ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to contribute to literature by outlining a pragmatist approach to the moral or ethical dimension of conflicts on, around, and about roads. Roads and streets have long been objects of controversy. From invasion of automobiles that challenged pedestrian control of streets in early twentieth-century cities and movements against urban freeways in 1960s to cyclists opposition to automotive domination of city streets at beginning of the twenty-first century, disputes about the meanings and uses of urban streets and sidewalks reappear continually in different contexts. The chapter suggests that approaching such disputes, at whatever level is involved, using the pragmatic sociology of critique and justification helps to elucidate the conflicts. The letters to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) show that same person can mobilize different types of justification and critique about same situation because, first, situation is ambiguous, or complex and composite, and second they are not parties to the action, but are only observing it from a distance.
