Our Streets Look Like War Zones — But What if They Were 'Sites of Peacebuilding'? (Ashton Rohmer)

Car culture has a higher body count than both world wars combined. So why don't we think of automobility in the same way we think about the bloody and destructive global conflicts that dominate the news — and what would it take to transform our streets into a tool to make our whole society more peaceful, rather than more violent?  Today on the Brake, we sat down with PhD candidate Ashton Rohmer to talk about her fascinating new paper that looks at our transportation culture through a "peace and conflict studies" lens — and why car domination is a kind of warfare unto itself, even if claims of a counterattack are seriously overblown. And then we dig into what shifts when we approach transportation reform  advocacy as a part of the larger "peacebuilding" project — and why self-proclaimed peacebuilders need to embrace ending car culture, too.