at both the scheme and aggregate level, are consistent with the legal obligation to deliver a credible pathway to the decarbonisation of the UK economy by 2050?
Biodiversity: What would make us feel confident that the policy imperative and opportunities to promote biodiversity enhancement are being recognised and pursued on their own merits, as opposed to biodiversity being ‘accommodated’ in pursuit of other goals?
Health and social impacts: How can we be persuaded that the health and social impacts of road spending experienced by individual people and communities are well understood and given sufficient weight at all stages of decision-making?
Maintenance and optimisation: What would give us confidence that appropriate financial provision is being made for operating, maintaining and optimising the performance of the existing road network?
Safety: What would persuade us that options for investing in improving road safety are being identified and weighed appropriately?
Consideration of alternatives: What would persuade us that road investment and expenditure decisions - at the scheme and programme level - are the result of serious consideration of a genuinely broad range of options and their merits?
Robustness of investment decisions in a changing world: What would persuade us that road investment and expenditure decisions are likely to represent value for money over the long term?
The first five of these are about the outcomes of road spending, the report suggests, and the last two about the investment and appraisal process, although to this untrained eye, #4, on maintenance and optimisation, seems to be part of the second group.
I’ve had the opportunity to chat briefly to Glenn about the report, and he tells me that these questions emerged inductively from the early discussions of the group, which comprises a reasonably diverse group of transport academics. The group was invited to nominate the areas where they thought existing investment policy might be under-powered, and the questions and related analysis emerged from this. There’s obviously a lot more detail about each in the report.
In some ways these questions also reflect the kinds of challenges that are currently being made in the courts to road investment decisions. The report picks up some of the recent history of this:
In the face of a climate emergency, the High Court ruled in July 2022 that the Government’s Net Zero Strategy was in breach of its own legislation and therefore unlawful. Road scheme proposals are facing legal challenges in relation to concerns over related carbon emissions and their wider health and social impacts.
In June the Committee on Climate Change published its 2022 ‘Progress in reducing emissions’ report in which it was critical of the lack of specific ambition of the Government to limit traffic growth. International and national commitments to tackle biodiversity decline are increasing. The UN biodiversity summit - COP15 - took place in December 2022 and almost 200 countries reached “a global commitment to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and to protect 30% of land and oceans by the same date”.
From a policy view, continuing court challenges are expensive in their own right, and doubly so because they require road programmes to be reassessed and then redesigned. It might be better to get it right first time by asking a broader range of questions that help to assess if road schemes are more coherent, not so say more compliant.
Since the benefits of road building are increasingly contested, and it is such an expensive business, taking a more rigorous view of it is probably a good idea, especially when we’re in a tight spending environment.
One of the problems here is that for all the noise about ‘decide and provide’, there’s a wide range of projections in the Department for Transport’s own work about the likely change in traffic miles over the next 30 years:
In December 2022 the Department for Transport published its National Road Traffic Projections based on its Common Analytical Scenarios. The projections depict possible change in total annual distance driven on roads in England and Wales between 2025 and 2060 ranging from eight per cent to 54 per cent.
Meanwhile, as quoted above, the Committee on Climate Change has criticised the government for being unwilling to limit traffic growth, even though it looks as if it is a necessary element in meeting net zero targets. So a little more policy directed towards to a bit more deciding and a bit less providing might be a good building block. We really ought to have a projection on reducing total distance driven, even if it’s only for evaluation purposes.
In the meantime, the Panel has the following recommendations:
[T]he Government should:
(i) publish a projection of the change in vehicle miles by carbon-emitting vehicles necessary or prudent to stay within an acceptable carbon reduction trajectory...
(ii) indicate with sufficient confidence how such change can be achieved in practice in the required timescale... and
(iii) make this analysis available as the basis for decisions on individual capacity-increasing road schemes.
Carbon emission reduction is certainly the most urgent task here. But looking abroad, safety seems to be moving up the agenda rapidly in other countries (there’s a big difference between ‘reducing casualties’ and ‘Vision Zero’, for example.)
And in terms of health, both the emissions issues associated with vehicles and roads, which won’t disappear with electric vehicles, and the adverse health effects from noise from them (ditto), are going to become more important. At the moment, their incidence falls on poorer and multi-ethnic communities. So this also becomes, quite quickly, an issue about social justice.
2: Andrew Tate is a symptom of too little feminism, not too much
The arrest of the unlikable Andrew Tate in Romania has spawned quite a lot of coverage, perhaps partly because of Greta Thunberg’s priceless put-down1 of a tweet by him boasting about the size of his luxury car fleet, that he had sent just days before his arrest:
A lot of this coverage has suggested that his pathological masculinity is a response to feminism, and this is one of those arguments that floats about these days without being examined too closely.
In The Guardian, Martha Gill decided to examine it.
She quotes Richard Reeves, who has a little bit of skin in this game, or at least a commercial interest, as the author of a recent book, Of Boys and Men:
“(Tate’s) appeal should… be seen as a leading indicator of some of the genuine disorientation being felt by millions of boys and men,” writes the author Richard Reeves, a feeling, he says, which results from “the extraordinary successes of the women’s movement”. Boys are being overtaken by girls in education. Men no longer know who they should be.
In her article Gill did a quick world tour. Her working hypothesis was that if modern misogynists such as Tate were a response to the “successes of the women’s movement,” then there should be more evidence of this kind of behaviour in countries where the women’s movement has made greater inroads.
(Angry Man, by Steve Rhode/flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Turns out, by her account, that it ain’t so.
Take a look at the world’s more entrenched patriarchies – those countries where men still unequivocally hold the whip hand – and you’ll find just as many angry young men flocking to misogynist ideologues at the merest glimmerings of feminist progress. Except they’ll be angrier. And there will be more of them.
In South Korea, for example, which has the widest gender pay gap in the world and a clear culture of harassment, the mildest of attempts to do anything about this in the 2010s
were enough to spark a huge anti-feminist movement among the country’s young men. In a 2019 survey, 60% of men in their 20s said discrimination against women was not a serious problem, while two-thirds thought unfairness to men was the big issue.
Slovakia, which ranks 24th out of 27 EU countries for gender equality,
is also the EU country with the highest proportion of young males opposed to advances in women’s rights.
In India, “where female infanticide is still a major problem and female literacy lags far behind”,
there is a thriving men’s rights movement, born out of opposition in 2000 to laws that protected women from violence over dowry disputes. Since then, young men have flocked to the movement, fuelled by what they see as “gender-biased laws”.
Gill thinks that there is a bit of a pattern here. She thinks that it is perceived unfairness that makes young men angry, and that this perception is fed directly by the sexist narratives in their societies. On this view, Tate is a product of the residual sexism of Western societies.
(Although she doesn’t mention it, I’d add that social media makes all of the Tates of the world more visible and seem a lot noisier, which is the other reason why his tweet at Greta Thunberg is salient here).
Anyway, she makes a sociological point here, that resistance to changing power within society is stronger earlier on:
Think of the reaction to anti-racist policies in the 1950s and then think of the reaction today, when most right-thinking people have been won over to the idea racism is deplorable. Tate is sexism’s last gasp. Not feminism’s bastard child.
And she also points out that the idea of a masculinity crisis is not new. In fact, there have been reports of crises of masculinity every time women have improved their position in society, going back to the 1880s. And the notion that young men lack for role models doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny either:
young males can still look ahead and anticipate a brighter future than young women. They can look to their 30s and 40s and anticipate parenting pay gaps in which they will probably be the victors; they can look at the tiny proportion of women at the top of most career ladders and predict a more successful 50s and 60s. Men do not, in fact, lack for role models: they have entire libraries, film archives and the leaders of almost every country and profession.
Meanwhile, there are still lots of reasons why young women might suffer from loss of self esteem, and these are amplified by the use of social media. Of course, Tate’s narrative appeals to young men:
like everyone else, young men are susceptible to the idea that they are special, deserving and that others are to blame for their problems... The west is still replete with sexist narratives. Tate is not a symptom of too much equality, but too much patriarchy.
Some of this made me think about the one of the arguments that’s made here sometimes, about the economic effects of the decline of manufacturing work in the West across the 80s and 90s, depending where you lived. That did have an effect on the economic prospects of a generation of blue collar male workers (typically without any form of higher education). But that was a crisis of class, not of gender.
j2t#416
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Apparently the fourth most-liked tweet in Twitter history.