Communication Across Borders: Testimonial Memoir as Literary Journalism for Mobility Justice

That literary journalism has the potential to communicate across physical and political borders in the quest for social justice is demonstrated by two recent books of real-time memoir: Wang Fang's Wuhan Diary (2020) concerning lockdown at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and Behrouz Boochani's No Friend but the Mountains (2018) which describes the circumstances of the refugees and asylum seekers imprisoned by the Australian government on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Their texts-written in circumstances where the opportunities for immersive reporting by journalists were unavailable-prompt consideration of the links between (im)mobility justice and literary journalism. They also raise questions about the line between fact and fiction in literary journalism, particularly under the threat of political censorship. And they provoke deliberation on the role literary journalism can play in reporting across closed borders on matters that are intensely local but at the same time of global concern. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Evaluating public transit agency responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in seven U.S. regions.

The Covid-19 pandemic's impacts on public transit will be felt for years, if not longer. In a few short weeks in 2020, the nature of day-to-day travel shifted around the world. Many of those who were able to stay at home did so while a large majority of those who needed to continue traveling moved away from public transit if they had alternatives available. For their part, public transit agencies responded with rapid service adjustments during March 2020, making varying efforts to communicate with riders and the public during this time so that users could understand how service was changing and how it would affect them. The impacts of the pandemic were dramatic-public transit ridership dropped by nearly 80% in April 2020 across the United States as the unemployment rate reached 14%-worse than any month during the Great Recession. But agency responses were nonuniform. In this paper, we characterize how seven public transit operators in the United States-those responsible for 55% of all unlinked trips in 2019-adapted service during the pandemic using quantitative performance information and a review of agency press releases. We also assess impacts on riders for whom public transit is essential. We find that pandemic-era changes largely did not change existing disparities between groups, suggesting that baseline inequities did not worsen as overall service levels fell. Understanding transit agency behaviors using different data sources is a first step towards linking agency responses with outcomes. This type of analysis that blends quantitative performance analysis with qualitative data can also provide insight into how agencies can adapt to future crises.

Not quite a block party: COVID-19 street reallocation programs in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed mobility inequities within cities. In response, cities are rapidly implementing street reallocation initiatives. These interventions provide space for walking and cycling, however, other mobility needs (e.g., essential workers, deliveries) may be impeded by these reallocation decisions. Informed by mobility justice frameworks, we examined socio-spatial differences in access to street reallocations in Seattle, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia. In both cities, more interventions occurred in areas where people of color, particularly Black and Indigenous people, lived. In Seattle, more interventions occurred in areas where people with disabilities, on food stamps, and children lived. In Vancouver, more interventions occurred in areas where recent immigrants lived, or where people used public transit or cycled to work. Street reallocations could be opportunities for cities to redress inequities in mobility and access to public spaces. Going forward, it is imperative to monitor how cities use data and welcome communities to redesign these temporary spaces to be corridors for their own mobility.

Informal motorbike taxi drivers and mobility injustice on Hanoi's streets. Negotiating the curve of a new narrative.

The central government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Hanoi's municipal authorities are enthusiastically embracing a series of plans and policies for the capital city to create a sustainable mega-city. This state imaginary privileges 'modern' mobilities, championing highways, a bus rapid transport system, and an elevated metro, while so called 'traditional' means of moving around the city such as motorbikes, bicycles, or cyclos are being strongly discouraged and increasingly marginalised. For example, Hanoi officials are implementing a step-wise ban on motorbikes from downtown streets by 2030, while the majority of the urban population travels by motorbike, with about five million motorbikes plying the city's streets. While such an approach not only creates mobility injustice for lower socio-economic residents of the city as a whole, it threatens to undermine the livelihoods of thousands of informal motorbike taxi drivers (locally known as xe ôm). In this article I engage with the emerging mobility injustice literature to explore how state discourses regarding urban modernisation are impacting the possibilities for Hanoi's xe ôm drivers to maintain access to city streets and viable livelihoods. These drivers must negotiate emerging and often conflicting state policies, their enforcement, as well as new app-based competitors, all of which challenge the equitable distribution of motility and produce important frictions. Nonetheless, xe ôm drivers draw on their agency and creativity during their daily routines to push back, while also creating new narratives regarding their vital role in maintaining neighbourhood security. We thus see how marginalised individuals are counteracting policies they consider unjust, even when this urban agenda is embedded in a politically socialist context.