Links
Transportation “vulnerability” Link
The drive to contain transportation infrastructure’s vulnerability directly serves the war on terror’s project of blurring the domestic and international realms such that the security state can police all realms of the globe with an iron fist.
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics @ Whitman, 2008 “We are all torturers now” Theory & Event vol.11 issue 2 RJ
Much the same blurring of the line between the rule of law and rule by executive discretion can be found on the field once designated as "domestic." Perhaps the most profound manifestation but also one of the most significant causes of this conflation is that consummate act of faux border fortification, i.e., establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. As Amy Kaplan has suggested, the founding of this bureaucratic behemoth, which merged twenty-two federal agencies into one, signifies disintegration of the very borders it is said to reinforce: The homeland is not like the home front for which war is a metaphor; homeland security depends on a radical insecurity where the home itself is the battleground. If every facet of civilian life is subject to terrorist attack, if a commercial airliner can be turned into a deadly bomb, then every facet of domestic life...must be both protected and mobilized against these threats. Homeland security calls for vast new intrusions of government, military, and intelligence forces not just to secure the homeland from external threats but also to become an integral part of the workings of home, which is in a continual state of emergency.37 On the "domestic" front, perhaps the most unsettling manifestation of the logic of homeland security is the post-9/11 detention on U.S. soil of foreign nationals and citizens alike, sometimes without charge, without a hearing, without access to a lawyer, and without judicial review. This practice becomes still more unsettling when one considers the parallels between it and the practice of extraordinary rendition, whereby foreign nationals, declared outside the protection of federal and international law, have been secretly seized and then removed to the prisons of governments not known for their observance of the niceties of due process. Much like the "ghost detainees" subject to extraordinary rendition, the very fact that those seized within the United States have themselves often been designated as "detainees," as opposed to "criminal suspects," has the effect of rendering them unclassifiable according to the conventional categories of law (although, once again, their detention is represented as a constitutional and so lawful expression of executive prerogative). While the indefinite and incommunicado incarceration of suspected terrorists is perhaps an extreme symptom of the logic of homeland security, it is worth recalling that the treatment now often meted out to undocumented and/or illegal aliens residing within the territorial boundaries of the United States is not entirely dissimilar. The war on terror, note Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager, has "made hash" of the boundaries between domestic law and the international arena by "blend[ing] criminal law enforcement with immigration policy, foreign intelligence operations, and military force."38 When immigration authorities are designated as administrative agents of the national security apparatus, when they are officially tasked with "eliminating vulnerabilities in the nation's border, and with economic, transportation and infrastructure security,"39 when they are granted broad discretionary power to conduct proceedings in secret and to deport persons with minimal if any judicial oversight, it should come as no surprise that non-citizens as well are routinely denied the protections that liberalism traditionally afforded those charged with criminal offenses. In sum, and complementing the hollowing out of congressional and judicial authority with respect to matters beyond the borders of the United States, within its borders (to the extent that this distinction retains any sense), we witness the creation of a vast army of unelected administrative agents whose discretionary rule, for the most part, is accountable to neither legislature nor court. (And, of course, if one were so inclined, one could readily extend this analysis to the status of welfare recipients as well.) The examples cited in this section suggest not the formation of an utterly lawless regime, but, rather, within an order that continues to understand itself in terms of the categories provided by liberal contractarianism, the more insidious creation, multiplication, and institutionalization of what David Dyzenhaus calls "grey holes." Such holes are "spaces in which there are some legal constraints on executive action...but the constraints are so insubstantial that they pretty well permit government to do as it pleases."40 As such, they are more harmful to the rule of law than are outright dictatorial usurpations, first, because the provision of limited procedural protections masks the absence of any real constraint on executive power; and, second, because location of the authority to create such spaces within the Constitution implies that, in the last analysis, they bear ex ante authorization by the people. When created, in other words, they may receive but they do not require ratification, whether by Congress or by those whom its members are said to represent. What this means in effect is that the second Bush administration has dispensed with Jefferson's stipulation that extra-constitutional executive acts (or, rather, acts that Jefferson deemed to be outside those constitutionally permitted) require ex post facto ratification; and, in addition, that it has dispensed with Locke's contention that, however unlikely, at least in principle, specific exercises of extra-legal prerogative power (or, rather, acts that Locke deemed to be outside those legally permitted) are properly subject to revolutionary rejection. What one finds in the second Bush administration, then, is a denial of both models of accountability, combined with an aggressive commitment to the constitution of a security state that is liberal only in name. As it extends its reach, perfection of that state renders the prospect of popular repudiation of prerogative power ever more chimerical, and, indeed, renders recognition of the problematic character of its exercise ever less likely.
General Infrastructure Link
Infrastructure projects necessarily empower one group at the expense of others
Richardson 01 (Tim, lecturer in the Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, “The Pendulum Swings Again: In Search of New Transport Rationalities,” The Town Planning Review, Vol. 72, No.3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40112456 - oliver g)
However, the fragmentary nature of transport policy discourse, discussed above, suggests that the impact of transport and mobility on space is not determined by a coherent ideology. The spatial effects of transport policy are likely, then, to be complex and contested, rather than harmonious and coherent. In the formal processes of transport policy making, space is often reduced to either an engineering problem, to a series of economic indicators, or to models where generic traffic flows between point spaces. What seems clear is that as transport policy changes physical space, and the possibilities for movement within it, it also 'defines, shapes and transforms social relationships and daily practices' (Swyngedouw, 1993, 310). These subtle socio-spatial effects are not generally captured in policy making. However, in losing these effects, what is also lost is the possibility of understanding how 'mobility itself is part and parcel of the process of uneven development and of consolidating asymmetrical power relationships' (Swyngedouw, 1993, 323). In grounding the new realism, it seems necessary to integrate an understanding of these socio-spatial effects. This need to understand socio-spatial effects needs to be placed within the context of the politics of space. Worsening transport conditions and new transport agendas create new spatial tensions and recast old ones. As a result, we should expect to see contests over the local construction of transport 'spaces'. Transport policies in many cases favour particular interests over others- for example motorized vehicles over cyclists or pedestrians, buses over cars, moving traffic over parked vehicles, parked vehicles over public space, freight over private traffic, travellers over non-travellers. Goodwin (1996b) has explained this as a contest for scarce road space. However, it seems likely that the spatial conflicts caused by transport policies extend beyond the physical boundaries of roads, affecting spaces occupied by other modes of infrastructure as well as other land uses causing a range of effects including blight, bisecting communities, channelling new development and creating shadow and corridor effects. For example, engineering improvements to a particular road may improve speeds and safety for cars and commercial traffic, but may at the same time worsen conditions and create new dangers for those who may wish to make slower or shorter journeys on that road or the adjacent pavement. As time is saved for one group of travellers car dependency is increased, making alternatives less attractive and reducing accessibility for those who do not have access to a car. In past practice, the dominance of time over space has been a critical factor in ensuring that rapid mobility has taken precedence over local accessibility. The central importance of time savings in transport methodology continues to skew policy towards decongestion and high-speed travel, creating difficulties for planning and financing spaces which are expressly designed to slow movement, such as pedestrianized and traffic-calmed zones. The new realism potentially shifts the balance of power in the prioritization of space by bringing a new emphasis on accessibility rather than mobility for its own sake. The grounding of the new realism will be played out in a series of local power struggles over transport space. At the centre of many of these struggles will be the increasing prioritization that will characterize physical transport spaces; mounting conflicts of interest between users and non-users of transport systems; and the conversion of places into new spaces of mobility or accessibility. There are no technical answers to many of these social and political conflicts and the new appraisal framework does not pretend to offer them. There are basic political judgments to be made and the possibility of consensus seems an unlikely aspiration in many cases. But the discourse of the new realism fails to provide adequate organizing principles to resolve these difficult tensions, or to provide analytical tools that are capable of mapping out the different ways that spaces might be constructed to serve different sets of interests. The challenge is to design policy processes that can make these tensions explicit, and ensure they receive proper attention. This line of reasoning suggests that we need to rethink the treatment of space in transport policy. Here, Foucauldian analysis may be helpful in integrating a clearer understanding of spatiality into policy making. In particular, new insights may be provided into how particular knowledge of mobility and space is utilized in policy processes to serve particular interests while others are marginalized, and the role played by tools of policy analysis in these constructions.
These faster more efficient transportation systems creates an emphasis on high-speed travel where the ability to question should we go faster is no longer relevant.
Harris et all, 04
(Peter Harris, Jamie Lewis and Barbara Adam, Emerita Professor School Social Sciences Risk,research groups: Interaction and Organisation (RIO) Study of Knowledge in Practice (SKIP) Published World Transport Policy & Practice ISSN 1352-7614 Volume 10, Number 2, 2004 http://www.eco-logica.co.uk/pdf/wtpp10.2.pdf Accessed 6-26-12 CS)
For reasons of simplicity, we can generally divide the European transport system into public and privately accessible modes of transport. The first group is made up of communal or shared modes of transport such as buses, trains and aeroplanes. These forms of transport predominantly operate on timetables and schedules designed around the needs of specific societal groups. The second group consists of privately owned transport modes such as automobiles and bicycles, which are at the owner’s continual disposal to be used whenever needed: any time and any place. What unites these two groups over recent history is their constant and consistent prioritisation of increased or higher speeds. Those modes of transport that are technically more developed and have the potential to go faster, such as trains and cars, have been maintained. Those slower modes of mobility technology, such as horse-drawn and steam technology, are left-behind, outdated. Travelling quickly has become strongly prioritised because people want to be able to go from A to B in the fastest possible time. Any opportunity to reduce journey-times is constantly sought, be it through increasing speed or by travelling on the fastest, or shortest, available route to a destination. With regard to the transport system this emphasis on high-speed travel has become the dominant prevailing attitude of both the public and transport policy. It has become so highly valued that it has been elevated almost to the status of an inalienable right, where the ability to travel as fast as possible is no longer questioned.
High-Speed rail Link
Directing resources towards the high-speed rail reinforces racial hierarchies in transportation.
Eric Mann, delegate to the UN World Conference Against Racism and director of the labor/community strategy center in LA, 2009 http://www.uchastings.edu/faculty-administration/faculty/piomelli/class-website/docs/Bus-Riders-Union-New-Vision.pdf
On the surface, no one in Los Angeles is for transit racism or against dramatic improvements in the bus system. In fact, because of the Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union’s five years of organizing to “shift the terms of the debate,” we have now reached the next level in the struggle—from marginalization to attempts at co-optation, as virtually every public official in Los Angeles praises the work of the Bus Riders Union, and agrees that (of course while we go a bit too far) our demands for a massive improvement in the bus system are fair,even reasonable. During this dual process of praising and co-opting, the multibillion dollar rail projects are moving full speed ahead and the bus system continues its spiral downward into shambles.The debate gets much sharper over our charges, in the public arena and in the courts, that the MTA is operating a racially discriminatory,separate and unequal public transportation system that violates the civil rights of 500,000 monthly bus riders, 81 percent of whom are Latino, African American, Asian Pacific Islander, and Native American. To fully understand the intersection of racism and the transportation system, we must analyze the region demographically and, then, in terms of its transportation infrastructure.