Level of Service: Design Standards, Imposed Car Dependence, and the Production of Urban Space in the Capitalist State

Abstract

Transportation scholarship has become increasingly critical of design standards and engineering methods that promote car-dependent development patterns in American cities. Level of Service (LOS) is a design standard that has received scrutiny for its misapplication to urban streets, accommodating highway-like traffic flow where local service and accessibility should be a priority. Combining the work of contemporary planning and engineering researchers, Marxist urban theorists, and critical theorists Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, this paper understands such design standards as forms of knowledge that reproduce power structures of capitalism. The paper focuses on an in-depth historical analysis of three watershed moments of federal decision making that helped establish and reproduce a car-centric discourse of urban transportation in the United States. Using this analysis, the paper describes how the widely accepted use of LOS as a quality measure for urban streets acts as mechanism of the capitalist state's spatial logic of managing urbanization around production and consumption to reproduce its own dominance.