[sustran] A very short list of very bad practices

eric britton eric.britton at ecoplan.org
Thu Jul 21 21:17:46 JST 2011


Subject: Victim Blaming 

 

Thank you very much Morton.  I find your analysis excellent, as always from, you considered and sober (I guess that is because you are a Icelandic) and all in all a good guide to the topic and possible next steps.

 

I wonder if I might ask you to write this up an article for World Streets, and of course for this forum, on what you call so rightly Victim Blaming.  An excellent topic, quite at the level of good sense at which we need to operate. Moreover it's great stuff because it is so thoroughly counter-intuitive and against the grain of unexamined but passively accepted standard  practice.  It certainly has to be right up there in the top rank of the pantheon of Worst Practices, and I know that you can do a great  piece for us all on this so as to make sure that becomes part of the battery of tools and awareness is which are so essential to getting transportation related policy decisions right.

 

I very much hope you will be able take the time out of your busy schedule to do this for us all.

 

In closing I would like to make a brief remark about the importance of treating this little Worst Practices exercise in a properly mature manner.  There is in the very title, Worst Practices, a somewhat jocular stab at the concept of Best Practices with all of the pretentiousness and potential dangers that such a mindset inevitably  carries with it.  I have no great problem with Bet's little cousin Good Practices, but when we begin to get into the hallowed halls of "Best Practices" and I find myself getting a bit obstreperous.  

 

"Worst Practices" is like Richard Strauss's opera the Rosenkavalier.  As one critic put it long ago: to be viewed with a wink in one eye, and a tear in the other.

 

Eric Britton

 

 



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