Human Transit

should i call myself a "transit rider"?

Is there anything wrong with calling a group of people "transit users" or "riders"?  Is there anything wrong with calling yourself such a thing?

Michael Druker at Psystenance has been thinking about how we should talk about "people who travel by a certain mode." 

The fundamental attribution error leads us to interpret the behavior of others as reflecting something inherent about those people, more than is warranted. However, the language we use plays a role in that judgment as well. Our labels often describe who people are instead of what they’re doing, e.g. pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, or drivers. Each one of those terms gives us a category to which those people belong, making it easier to attribute their actions as reflecting some property of members of that category. That, in turn, makes it more difficult to progress towards a multimodal and sustainable transportation system.

I propose a different and deliberate use of language to mitigate this:

• Old: pedestrians. New: people on foot, or people walking.
• Old: cyclists. New: people on bikes, or people cycling.
• Old: transit users. New: people on transit.
• Old: drivers or motorists. New: people in cars, or people driving.

Sometimes we’re in cars, sometimes we’re on transit, sometimes we’re on bikes, and sometimes we’re on foot. But we’re all people, and our perspectives are much more similar than the facile modal categories lead us to believe.

Some people reading that are going to be reminded of the term "people of color," which rose in part from the ease with which, say, "black" as an adjective ("black people") tended to deteriorate into "black" as a noun ("the blacks").  "People of color" put the category term back where it belonged, in an adjective phrase, while also extending across all the non-white ethnicities.  Other "people who" and "people with" terms began to appear around the same time -- "people with AIDS" for example -- each addressing a situation where describing with a noun -- "AIDS victims," "AIDS sufferers," -- seemed to crush individuality and personhood. 

Of course, these terms were always easy to ridicule as "politically correct," partly because they were cumbersome.  The need for sheer brevity makes me doubt I will fully embrace "people cycling" as a fully satisfactory synonym for "cyclist," though when speaking I do look for ways to keep the focus back on "people" rather than on the technology of transport they're using. 

Still, Michael is basically right.  Reducing mode choice categories to nouns -- cyclists, motorists, riders, etc -- is potentially divisive.  These categories seem to give us the clarity we need to do any thinking at all, but clinging to them can blind us of all the ways that two cyclists can be different, and all the ways that this cyclist and that motorist may agree on far more than two cyclists do.  Ultimately, the only way to combat this is to notice it, and point out alternate ways of categorizing that can help open minds.  For example, you might think of "people who, in their ideal world, would like to get around on transit."  Some but not all existing transit riders are in that group.  But so are some motorists.

It's also worth noting that we don't just apply these reductive categories when describing others, we may also apply them to ourselves.  (The comments on Michael's post explore this in some detail.)  A "transit users group" may sound like a good political strategy, but if you identify yourself too much as a "transit user," and build your understanding of politics around that identity, you risk excluding the views of current non-transit users and thus prematurely narrowing your potential community of interest.  (The San Francisco Transit Riders Union, for example, embraces "current and future riders.")  Lots of people care about transit, and they want to be counted, too. 

the most important blog post you'll read this year ... (updated!)

... may well turn out to be this one, by Michael Druker at Psystenance.  It's about a conceptual error that lies at the root of a lot of bad transit planning decisions, an error made, at one time or another, by most citizens, many political leaders, and more than a few professionals.  It's called (not very effectively) the Fundamental Attribution Error.  It happens when we say or believe statements of the form:  "My decisions are based on my situation, but other people's choices are based on their culture, the kind of people they are." 

[Situation includes relevant factors that the person can be consciously aware of, including their location, destination, available infrastructure, available vehicles, special needs (wheelchairs, traveling with children, etc) and the relative value of time and money.]

Psychologists have observed that in general, humans tend to overestimate the rationality of their own decisions, and underestimate the rationality of other people's.  We tend to think that we make rational choices ourselves, but too often, it's easy to form stereotypes about people whose different situation has caused them to make a different choice, and before long you're hearing about categories like "the kind of people who ride the bus" as opposed to "people who ride rail" as opposed to "lycra cyclists" and "the car culture."  The mistake here is to explain people's behavior by assigning them to a cultural category, rather than by understanding their situation.

We've all heard the term "car culture" about places like Los Angeles.   I've always hated the term, but now I understand why: it's an expression of the attribution error.  When we say that Americans drive because they're a car culture, we imply that that the choice of most Americans to drive isn't a rational one, in light of each person's situation, and therefore requires a cultural explanation.  

But in the places most Americans live, given the current economics of driving, and transit options being as they are, the decision to drive is rational for most of the people making it.   If most Americans are in situations where driving is the rational choice, we don't need the "car culture" to explain their behavior, and we can see a clearer path to changing it, by helping to change people's situations. 

Conversely, car advocates who cite current car use as evidence that people want to drive cars are also making the attribution error; they're implying that everyone who rationally chooses to drive is culturally committed to driving.  That's wrong; some of the people driving cars would like to be in a situation where they didn't have to.

That's why I never talk about a need to "change the culture."  Culture does change over time, but by its nature it also resists change, because it's made up of deeply held feelings and attachments that most people don't want to recognize and critique in themselves.  Nobody likes being told that their behavior is the result of their culture.  So defining America's car dependence as cultural is not a route to changing it.  In fact, it plays right into conservative critiques of urbanism as social engineering.

The fundamental attribution error has deep philosophical roots.  Jacques Lacan argued that the crucial stage in the development of a small child is the moment when he looks in the mirror for the first time and sees how he resembles the other people in his world.  At this moment, he discovers that he is the same kind of being as the people he sees.  Until that moment, a baby is a consciousness interacting with sense perceptions, attaching to some and not others, but with no ability to imagine that there are other nodes of consciousness, similar to his own, all around him.

We all get through this development stage imperfectly.  Often it's said of a very arrogant person that "other people just aren't real for him."  Categorizing others too readily is just a retreat to the pre-mirror state of the child, a state in which I am real and everyone else is just stuff happening around me.  Categorizing is completely understandable:  When we are functioning in a complex society, we need ways of identifying threats, just as our ancestors on the African savanna did, so we tend to put others in large mental categories that help us make sense of them.  Racism arises from that impulse, but so do categories like "the type of people who ride the bus."  As with racism, we only get beyond it with some hard work in taking control of our own mental processes, and remembering the lesson of the mirror stage.

(This post was updated and expanded on March 16 at 11:00 PM Sydney time, in response to early comments.)

Further update, March 17:

This may be one of the most misunderstood posts in the short history of Human Transit, and I take responsibility for that if that is the case.  At the risk of getting deeper into the mire, let me expand a little in response to some of the critical comments and commentary to date.

First, there's been much discussion of sociology in the comments, so let me clarify, as several commenters also have:   Fundamental attribution error (FAE) is psychology, not sociology.  It describes a common mistaken view of individuals, described from the perspective of their own consciousness.  For that reason, its reference to "situation" includes just the data available to the conscious mind, not including unconscious motivations such as personality or cultural conditioning.  (FAE doesn't imply that those unconscious motivations don't exist, only that we tend to overstate their influence in describing the actions of others.)

My description of it here is not an accusation toward anyone.  I'm saying only that psychology has found that a tendency toward attribution error is a feature of human minds in general.  This does not imply that anybody's motivations as totally irrational or totally rational, nor does it require us to speculate about how much irrationality is cultural -- a question that really would lead into sociology.   It observes only that average humans are likely to overestimate the rationality of their own choices and underestimate the rationality of other people's.

Racism is a much more vivid example of the same kind of phenomenon, so it may be useful as an analogy.  (To be excessively clear, I am not equating racism with attribution bias, nor am I implying that one is as bad as the other.  I'm observing that they are biases of the same kind -- different sizes but the same shape -- so that the workings of one can be understood by analogy to the workings of the other.)

Psychology finds that many people who are not racist in daily life will still make racial distinctions in quick-response tests where there is no time to think.  (Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink discusses an example of this in detail.)  The instinct to judge others based on categories of appearance such as race is understandable if you consider the needs under which the human brain evolved.  Like other mammals, primitive humans had no choice but to make quick friend-or-enemy judgments based on appearance and behavior.  Racism is one effect of that same instinct still working under the surface in modern brains.  Like aggression, racism arises from an instinct that served our evolutionary ancestors' needs but is a problem in modern society, and that has not had time to evolve away.  This suggests that those of us who see ourselves as not racist are putting a certain effort into compensating for the mind's primitive instinct to categorize other people racially.  I'm certainly aware that I'm doing that.

The FAE demands the same kind of awareness and compensation.  That's all I'm saying.  So if you have a thought of the form "those people's behavior is irrational" or "those people are behaving that way because of their culture," just notice that this is the kind of view that the human mind tends to exaggerate, so give that thought some extra scrutiny before you get too attached to it.  In our conscious management of our ideas, attribution error implies that we should try to consciously err on the side of assuming that other people's behavior is rational. 

Someone with poor hearing in one ear will often learn to turn their head slightly to compensate when listening to someone.  Attribution error implies that our brains have a similar limitation, a bit of deafness to the possible rationality of the actions of others, one for which we need to compensate.