Book Notes

Veronica Davis starts her book with the question, "What do we owe each other?" Her eventual answer, emerging from the text of the book, is the foundation of her manifesto for community repair. The book's last line reveals the answer, and it is a worthy conclusion to the book, a capstone for the manifesto, and a challenge to the reader.

At the time of the book's publishing, Davis worked for Houston as director of transportation and drainage operations. Growing up in suburban New Jersey in a community with a pre-automotive streetscape (p. 1), She used the bus, walked to school, and played outside on playgrounds. She was one of the founders of Black Women Bike (p. 26), which grew out of the recognition of the absence of women of color in contemporary bicycling culture.

For Davis, "transportation is personal" (p. 15) because of family connections in different transportation roles, but also because the state of Louisiana took her mother's family home for a highway project. She could see that the decision makers--white men--destroyed homes, stores, and a community-built high school just four years after construction (pp. 19-21). The transportation field had an "Elephant in the Room: Racism and Lack of Diversity" (p. 61). Black communities did not have the right to vote until 1965 and became the path of least resistance for highway construction (p. 62). She observes how the transportation industry was "silent about equity until the mid-2010s" (p. 38).

The author's central aim in this book is to provide a framework to redefine equity in transportation. She challenges the idea that equity should be defined only in terms of a spreadsheet-style equal allocation of funds. This spreadsheet concept of equity is often illustrated by a graphic showing kids of varying heights standing on boxes, each box high enough to raise each child to be able to see the baseball game over a fence. While this graphic intends to define equity with good intent, Davis critiques it because it falls short of the full context. The bigger picture involves the need to define equity not just in terms of resource access, but in terms of prioritized treatment and restorative healing.

Davis suggests an analogy of equity modeled on a hospital emergency room intake triage (pp. 47-48), where the patient's condition sets the priority treatment based on need. Implicit in this analogy is an emphasis on immediate prioritized treatment, short-term stabilization, and long-term restorative healing. Equity, by this ER analogy, addresses immediate injustices, historic destruction, disinvestment, and disenfranchisement. This stabilization-restorative-healing model of equity challenges long-held priorities in zoning and car-oriented culture.

This ER approach has these guiding principles (pp. 47-48):

1. Community Engagement to involve all people, particularly those left out of decision-making and consideration.

2. Access to multiple, multimodal transportation options to gain community resources.

3. Data-driven prioritization for areas with the highest injuries.

4. Restoration of historical disinvestment to fund assistive and active transportation.

Davis' manifesto thus directly addresses community history with a path forward that recognizes harms, offers stabilization and healing, and uses restoration justice (pp. 49-50). Applied to transportation, it is a call to "address healing the damage done by cars" by working to "reframe our thinking from moving vehicles to moving people as well as bring focus to the off-peak times" (p. 63).

If there is a fault with Davis' treatment of transportation modes, it is that she over-apologizes for the accusation of waging a "war on cars." While she addresses an unseen reader she believes must be stating this (p. xvi, p. 55), Davis answers her concern later in the book when she points out that for those who have had unquestioned privilege for a long time, coming to terms with the inherent shared nature of all public space may seem an imposition. This sometimes uncomfortable need for a balance in transportation, for some, means a " war on cars" (p. 73).

The restorative healing model for inclusive transportation identifies the need for non-car mode spending. She describes public transit as a safe and efficient way to move volumes of people through a corridor (p. 73). Planning transportation can be disconnected from public engagement because the technical process operates separately from public engagement; planners and engineers often do not engage well with the public, and public comments can cause anxiety and fear in public decision-makers (p. 98).

The push-back and opposition to the idea of equity or inclusiveness in transportation is often organized and motivated by people with the desire to avoid change and preserve surface-level conveniences of absolute speed and car dominance of all public spaces (p. 136).

Davis shows how the values of decision-makers set how transportation networks work. More inclusive transportation networks may grow by examining the deeper, historical, and restorative needs for equity.

Related Links

• author site
• Goodreads page

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