SILLY, MEANINGLESS WORDS.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson has long taken up the cause of getting around by anything other than a motorcar.  Which is fine.  Using the Student Affairs vocabulary polluted by fake psychiatry is not.  She goes there all the same.  "Meet the NIMBY’s Toxic Cousin: the NOMS (Not On My Street)," with the sub-headline, "Are neighborhood 'car supremacists' taking over our community meetings — and what do we do about it?"  That might get the Streetsblog set nodding their heads and stroking their hipster beards.  It does little to change minds, and the point of holding a community meeting might be to ... offer information and persuasion to shape transportation policy.

The information and persuasion is there, if you pay attention.

For instance, many testimonies incorrectly characterized street space as a scarce, non-renewable resource with little room to spare for things like curb extensions — a phenomenon she calls “static scarcity,” which ignores the ancient history of streets evolving along with society. Other testifiers, meanwhile, participated in “blame inversion,” or raging against non-drivers for problems that are objectively caused by motorists, like traffic jams backed up alongside new bike lanes.

Research shows that congestion typically shrinks or remains flat when governments add cycling infrastructure to their roads — even if that infrastructure subtracts a little bit of lane space from drivers, many of whom hop on their bikes when they have a safe network to ride on. But that doesn’t stop the NOMS — whose ranks include USDOT Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy — from claiming the exact opposite, without any evidence beyond their personal bias.

I don't know, a new pejorative, with those culture-studies insults tacked on, doesn't sound like the best way to call attention to the research.  But that's how a George Mason academician called Ashton Rohmer with their Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution rolls.

More than a century after the dawn of the automobile, Rohmer says these kinds of “car supremacist” ideas have become so deeply rooted that merely building new bus rapid transit lines will not be enough to heal the lasting damage to our broken culture.

“The issues posed by our mobility status quo are not engineering problems to be modeled or long range plans to be strategized, but constitute a moral project to be scrutinized, a social construct to be challenged and a system of power to be dismantled,” she wrote.

Of course, Rohmer isn’t the first scholar to argue that concepts like “motonormativity,” “windshield bias,” and “car-brain” have pervaded American life — and she isn’t the first to point out how powerful interests in the oil, road, and auto industries have systematically ingrained that perspective into our everyday lives.

Still, she argues that until we closely examine how everyday Americans perpetuate autocentrism from the bottom up — and how policymakers allow them to do so — we will never fully shift our transportation status quo, even if we do confront car culture’s top-down causes.

“I haven’t seen much theoretical work to explain the process by which a grumpy neighbor can complain about a speed bump, and then two days later, it gets removed,” she added. “There isn’t just a global political economy at work in that situation. It’s powered by individuals at the hyper-local level, within a bureaucratic process that enables that power to continue.”

Maybe that "grumpy neighbor" knows how to ask politely?  Contrast that with the professor's not-quite-call for unleashing Student Affairs types and their cancel mob at the next public works commission's meeting.

While she stops short of offering a full-scale de-radicalization program for the NOMS, Rohmer says that decision-makers must recognize that car supremacy is a moral wrong just like any other dehumanizing ideology – and it’s past time for policymakers to check its influence on civic society.

That might look like disempowering tiny groups of unelected, unrepresentative community members who want to publicly debate whether things like bike and bus lanes should exist at all — while engaging the larger community even more deeply on the details of how those projects are rolled out, without compromising on the need for life-saving projects.

“If we use our community engagement practices to enable someone who thinks that it is okay not to make our streets safe for everyone who uses them, that is a failure of community engagement,” she said. “When we relegate decision-making to people who have these ideas about whose lives are worth valuing, I don’t think that that should count as ‘consulting the community.'”

I can think of no more effective way to lose an argument than to send a cadre of jargon-spouting Critical Studies majors to the next hearing on a traffic taming project.