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  • Exchanging Travel Speed:Time Politics in Mobility Practices
  • Peter Peters (bio)

Imagine the main hall of a traffic information center on a Wednesday morning. A high video-wall displays in schematic form the highways in a densely populated, urban region. The video screens are covered with green, yellow, orange, and red dotted lines, which indicate the average speeds of traffic on any given stretch of the region's highways. Green indicates that the traffic is flowing without any obstructions, while red indicates total gridlock. This morning one of the highways, say the A16, is colored red: a truck containing hazardous fluids has overturned on the roadway, causing a backup that has already grown to several kilometers. The national radio issues a warning to motorists to avoid this stretch of the highway—but backups have already begun to appear on all the roads that connect to the A16, and they soon grow to a staggering 400 kilometers. Meanwhile, the traffic manager sits stoically watching how the situation is developing on the screen. He explains that from the control room you can watch a traffic jam come into being, but you cannot intervene to solve it.

The red dotted lines on the video-wall in the traffic control room metaphorically represent congestion, scarcity, and stagnation. The hope of clear traffic flow, taken for granted in television commercials showing cars driving through deserted landscapes, will not be met today in this urban region. The traffic manager who is aware that there is a traffic jam, but who cannot do anything about it, is like many policymakers who have tried but failed to solve the [End Page 395] problem of traffic congestion. Since the early 1970s, the continuing growth of mobility, especially car mobility, has been seen as an important public issue in Western societies. Policy analyses explain the persistent character of the problem by the character of social dilemmas: what is good for the individual, the speed and luxury of personal transport, has to be weighed against the costs for society, such as environmental degradation, the detrimental economic effects that result from congestion, the deteriorating quality of life in urban areas, the fragmentation of the landscape, and traffic unsafety. Governments have formulated policies to break out of these dilemmas, but without reaching any sustainable solution.

If there is one common theme that underlies most of the policy proposals that have been put forward, it would be that the politics of mobility has been a politics of time gains. Building divided highways, ring roads, and bypasses around towns and villages, constructing new railroads and tunnels, constructing new runways at airports, as well as proposing the introduction of a national road-use tax have found their ultimate legitimization in the shortening of travel times. However multifaceted the debate may be, the primacy of shorter travel times as a main goal is not itself seen as an issue in the debate. Conversely, the "loss" of time, as an effect of traffic jams or delays in the national railroads, counts as an important topic that warrants ample attention in politics and policies. In political terms, shorter travel times count as the ultimate point of reference in judging the expected public support for a position and the feasibility of a proposed policy measure.

In this paper, I will analyze the politics of time in the arena of daily travel. Along with transportation economists, urban planners, social geographers, and traffic engineers, I argue that travel time is of pivotal importance for understanding the character of daily practices of travel. However, I will challenge the basic assumption underlying mainstream transportation research: the idea that the time spent traveling can be reduced to a neutral and measured unity that can be saved if we speed up. The core of my argument is that travel not only takes time, it also makes time. In examining everyday travel, I argue that travel time can also be understood as the product of situated transit practices. In this practice-oriented approach, travel is not reduced to getting from A to B as quickly and as smoothly as possible—the underlying assumption in mainstream transportation-research vocabularies on mobility—but instead, it is treated as a...

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