For Oct 7
Reading: Readings from Ivan Illich
Philippe Bihouix, The Age of Low Tech: Towards a Technologically Sustainable Civilization (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020) , xiii-xviii, 1-2, 92-98
Video: Clarence Eckerson, Jr. Cycling Copenhagen Through North American Eyes
Bihouix is an engineer. How is his argument against the automobile (or for the bicycle) different than Illich’s? Why do we pay so much attention to “high tech” instead of “low tech.”? What struck you in the Copenhagen video? What struck North Americans? Could we Copenhagenize American cities?

Website of Toole Design, a company founded by an NCSU grad working to make American cities more bicycle and pedestrian friendly. Look especially at their discussion of the “New E’s” of transportation. The old “E’s” were Engineering, Education, and Enforcement.

Does anything strike you in the Toole Design website? Why are “Empathy, Equity, and Ethics” important? Would you typically see this discussed on a company’s website?

Jennifer Toole’s talk to the Franklin Scholars, November 2023. On empathy in engineering

From Ariana, Saturn Commercial, c 2003.

From Daniel, Cars are a Disaster for Society–CityNerd

For Oct 9
I-440 Purpose and Need Statement

I-440 Project: Finding of No Significant Impact
Take a look at these two Google Earth images of the I440 Beltline intersection at Wade Avenue. This one from 2015 before the project started and this one from 2021. Here is a folder of pictures of the construction process.
Ian Lockwood, “Making the Case for Transportation Language Reform: Removing Bias,” Institute of Transportation Engineers. ITE Journal 87, no. 1 (January 2017): 41–43.
Charles Marohn, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer
Darryl Fears and John Muyskens, “Black people are about to be swept aside
for a South Carolina freeway — again,” Washington Post, September 8, 2021
Here are the graphics to the article in a twitter thread.

Look through these first two documents. What kinds of assumptions do they make? What factors do they include or not include? These documents were produced by engineers. Do you see any examples of Ian Lockwood’s biased language in these documents? Do you think the “Finding of No Significant Impact” statement is justified? We often imagine that engineering is an objective field, but Ian Lockwood, an engineer himself, accuses engineers of using biased language. Do you agree? Why do they do that. What are the implications of doing so? It is infamously known that from the 1950s onward poorer people and African-Americans were displaced to make way for highways. One of the great historians of New York City estimated that in the 1950s and 1960s 250,000 New Yorkers were displaced from their houses to make way for highways there. In our area, building the Durham Freeway destroyed Hayti, an middle-class African American community. Is there something inherent in the automobile that leads to these projects?