The Week in Mobility - 9 July 2021

Love Island is Educational

On Tuesday night’s Love Island, earnest ex-school teacher Hugo got himself into a spot of bother. When asked what female attributes were a turn off, he said “Fake” sparking a spat between himself and the numerous boobjobbed contestants. 

26 year old Faye, who has fake boobs, lips and botox told Hugo that he couldn’t judge her choices when he didn’t understand why she’d had “work” done in the first place. She went on to explain (whilst wielding a plastic prosecco glass) that she’d had insecurities about her body triggered, no doubt by society’s expectations of beauty standards. 

Hugo (and myself) were mortified for judging. This remarkably sensitive moment from ITV2 is jarring against the near constant dialogue of “what’s your type” followed by the “petite blonde with dark features” response.

Equally interesting is that contestants Jake and Libby have accelerated through every stage of a 2 year relationship in the space of a week. Over 7 days they’ve gone from coyly getting to know each other, to “we’re the same person and so in sync”, to time for pastures new. 

This has proved to me that Love Island is educational on two fronts. 1. It shouldn’t be “it is what it is” - labelling people as “types” is not inclusive or sensitive without context and 2. Time is relative and, not all time is created equal

Ready yourself for a seamless analogy to transportation….

People are a product of their experiences, their experiences a product of their very particular context. 

In Belle Glade, Florida - a rural, predominantly African American community will need either a car or $2 and two hours via 34 stops to get to a Covid-19 vaccination clinic. Two hours for some, is an untenable time to give up when balancing a low paid, inflexible job and childcare. For others, two hours could mean driving to a long weekend in the Cotswolds and already be two glasses of Pinot Grigio down. 

The frequency and affordability of transportation options plays a significant role in shaping context - becoming a driver of multiple, overlapping forms of inequity. Simply speaking, your job impacts your income. Your income impacts where you can live. Where you live impacts the jobs, services, schools, fresh food, healthcare and the multitude of resources you’re able to access conveniently. Transportation options impact whether the above is limited or abundant, convenient or an utter nightmare.

That said, it is not just the presence or affordability of transport options that dictate the outcome, but rather how they contribute to an individual’s perception of time. Time is the least disposable asset for those who are rewarded least favourably for it. Increasing the frequency of public transit services will certainly help. But transit isn’t the lowest common denominator to enabling access. In Love Island terms, we’re still operating at offering low cost boob jobs rather than addressing body positivity from a young age. 

Strip down travel to its most basic form and we see that active transit is the rate determining step that has to be optimised to avoid dependence on car ownership and single occupancy vehicle journeys. Walking, cycling, scootering and wheelchair-ing are the acapela of transportation, buses the wedding band and cars the full blown opera. Participating in an opera is over the top if you can’t sing.

Optimising active transit journeys requires two critical actions. 1. Make it safer and/or feasible and 2. Bring things closer to the point of origin. It will shock many UK citizens that in the US, sidewalks are not ubiquitous. In fact, 8% of the 4,500 annual pedestrians killed in traffic crashes with motor vehicles are attributed to pedestrians walking along roads with no sidewalks.

"Many of our roadways were designed solely to move traffic, and pedestrians were viewed as an afterthought, or not considered at all. It is time for our community to retrofit our more dangerous roadways to be safer for pedestrians, improve the pedestrian level of service, and enhance walking as a safe means to increase physical activity." Dirk Gowin, executive administrator of transportation with the Louisville Metro Government in Kentucky.

Safety is a critical motivator, but how can you get to a bus stop or railway station without a pavement? If you can’t walk, wheel or cycle then you’ll reach for the car keys and reduce the cost per use of your £300 per month PCP deal. 

Secondly, complete neighbourhoods and streets or 15 minute cities reduce the distance required to travel to goods and services; in turn reducing the time burden as well as increasing the ability to travel via active modes. Food Deserts, areas in which fresh food is over a mile away from where a person lives, are casualties in need of complete street treatment. Sadly and unsurprisingly, food deserts exist most prevalently in low income neighbourhoods of colour. In Los Angeles, California, predominantly white neighborhoods benefit from nearly three times as many grocery stores as black neighborhoods and twice as many stores as latinx neighborhoods. If you can walk to a fizzy drink but not a piece of fruit, as is the case for 39.4 million Americans, then poorer health outcomes are already a predetermined certainty.

Health, transportation, environmental justice, social and economic opportunity to name but a few, are a complicated concoction of intrinsically linked inequities. Tackling them requires an in-depth understanding of a person’s environment and circumstances (social and economic) and the resulting relative nature of speed, time and distance. Transportation equity will be furiously debated as we endeavour to understand more and more about the intersection of inequities. In the interim we should interrogate the disaggregated data to truly understand individual communities and identify the relative metric to solve for - “types on paper” and time as a universally common metric might just need dumping from the island.