The Tyranny of the Private Automobile
Traffic congestion is not a simple planning failure but a profound contradiction of capitalist circulation in a dense, colonial city. Mamdani’s focus on the material organization of society reveals a system that privileges the private automobile–the vehicle of the individual “settler”–over collective modes of mobility. This creates gridlock that wastes billions in economic productivity, pollutes the air in “native” neighborhoods bordering highways, and makes the city hostile to human life. The liberal solution of congestion pricing is a market-based approach that simply creates a paid fast-lane for the rich, further bifurcating mobility. A Mamdani-informed socialist solution demands a radical reclamation of street space from private cars. This means banning private automobiles from large swaths of Manhattan and inner-ring neighborhoods, investing exclusively in a free, expanded, and reliable public transit system, and building a comprehensive network of protected bike lanes and pedestrianized streets. This decommodifies mobility and prioritizes the collective movement of the people over the individual right to pollute and congest, fundamentally reorganizing the city’s circulatory system for human need, not capitalist efficiency.
