seeing like a biker

“All these cities were connected with each other, and with the capital, by the public highways, which issuing from the Forum of Rome, traversed Italy, pervaded the provinces, and were terminated only by the frontiers of the empire. If we carefully trace the distance from the wall of Antoninus to Rome, and from thence to Jerusalem, it will be found that the great chain of communication, from the north-west to the south-east point of the empire, was drawn out to the length of four thousand and eighty Roman miles. (85) The public roads were accurately divided by mile-stones, and ran in a direct line from one city to another, with very little respect for the obstacles either of nature or private property. Mountains were perforated, and bold arches thrown over the broadest and most rapid streams. (86) The middle part of the road was raised into a terrace which commanded the adjacent country, consisted of several strata of sand, gravel, and cement, and was paved with large stones, or in some places, near the capital, with granite. (87) Such was the solid construction of the Roman highways, whose firmness has not entirely yielded to the effort of fifteen centuries. – Edward Gibbon, Book One, the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Last month, on Christmas in fact, I penned a negative review of Rodney Stark’s book, The Victory of Reason for the Austin Statesman. Stark has long been arguing that religion is a neglected factor in sorting out the rise of the West and its triumph, and in this book he distilled his argument in more popular terms. I thought his treatment of the mix of factors that gave rise to liberty, progress and capitalism distorted the place of the Church by treating it, so to speak, undialectically – that is, as a unilateral and autonomous force -- and I thought his method of “proving” that the Church was responsible, for instance, for the notion of “progress’ was surprisingly unscientific – cherrypicking quotes from the church fathers is not a method, and it certainly isn’t intellectual history, either.

One of Stark’s hobbyhorses was the respect we accord the damn Romans and Greeks, so he spent some time attacking the ancients. To attack the Romans, he dissed their roads. Oh sure, the Romans had these great roads, but – Stark insisted – the roads were pisspoor for transport because they were too narrow, as opposed to good, Christian early medieval roads. It was pretty obvious on the road issue that Stark was unacquainted with Raymond Chevallier, the greatest scholar on the subject, and that he was confounding all roads with “viae militares.” However, the symbolic equation between road and civilization is powerful, and Stark chose his target for its maximum symbolic value. My quote from Gibbon, with that endnote like the flourish of trumpets (“Such was the solid construction of the Roman highways, whose firmness has not entirely yielded to the effort of fifteen centuries”) is typical of the admiration roads draw out in us.

All of which brings me to Fiona Wilson’s article in Autumn, 2004’s Development and Change, “Towards a Political Economy of Roads: Experiences from Peru.” Wilson proposes in this article to ask a simple question; who benefits from roads?

Wilson takes James Scott’s position, in Seeing Like a State, that roads make territories “legible” to state power. She notes that road building seems to be the one non-controversial infrastructural project that has remained constant in the development paradigm from the sixties, where development was all about building up import substituting industry, to the Washington Consensus, where development was all about privatization and export.

And she notes the human scale of the road, from the point of view of development geography:

“it would be presumptuous, not to say patronizing, to suggest that village people are misguided in their desire for greater accessibility. Most understandably, they wish to be relieved of the drudgery and isolation of living in a walking world (Porter, 2002), to stand a better chance of gaining and interweaving livelihoods
(Bebbington, 1999), to qualify for a higher level of service provision, especially in education and health, and to feel themselves incorporated as citizens in national life.

My concern in this article is not to question the legitimacy of this demand but to discuss the considerations that lie behind it and ask whether greater accessibility can always be assumed to bring lower transaction costs, greater prosperity and an easier, more secure, way of life for rural people. The current privileging of
accessibility partly reflects the unproblematic way that infrastructure is addressed in development planning literature where rural or feeder roads tend to be considered as socially and politically neutral, or as a technological fix. But as Samoff (1996) argues, there is a wide gulf between the literature that simplifies
and adopts a facade of precision in order to draw policy recommendations and the literature that remains wedded to the importance of understanding messy reality, power relations and the uncertainty and unpredictability of outcomes in everyday life.”

This grabbed me. I live, if not in the walking world, at least in the bicycling world. That world is sometimes difficult to embed in the world of cars. It is a fact unnoticed, in fact, by your average car driver that a road can make access more difficult, rather than less, depending on your vehicle. A biker has to get around the highway system, and the variations in traffic flow to which certain main roads are subject. In a place like Austin, where there is a heavy sport biking population but no consideration, otherwise, of biking as a real form of traffic, this leads to innumerable itinerary compromises. For instance: I once had a job as a phonemarketer with a EMR software company that was located on Capital of Texas Highway. To get there on my bike took twenty minutes, not bad really – it was about seven miles from where I live. I actually liked the scenery I took in biking there, since I had to back route myself by way of Mount Bonnel on roads that have the steepest grade, I believe, in the city. The last fifth of my journey, however, required a dog leg up Capital of Texas Highway, and that was always a little hairy. Yet the “world” that I had to navigate had been created to accelerate transportation, and I do not think it occurred to any of the engineers planning the roads to question, even once, their P.O.V. – this, even though there is a whole world of children and teenage transport that comes out of the very houses that the roads are integrated with. In my (off the cuff and screwball) opinion, surely one of the great factors in the rise of children’s obesity is not the food we eat, which is probably much healthier than the prepackaged foods of the sixties, but the blind shutting out of children’s transportaition – i.e. bike world – that has occurred since the sixties.

But to get back to Wilson’s essay. Wilson poses a simple question:

“From the perspective of rural populations, road building may lead not to benefits but to an undermining
of fragile livelihoods and dispossession of resources. There may be considerable advantages to be gained from holding on to spatial ‘autonomy’ notwithstanding the costs — a concept having a far more positive ring than ‘inaccessibility’ or ‘isolation’. For the sake of ‘autonomy’, can a case be made for making do with tracks and trails instead of building roads?”

I’ll take up Wilson’s responses to this question tomorrow.