Our transportation systems shape and are shaped by attitudes, norms, and biases. Understanding how to shift these in positive directions can help address the pernicious public health challenges of traffic crashes, urban sprawl, inequities in mobility and accessibility, and other effects of a built environment that essentially requires automobile use. This experiment replicated a recent study of public health social norms in the United Kingdom with a United States sample and found similar social norms that often significantly favor cars and may obscure the public health hazards posted by an autocentric approach to planning, engineering, and policy…
Travel behavior is not merely objective or rational in the economic sense (Groeger 2002). There are aspects of vehicle design and the larger transportation system that cause or exacerbate human emotions, biases, social stereotypes, and willingness to behave interpersonally in ways particular to the roadway (Abrahamse et al. 2009; Coogan et al. 2014; Delbosc et al. 2019; Diana and Mokhtarian 2009; Goddard, Kahn, and Adkins 2015). There is a need to understand how these psychological factors result in the inability to see beyond the literal and figurative windshield to envision different ways of doing things or generate the political will and public demand for change. Referred to variously as “windshield bias,” “car brain,” “car culture,” “auto dominance,” “American’s obsessions with their cars,” etc., Walker, Tapp, and Davis coined the term “motornormativity” (Walker, Tapp, and Davis 2023) to describe this phenomenon. In their study of attitudes among UK adults that contrasted social norms around car externalities to parallel, non-car social effects, they found robust evidence that people excuse the negative effects of car use in ways that obscure the public health hazard posed by an autocentric society (Walker, Tapp, and Davis 2023).