Motornormativity in Tech - part One
Motornormativity, Part One: How the World Learned to Love the Car
I first heard the word motornormative when I interviewed Lee Waters on my podcast. Finally here was a word for something I’d seen my entire career: a world designed, shaped and justified around the car as default.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
It’s in our streets, our language, our planning policies and our funding formulas. Daniel Knowles, author of Carmaggedon, described the consequences to me on a previous episode of the podcast. Do take a listen.
While it's rooted in the past, having its origins in the early twentith century, it is also shaping our future, in ways it’s important to notice.
The word motornormative was coined by psychologist Ian Walker in a 2021 paper titled "Motornormativity: How social norms hide a major public health hazard". He draws parallels with concepts like heteronormativity, arguing that society is structured around an implicit assumption that driving is the natural, default way to travel. Crucially, Walker highlights that this isn’t necessarily a conscious bias. Rather, it’s a deeply embedded cultural norm - one that influences everything from infrastructure investment to road safety campaigns. Do take a listen to my podcast episode with Lee Waters, as he describes motornormativity far better than I can.
This bias shapes language, behaviours and public debate. Pedestrians must use crossings as traffic is the default. Cyclists should wear helmets and high-vis, while drivers are allowed to speed in two-tonne vehicles. In a motornormative system, the car is assumed; everything else is an exception.
The reason I’m talking to you about this is because of what it means for the future - but let’s look first at how we got here.
America: The Birthplace of Motornormativity
Motornormativity, in many ways, is synonymous with American culture. The early 20th century saw the rapid transformation of US cities to accommodate the car. The poster child for this change was Los Angeles. Visitors to LA today struggle to visualise that LA once had one of the largest public transport system in the world. The Pacific Electric "Red Car" tram lines stretched for over 1,000 miles, far surpassing the reach of the London Underground. If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at the haunting video of the last days of the Red Cars halfway down this post.
By the 1950s, American cities had been reshaped around the needs of the car: zoning codes segregated uses, highways bulldozed through neighbourhoods and walkability all but vanished. This was modernity, American-style. And as America exported its vision of the future, motornormativity went global.
Motornormativity Goes Global
Postwar Britain looked to American models in transport planning, and we saw motornormativity play out in the London Ringways plan; a madcap dream of concentric motorway-style roads circling the capital that nearly knocked down my childhood home. Even more telling was the Pedway scheme, which sought to remove pedestrians from the streets of the City of London altogether, banishing them to elevated walkways above traffic. Neither scheme succeeded, but both show the dominance of the assumption: roads are for cars, and everyone else must fit around them.
Elsewhere in Europe, similar plans took root. In Paris, the Grands Projets Autoroutiers proposed carving highways through the city. In Germany, cities like Stuttgart and Frankfurt tore out tram lines to make room for cars. So did every British town and city bar Blackpool. And as Western countries funded infrastructure in the developing world, they exported this mindset. Cities like Nairobi, Jakarta and São Paulo built for cars even when the vast majority of citizens didn’t own one. This coastal road in Mumbai has just opened. Mumbai has 1.4 million cars for 20 million people.
Mumbai coastal road
But in the past two decades, Europe has begun to reckon with its motornormative past. Oslo, Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam are all reconfiguring streets for people, not cars. There’s an increasing recognition that motornormativity doesn’t work. It leads to congestion, pollution, inequity and social disconnection.
But the Future is Still Made in America
And yet, even as Europe learns and adapts, America does not. In fact, the future being built in the USA is more motornormative than ever. That's a problem; because America still exports the future.
The next generation of tools, platforms and innovations are disproportionately shaped by Silicon Valley assumptions. And those assumptions are deeply, culturally, structurally car-centric. This is not a niche concern. It's a fundamental challenge for anyone trying to build transport systems that serve the many, not the few.
That’s what we’ll cover next week in part 2.
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