Noise, Overt Aggression and Intimidation in Vehicle Design and Vehicle Operator Behavior as Ethnic Cleansing (Episode 5)
In which we discuss 'imposing and angry people exploiting a power dynamic' and those who are complicit
Here’s part 5 of an open-ended series about ethnic cleansing in America through the lens of zoning. parts 1-4 focused on zoning, today and part 5 is shifting focus to ‘mobility infrastructure’, the other side of the zoning ‘coin’.
It’s generally considered ‘not good’ to have intrusive thoughts. It’s the opposite of having your attention stably directed on a task, experience, or interaction. The internet says:
Intrusive thoughts seem to come out of nowhere. These thoughts and images are unwanted and often unpleasant. The content can sometimes be aggressive or sexual, or you could suddenly think about a mistake or a worry.
Let’s scope that down to something that matches something I’ve observed, in the last few years of my life, living near and not near (and sometimes VERY NEAR) a variety of roads:
Intrusive thoughts seem to come out of nowhere. These thoughts and images are unwanted and unpleasant. The content can be aggressive, and/or you could suddenly find yourself worrying.
Through the lense of intrusive thoughts, we’ll discuss three things:
intrusive thoughts
emotional contagion
vehicle noise
What is being intruded upon
First, before discussing intrusive thoughts, it’s worth a meditation on what, precisely, is being intruded upon.
Often, peace and quiet is a useful precondition for a certain form of peaceful thought. In peaceful sand safe-enough environments (like the apartment building we’re about to talk about) there might still be noise, of course, but it’s the ‘noise’ of wind and birds human voices.
I used to live here:
Here’s what google maps would show as my view:
Here’s a photo from the porch balcony:
And here’s two photos looking back at the apartment, from the other side of the pond:
Look at all the nature, the greenery. It was so silent. Sometimes the geese would honk a lot, and it would be disruptive, but it was far preferable to racing engines and cars driving by at 50 mph.
Here’s what it sounds like on a windy day:
Note the silence, and lack of vehicles moving in the visual field.
When I say it was deeply silent, and sufficiently silent, please believe me. It wasn’t perfect, but for a bunch of simple obvious reasons related to acoustics, mass, dampening, lines-of-sight, and refraction, it was incredibly peaceful.
The time of my life I spent living at the above apartment has contrasted with the time of my life that I’ve been awash in vehicle engine noise most of the waking hours of the day, and if I *wasn’t* being washed in vehicle noise, I knew it was but a temporary reprieve.
The vehicle noise for those who live near-enough to roads is virtually identical with intrusive thoughts, and given that American municipal planners claim the roads are under their responsible management, I lay the blame and responsibility for this particular form of pollution at the feet of those planners.
Observed Aggression
Now, lets talk about living adjacent to a road. The pain of inadequately managed roads boils down to various versions of “both constant and sporadic assaults on the senses and physical safety.”
Let’s detangle three things:
roads
the vehicles that drive on them
the people that operate those vehicles.
We’re going to talk about trucks, and aggression & intimidation as a feature of a product.
Please note that the Ford F-150 is the most popular vehicle being bought today (at like ~$50k!!!) but there’s plenty of non-ford pickups being sold.
First, spend a moment skimming the following excellent article.
About Face: Death and Surrender to Power in the Clothing of Men (by Nate Powell)
A line from the article is worth mentioning in the context of personal vehicles. obscure personal recognition and minimize accountability.
Now, next time you’re driving/walking about, look at the passing vehicles, and evaluate them on some of the following attributes:
front, side, rear window tint/’blacked out’ anything.
headlights: how high off the ground/how bright/incandescent/LED?
could it be said be said that the vehicle has a ‘stance’?
nationalistic/vigilante/zombie/military adornments/stickers?
loud/polluting? Especially if it’s intended to make any kind of noise. Has the exhaust been ‘tuned’, or could the engine be said to have a “roar”, or something “throaty”?
naked, overt references to power and colonialism (‘tremor’, ‘raptor’, “max”, “super”, “-est”, “dominator”, “opposer”, “100”, “200”, 2500, x, trailboss, king, escape, explorer, ram, sierra, tundra, colorado, yukon, lariat, tahoe, trailblazer, cherokee, renegade, gladiator)
Many vehicle names/design choices give a nod to a child's rejection of communication, reciprocity, and legal accountability.
None of these attributes are even affectable by the person driving the car, other than being possible one-time decisions.
Here’s a range of in-the-moment decisions that vehicle operators make continuously, which contributes to interacting with the above attributes:
“tailgating”
choosing a wide or narrow turn radius (at any speed)
changing/not changing lanes
maintaining distance between vehicles
how quickly one gets up to speed, at what speed one coasts
deferring (or not) in myriad ways to others
where the head is pointed
sunglasses, or not
gestures, or not
present vehicle speed
gunning the engine
There’s a lot more I could add, but all of those decisions pretty casually interact with the vehicle attributes in such a way that with some regularity, even if you’re completely emotionally regulated, if you’re near-enough to a road, you’ll regularly witness certain kinds of interactions tainted by what feels like aggression.
Witnessing displays of aggression is close-enough to ‘emotional contagion’, which is indistinguishable from ‘forcing’ an intrusive thought into someone else’s consciousness.
There’s a neat book titled The Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which says, among other things, “a strategy by which emotionally immature people seek to regulate their emotions is to make other people feel more like what they feel inside, because then what they feel is ‘more normal’."
Thus, when emotionally immature people ‘punish’ someone else on a road, sometimes the explicit intent is no more and no less than to spread their misery.
And and you witness it, your psyche is ever so slightly ‘flicked’, and nudged towards a disregulated state. obviously.
To live near a road, then, is to open your senses to the constant assault of emotionally immature, disregulated people aggressing against others.
You might say “Josh, fine, what do you think SHOULD be done? If not ‘one more lane’, what? And ‘snap fingers achieve Tokyo-level rail network’ is not an option I want to waste time talking about.”
Stay tuned for the next episode.
My complaints of how roads intrude upon one’s thoughts, in a way that supports population displacement, isn’t limited just to the emotional contagion aspect of seeing overt violence and aggression. It’s also inclusive of the regular emissions byproduct of cars, even when chosen with non-aggressive styling/language and being driven non-aggressively.
Vehicles are loud
Noise from engines. Noise from brakes. Noise from the rolling tires. (If you live in places that sometimes get cold, you might know the distinctive sound of snow tires). Nice tires are quiet. Cheap/industrial tires are loud. Heavy vehicles hit bumps in the road with force. Traffic lights encourage a braking/racing cadence, and heavy vehicles work hard to get up to speed.
Even an all-electric vehicle like a Tesla generates plenty of rolling/wind noise, and if there’s imperfections in the road surface (there are imperfections in the road surface) it generates noise ‘hitting’ those imperfections.
You might drive a quiet vehicle, but there’s enough people who don’t. You might be a conscientious driver, but enough people are not. When you live near the right road, you see the same people, know how they move. You can feel the contempt, pouring from them.
This effect, both of the witnessed emotional violence, and consistent, passive outpouring of noise, is extremely noxious and disruptive.
I dislike that when I bring up this class of concerns, this entire class of concerns is ignored by the responsible parties, because if the parties perceived the concerns as legitimate, they would theoretically become responsible for the harms, and american traffic planners stringently resist personal culpability for the harms caused by road networks.
Vehicles generate tremendous visual clutter, especially via reflective surfaces
I once worked in an office in downtown Denver, and light from turning vehicles would sometimes spray across my face, like someone flashing a signal mirror at me, at certain times of day. It would be very disruptive, and I’d have to shut blinds, or leave my desk and sit elsewhere.
It would be worst when the sun was at a certain spot in the sky, and it would be reflected worst from certain spots on the street.
Where I sit right now, typing these words, as cars pull in and out of a parking lot across the street, sunlight bounces off a window and quite brightly bounces into my visual field. I’m inclined to close the blinds to soften the disruption, but I like the sunlight.
Cars obstruct vision. There’s plenty of places I’ve been that look better during non-peak hours, or when it’s stuffed to the gills with stopped traffic, it’s just… sad, to look at. Lots of the visual field, in America, in a city, if it extends more than a short distance, intersects a road which is drenched in vehicle traffic.
Nearly every view in America is cluttered with personal vehicles, either parked or moving.
Vehicles generate brake dust, tailpipe emissions, and tire rubber
In addition to the noise, vehicle traffic is a gift that keeps on giving. Not only does the noise and aggression cause a worsened emotional state, but the other forms of emmissions are well known to contribute to all sorts of illnesses, degeneration, and sadness.
You know how ‘poor kids have higher rates of asthma’ or ‘african american populations have higher rates of asthma’ or whatever?
It’s because the concentrated air pollution ends up coating the lungs of those who live/walk adjacent to the roads, and Americans have worked a long time to make it overwhelmingly likely that the people who walk and live near these roads are poorer.
Who lives/walks near the worst arterials? People of the global majority, because white people in the 50s did everything they could to make the lives of non-white people difficult, and everyone knew roads were a great way to do it!
Since ‘aggressive intrusive thoughts’ are certainly a thing you could tell a psychiatrist about, and they’d write it in your record, it feels noteworthy that to live within ear shot or eye shot of a road, your nervous system is being continuously exposed to major and minor acts and threats of violence, and one’s well-being is absolutely degraded by this.
If this cost could be tabulated in dollars, it would be substantial. At least some of the rate of America’s consumption of anti-depressants is related to ameliorating the psychological damage of ‘car culture’.
It is, ahem, profoundly miserable, to repeatedly witness incidents of open violence and near-violence.
If you’re having trouble imagining why someone could see the roads as dangerous and passing vehicles as often-enough ‘intrusive’, consider searching youtube or whatever today’s version of liveleak is for ‘Pedestrian vs Car Fatal Crashes Compilation’ or ‘car accidents’. I find such videos generally horrifying and tragic, even though the videos often-enough celebrate the gore.
For the last several years of my life, there’s been like a 1000x increase in the amount of vehicle noise I hear every day, and the amount of the four primary vehicle pollution categories I am exposed to, every day (brake dust, tire rubber, tailpipe emissions, noise).
From the first night I moved into a house directly adjacent to a road that I knew had a certain designation (it wasn’t an arterial, but connected directly to an arterial, the harms were completely downstream of the decisions made around ‘arterials’).
Since then, I’ve lived in other houses, all of which are various forms of ‘close’ to an arterial. In every single house, there is no refuge from the grinding noise of passing vehicles. Vehicles passing by 45 feet away are bad enough, but the noise and emissions harm of an arterial passing by a block away, or a block away in both directions is enormous.
You and I could go on a walking tour, and sit close-enough to a few different intersections, and instantly achieve a tremendous shared understanding of what I mean when I say “Some behaviors on American roads feel distinctly aggressive”.