Few regional initiatives have triggered as much agitation, indeed quasi-violent opposition, as Brussels’ mobility plan “Good Move”. The objectives are sound. But is the implementation fair?
Philosopher Philippe Van Parijs reflects on current debates in Brussels, Belgium and Europe
Municipality after municipality, neighbourhood after neighbourhood, Brussels endeavours to implement the ambitious regional mobility plan “Good Move”.
That there should be such a plan is a no-brainer. The extent to which and the way in which we choose to move affect the well-being of other people. It is therefore only right that public authorities should try to shape our mobility in such a way that our movements harm other people less than is currently the case, and, if possible, even benefit them: in the economists’ jargon, less negative, and more positive, externalities.
The most obvious externalities are negative. They include local atmospheric, acoustic and visual pollution, the local contribution to global climate change, the various forms of congestion, including saturated parking spaces and overcrowded public transport, and the physical insecurity associated with the risk of accidents.
Positive externalities are fewer and less obvious. Most of the people who move on foot or by bike contribute to making the public space secure in the sense of aggression-free. They occasionally contribute to conviviality and social cohesion: smiles are more easily exchanged and conversations more often started between pedestrians than between car drivers.
And in a society in which the cost of health care is largely borne by society-wide solidarity, the contribution of walking and cycling to people’s health is not merely a private benefit: it is also a positive externality.
Note that better mobility may sometimes mean less mobility: a dense habitat, the expansion of teleworking, the development of mini-supermarkets, schools and other public services within walking distance, and the optimalization of e-commerce all the more harmful forms of mobility less necessary.
Better mobility may also mean slower mobility: encouraging the use of slow means of transport and imposing tough speed limits on fast ones both belong to a sensible mobility plan. Most paradoxically perhaps: good mobility is largely about making immobility more enjoyable: reducing all forms of pollution and freeing public spaces of car traffic and parking are all contributions to an environment in which on can sit, stroll, breathe fresh air and let children play in a relaxed and pleasurable manner.
Public action aimed at good mobility so characterized is not only legitimate. It is indispensable, both on grounds of efficiency — as economists put it, the failure to internalize externalities leads to a (sometimes disastrously) suboptimal overall level of welfare — and on grounds of justice — in particular, we, as polluters, should be made to pay for the harm we inflict on others.
In pursuit of these objectives, public action can appropriately use prohibitions and taxes as well as subsidies. And within the territory of the Brussels-Capital Region, given the interdependence between the municipalities, it is right that the regional authorities should take the initiative, while leaving the detailed implementation to the 19 municipal authorities.
Nonetheless, Good Move is proving extremely controversial. It is of course hardly surprising that policies which thwart some short-term interests and try to change long-established habits should meet with significant opposition. But what turns frustration and protest into indignation and revolt is a feeling of injustice. Good Move, many felt and some screamed, is unfair, both as regards the process that is producing it and as regards the effects it is producing.
First of all, Good Move, detractors claim, is imposed top-down, without taking account of the residents’ daily experience, concerns and ideas. Nonsense, policy makers respond, we made every effort to involve residents in a process of “co-construction”. Residents and other stakeholders were invited to several meetings at which the detailed plans were presented and discussed. Who is right?
I spent an afternoon in Cureghem, the neighbourhood of Anderlecht in which the revolt against Good Move started. At the entrance to apartment buildings I could see piles of unopened letters and unread leaflets, among them no doubt the invitations disseminated by the échevine de la mobilité, as it happens a German citizen who does not live in Cureghem. I also met a very angry car-owning old Italian resident who had never learned to read. And many of the people I talked to had not heard of any consultation meeting about Good Move, let alone attended it.
“Co-construction” would be challenging enough in a town with a stable, homogeneous population, where all consume the same media. In Cureghem and many other parts of the Brussels-Capital Region, it is not hard to understand why many perceive the so-called “co-construction” as window-dressing for a top-down process run by outsiders.
Fairness, however, is not only a matter of inclusiveness in the procedure. It is also a matter of distributively justifiable outcomes. Good Move, according to its detractors, is good for the better off, but worse for the worse off. True, nearly half the cars are owned by the richer quarter of Brussels’ households. But this does not suffice to show that Good Move’s promotion of alternatives to the car is pro-poor.
Bruxelles-Mobilité, the regional agency in charge of Good Move, reported, for example, that among households that do not own a car, the percentage using bicycles is twelve times higher in the richest category of households than in the poorest one. For reasons that may have to do more with access to safe storage facilities than with the price of bicycles, the transition to more environment-friendly means of transport clearly suffers from a social bias.
Similarly, the promotion of zero-emission zones is no big deal for richer households, happy enough to switch to high-tech electric vehicles. But what about the scores of poorer households who are not only forced to give up their old cars henceforth barred from Brussels’ streets but also face a dramatically reduced second-hand market for cars they could use?
Does this all mean that those convinced of the importance of social justice must ditch Good Move? Of course not. But they must try harder to make it both procedurally fair and outcome-fair. To achieve real, inclusive “co-construction”, there is no quick fix.
Even if high turnouts could be achieved, referendums do not lend themselves to sets of complex questions, and simple questions miss the ubiquitous interdependences inherent in mobility issues. What is needed is a mobilization of collective intelligence through an unceasing on-the-ground search for problems, solutions and arguments among the people most directly affected by the prospective mobility plan and most actively thinking about it. There is no perfectly effective way of doing this, but there are bound to be better ones than dropping leaflets in letter boxes.
Similarly, to get Good Move to produce distributively fair outcomes, there is no magical strategy. But if one is patient and modest enough to listen to the people directly affected and to learn the lessons of experiments conducted elsewhere, mobilizing collective intelligence should be able to come up with new ideas worth exploring: from cheap collective storage facilities and subsidized anti-theft devices for bicycles to the administrative and financial facilitation of neighbourhood-level car and van-sharing schemes or the redistribution among the residents of each neighbourhood of the (significantly increased) fees collected for parking in its streets.
To an extent that varies greatly from place to place, Good Move is not having an easy time. This in no way implies that it should be abandoned. But it does imply that fairness should be constantly on the minds of those in charge and relentlessly pursued with the help of as many as possible of those best placed to perceive the problems Good Move intends to address and to help identify the best ways to solve them.
