Shill: Driving and the Law

The US seems on the precipice of more serious action around—and investments in—our crumbling infrastructure, and the choices made in this arena will surely impact access to and from rural places, as well as other rural-urban connections. So, it seems particularly timely to consider recent work by Gregory H. Shill (Iowa Law) that asks us to reconsider our national reliance of cars. In Should Law Subsidize Driving?, Shill unpacks how the law has systematically encouraged car supremacy and questions the wisdom of those choices.

In particular, Shill argues that the design and enforcement of traffic laws, land use laws, environmental regulations, insurance laws, tax laws, and individual contract regulations create “structural privileges for driving over other transportation modes and activities.”

In his examination of the many facets of law that contribute to preferential treatment for drivers of cars, Shill provides many striking pieces of data. For example, speeding: occupants in speeding vehicles (in zones over 20mph) are killed or injured at rates between 156 percent and 228 percent more than non-speeding vehicles in the same traffic zones. Shill also asserts that law enforcement and media narratives often blame non-drivers for their own deaths, highlighting a chilling example of a 3-year-old girl killed while crossing the street at a crosswalk.

After a thorough overview of a wide expanse of law, Shill concludes that the law is not neutral with respect to driving (to the contrary) and that subsidies for driving should be repealed. This, of course, raises a lot of interesting questions for rural communities in particular, including: How will rural people get around without cars? What are the other futures are possible here?

For further discussion on this theme, readers may also be interested in a recent response by John Saylor (J.D. Candidate at Penn) focused on auto-safety regulations in particular in The Road to Transport Justice: Reframing Auto Safety in the SUV Age.

Finally, after this was posted, Lisa Pruitt helpfully reminded us of this interesting connection: Carol Sanger, Girls and the Getaway: Cars, Culture, and the Predicament of Gendered Space , 144 U. Pa. L. Rev. 705 (1995).

This digest was produced with significant contribution by Aurora Kenworthy, UNL Law Student.