Between traffic and walking discourse: Pedestrians in the traffic machine,hints from the Estonian case

Abstract

Walking has attracted increasing interest in the social sciences and humanities. Yet only rarely have studies in those disciplines considered the subject of traffic, leaving governing and regulations to traffic specialists and engineers. Primarily using conceptual reflections but intersecting these with an analysis of historical traffic regulations in Estonia as they are related to contemporary framings, this article introduces the pedestrian as an element of a traffic system who is governed to control her body in legally prescribed ways. Directing attention also to language, as the vignette from Estonia shows the existence of a particular word “liikleja” for the ways in which pedestrians are seen as being subject to the traffic system as disciplined elements of the traffic machine. The article describes such perspective as “traffic discourse” which is contrasted with the more holistic view of pedestrians present in walking studies (“walking discourse”).

Introduction

Walking studies is a burgeoning field. ¹ From the early studies of walking onwards, scholars have conceptualized walking as “embodied acts” of being in contact with landscapes surrounding the walker. ² Walking studies is attentive “to the bodily, emotional and sociotechnical characteristics of walking” that possess political potential. ³ These studies see walking as a diverse activity, not something that is only destination-oriented and purposive. Walking is also strolling; it is discursive as well as conceptual. ⁴ Yet in the system of traffic coordination dominated by police and by engineering and safety advocates, walking and pedestrians tend rather be defined as machinic elements of the traffic system, subject to regulation.

Civil engineering innovations, such as traffic lights or quad-rails that were introduced to advance safety over the course of the twentieth century were implemented to the detriment of mobility possibilities open to pedestrians. ⁵ As Pooley notes, writing about the history of everyday walking, new traffic regulations in the interwar period were driven by a desire to protect pedestrians but also to ensure the smooth flow (of vehicles), if not eventually to restrict pedestrian movement. ⁶ Hoping to foster cooperation amongst road users, the interventions that favoured motorists “led increasingly to road designs and traffic managements that privileged drivers and restricted pedestrians”. ⁷ Activists noted the marginalisation of pedestrians due to ever more cars on the streets. ⁸ In the background of critiques highlighting the marginalisation and dehumanisation of pedestrians lies the notion that walking and driving are fundamentally different: the former is more enmeshed in the world, the latter results in dangers for weaker road users. ⁹ Two different conceptualisations – if not ontologies – can be delineated: one that this article calls traffic discourse, as it is centred on movement, safety and interaction amongst road users; the other named walking discourse, as it draws attention to the diverse experiences of walking within a particular landscape which extend beyond participation in traffic. These conceptualisations regard pedestrians in contrasting ways. Traffic discourse relies on the integration of walkers into traffic, which is understood as machinic and systemic; this orientation shapes the logic of the discourse. Walking discourse, in contrast, highlights the differences between the walking body and moving machines; it draws attention to the sensuous, perhaps even holistic experiences of surroundings that can enable walking time to be productive time and potentially produce forms of community and manifestations of street life. ¹⁰ Instead of treating walkers as human subjects in all their diversity, as walking studies do – couched in an “age-old understandings about the right of pedestrians to walk where and how they desired” – traffic discourse treats the walker as an abstract, average, almost fully automated road user. ¹¹ In this way of thinking, the walker is embedded within the system of traffic.

This article traces the emergence of traffic discourse as a historical process, doing so by interrogating accounts of walking in academic literature with those of pedestrian regulations in Estonia, in which a particular cluster of related words in Estonian – liikleja (a person on foot or in a vehicle and negotiating traffic) who liikleb (the verb for “traffic”) in liiklus (the noun for “traffic”) – has played a vital role, delineating the kind of narrative that has taken shape around automated pedestrianism. The Estonian case, encapsulated as a vignette, provides means to explicate the historical development of the traffic discourse, highlighting the discrepancy between the more holistic view of pedestrians adopted in walking studies (walking discourse) and the simplified, automated, machinic understanding of walking one finds in traffic discourse. Following an understanding that words contribute to ways of thinking, the vignette shows the functioning of a particular word within the emergence of traffic discourse. ¹²

The discussion here is mostly conceptual but the Estonian case provides a suitable vignette to reflect on those conceptual ideas, providing some contextual and locational embeddedness for the otherwise conceptual knowledge. Over the last few decades, Estonia has undergone a process of intense motorisation; car ownership has nearly tripled. ¹³ Yet the discourse of traffic as a machine is much older and precedes such rapid motorisation. This discussion of the Estonian case offers links as well as clarifications to studies of “automated pedestrians”, which have been historically informed but are usually focused on Western Europe and the United States. ¹⁴ The historical study of Estonian regulations leads to the moment of the invention and the development of the term and figure of the liikleja – the fully attentive, law-abiding, and responsive pedestrian negotiating movement with other liiklejas – who is both Hornsey's “automated pedestrian” and Demerath and Levinger's “driver on foot”. ¹⁵ The similarity between narratives of the 1930s and of the 2010s highlights the wider historical presence of pedestrians in traffic discourse.

Firstly, the article explicates the two different discourses – traffic discourse and walking discourse – that capture the different ways in which walking (in cities) has been understood.

Traffic discourse and walking discourse

Regulations on traffic in Western Europe arrived only very tentatively over the course of the nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, the Police Act of 1839 introduced police intervention in non-criminal activities in Britain, while the Traffic Act of 1867 extended those regulations. ¹⁶ This was also the year when the first semaphore was put up in front of the British Parliament to negotiate the movement of pedestrians and the incessant flows of vehicles on the street, even though the experiment was short-lived. ¹⁷ The nineteenth century and early twentieth century were the times of what Joyce called the “Free-Born English Pedestrian” in Britain. ¹⁸ According to him, there was the “still widespread sense that the highway was free to all users, not least the foot traveller”. ¹⁹ As Hornsey pointed out, “to move at will” on the highway “was to celebrate a particularly English love of liberty and democracy”. ²⁰ The transport revolution of the nineteenth century transformed walking from a necessity to a voluntary act. ²¹ Walking – particularly in the British countryside – became associated with freedom. The history of walking, following Rebecca Solnit's classic Wanderlust, is the history of freedom. ²² This logic, however, was challenged by motorisation leading to the emergence of the traffic discourse.

In the early days of automobility, however, regulators did not deal with pedestrians but gave all their attention to vehicles, particularly motor cars, as they increasingly emerged on roads in the early twentieth century. Streets and traffic have, throughout history, been regulated largely by an informal cultural and social system of custom but motorisation introduced an ever-expanding set of written norms. Thus, the first modern traffic regulations – introduced in New York in the United States in 1903 – were concerned not so much with the reduction of congestion as with speed and reckless driving as dangers to safety on the streets. ²³ However, while twentieth-century motorisation started with the curtailment of car drivers’ freedom to roam, it eventually led to placing the responsibility on other road users in order to maintain car speed. Instead of pedestrians being seen as humanly “muddled and foolish” and vehicle drivers being held responsible to exercise caution with them, the interaction became increasingly subject to a unified law. ²⁴ “The motor revolution”, according to Norton, made police step out from their usual roles as “the arbiters of individual traffic conflicts” and take responsibility for the formulation and enforcing of codified traffic rules in an attempt “to bring order out of chaos”. ²⁵

This bringing order out of chaos is the process of emerging traffic discourse as a principle of governing pedestrians. Such regulations have tended to follow “a functional logic of pedestrian circulation”, with traffic experts often relying on “mechanical metaphors” and favouring smoothly circulating traffic. ²⁶ The notion “ped” – as introduced by engineers – captures how regulations tend to treat pedestrians as moving machinic monads and is focussed on traffic flow, instead of paying attention to the cultural, social and political meanings of walking. ²⁷ Thus the emerging traffic discourse subjected pedestrians to rules and pushed them out of the street space that they previously used freely. There is thus a normative conception of the pedestrian that assumes that she or he is machinic, an unreflective enactment of the traffic handbook. The traffic discourse is hence rooted in engineering thinking which yet has mostly worked with motorised mobility but paying attention to pedestrians in the face of safety or governing flows of walkers, with the machinic logic at the centre.

Such regulations for pedestrians of course did not emerge smoothly. As historian Clay McShane asserts, pedestrians were simply less willing than car drivers to adapt to new systems imposed on them via written regulations, as pedestrians “faced a new regulation of an old behaviour”, which is “a more demanding adjustment than facing new rules for new behaviours (like driving)”. ²⁸ Moreover, Scollon and Scollon describe pedestrian traffic as being more complex than vehicular traffic: the code for vehicles is direct, whereas, for pedestrians, various discourses combine and collide. ²⁹ Indeed, human bodies are capable of moving in all sorts of ways that often diverge from what is legally accepted. “Pedestrians can twist, duck, bend, and turn sharply” by going under, over, or around barriers, or by skilfully negotiating gaps in vehicular traffic to cross at a red light, for example, or to jaywalk. ³⁰

The most sustained critiques of traffic discourse, however, emerge from the walking discourse. This discourse, nevertheless, can be divided into two. On the one hand, there is a more urban design-focused approach to developing walker-friendly cities. Subjecting walkers to the paternalistic control of the state and criminalising walking infringements not only curtails pedestrians’ freedom; it also harms public health, as walking is generally beneficial for an individual's health whereas actions controlling walking reduce its appeal. ³¹ A set of walking literature has shown how walkers are more open to face-to-face interactions as they are not cocooned in their vehicles as car drivers are. ³² Such interactional positions allow communities to be produced and maintained through pedestrian street life. ³³ The urban design literature on walking thus sees street layout, urban density, block sizes, and other meso- or micro-level aspects of street planning not only as conducive to getting people to walk but also as more generally enhancing sociability by treating streets as places. ³⁴

On the other hand, the problem with the pedestrian as figured in traffic discourse discussed here can be seen as more conceptual, if not existential and ontological. It involves questioning the subjection of pedestrians to regulations in general, considering the nature of the activity and the position of the walker in relation to human beings having diverse, complex relations with one another and valuing the holistic being as a participant in the world. ³⁵

This is what I call here walking discourse. In this view, pedestrians are not really “pedestrians” as specific users of space but are human beings in all their diversity (young, old, and disabled). ³⁶ The move to changing the thinking in traffic discourse via walking discourse might take place by imagining different figures, such as that of the “loiterer”. ³⁷ Loiterer is usually a negative actor in governing, the one who spends time aimlessly and appears to be up for some transgressive behaviour such as the one who crosses a street for too long: the Rule for Pedestrians in the United Kingdom (no. 18) states that one “must not loiter on any type of crossing”. ³⁸ The loiterer as defined for instance by Morag Rose is a playful figure to engage with powers that in different ways criss-cross cities and shape actions. ³⁹ Rose turns the subject into a way to rethink power. The loiterer challenges existing power structures by being where, according to formal norms, they are not supposed to be and acting in prohibited or frowned-upon ways. Thus, the loiterer challenges the utilitarianism of pedestrian movements and places the walker critically vis-à-vis normative regulations. Individuals would not be assigned to the “family” of automated traffic participants then but instead be treated as participants in different groups, as, in various ways, walkers. Walking discourse centres on the relationship between human bodies and the environment, which are enmeshed in this mode of mobility. Walking, thus, is a way to work against “this erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city” which emerged in the increasing motorisation. ⁴⁰

The following section explicates through a vignette about the emerging traffic discourse in Estonia. The vignette captures the local and situated uses of traffic discourse associated with contextually rooted mental shifts about pedestrians as they have also been associated with a particular word liikleja.

Vignette: The emergence of traffic discourse in Estonia

My research on discourses about pedestrian mobility started from an interest in contemporary times. With the focus centred on reasons and framings of pedestrian regulations by police, transport officials, as well as citizens themselves, the main method was interviews accompanied by scrutiny of media outlets. The research project as such was not thus historically focused but became historical as it was clear that understanding some contemporary framings necessitated moving back in time and doing so at least to the years when traffic regulations started in the country in the first half of the twentieth century.

The interviews I conducted in Estonia in 2016 and 2017 with the above-mentioned officials (see list in the bibliography) highlighted how “rule-following” and “carefulness” are characteristics of how pedestrians in traffic are perceived by officials, showing the traffic discourse in operation. The pedestrian, for instance, was discussed as “a road user [liikleja in the original interview] similar to others, like a bus driver or a car driver” (Interview no. 6, city administration). Moreover, if “everyone behaved according to the rules, then there would be no accidents” (Interview no. 2, I3, a police officer). Such a rule-following perspective casts the rules of traffic as the technical area wherein pedestrians are technical devices acting within given norms and following, best if the word for word, what has been written in the regulations. However, in the regulations governing Estonia as well as in other countries, the pedestrian is asked not just to follow rules but also to be careful. Pedestrians should not only claim their right of way but also yield to deadly machines out of concern for their own safety: “I’ve got the right of way, and a car runs me over; what can I do with this right of way when I’m [buried] in the graveyard” (Interview no. 6, city administration). Within the framing of “careful pedestrian”, problems arise due to a pedestrian who is “lazy” or, in other words, “taking the easy way”. Such a pedestrian does not want to walk the extra distance to make a safe or legal crossing. The “lazy pedestrian” takes the shortest route. Indeed, the “lazy pedestrian” has been a concern for traffic regulators stretching back to the early days of traffic norms, as pedestrians are used to walking shorter routes across streets. ⁴¹ While nowadays this fact has also been incorporated into planning and design through the principle of “pedestrian desire lines”, which denote passages requiring the least effort from pedestrians and are most directly linked to points of destination, traffic discourse nonetheless regards the freedom of pedestrians and the direct routes taken by walkers as a problem.

The pedestrian as an element of the traffic system, an element that is supposed to take extra care when interacting with the dangerous machines of traffic, is highlighted by the case of safety reflectors, which pedestrians in Estonia are required to wear after dusk. Becoming part of legal regulations in 1987 but made compulsory in Estonia in 1992 and on all streets (urban and non-urban) in 2011, the safety reflector is aimed at mediating the interactions of drivers, cars and walking road users. ⁴² The question of pedestrian safety in Estonian cities, especially during the dark winters, thus becomes, in important ways, a question of whether one has a reflector. Moreover, news reports of pedestrian casualties often note whether the victim was wearing a reflector. ⁴³ Interestingly, though, much of the population accepts the requirement and states that they regularly wear the reflector. ⁴⁴ The reflector requirement does not treat pedestrians in traffic as complex assemblages engaged in diverse activities, as the walking discourse would regard them. ⁴⁵ Indeed, while walking discourse sees walking through the eyes of “Romantic poets and transcend[ent]alist philosophers”, pedestrians are governed entities subjected to the rules of the automobile-oriented system in the dominant traffic discourse. ⁴⁶ Even though the reflector requirement is not strictly enforced in Estonia's urban environments – often, when police find someone not wearing a reflector, they just give her or him one as a gift – more than one thousand fines have been issued nationwide a year to those not wearing reflectors. ⁴⁷ The problems in enforcing the rule consistently are obvious since strictly speaking even those walking a few hundred metres (from a car, say, to a building) must wear a reflector. The rule's existence highlights the logic of the traffic system in the Estonian regulations directed towards pedestrians (the traffic discourse).

Attending to the contemporary understanding of pedestrian regulations, however, revealed some patterns, which then led to an interest in the historical perspective. Namely, the word liikleja emerged as a central term but as one with no direct English equivalent: “road user” would be closest, but it still fails to encompass parts of the meaning in Estonian. Liikleja is not just about being on a road; it denotes movement. In that sense, the term is semantically a subject of “traffic” – that is, someone who is engaged with traffic and who “traffics” (though not in the sense of drug trafficking). Traffic regulations in Estonia paid attention to pedestrians with this word in use throughout those documents.

I went through traffic regulations in Estonia, starting from the first one in 1910, and tracked the process of emerging pedestrian regulations in the following documents from 1922, 1933, and 1936. I also scrutinised the first regulations of the Soviet period from 1945 onwards, including the later ones already referred to above. ⁴⁸

The history of traffic norms in Estonia followed the pattern of regulation in the United States and elsewhere, being introduced at roughly the same time (in 1910). Similarly to the initial traffic regulations in the United States (1903) that were concerned not so much with the reduction of congestion as with speed and reckless driving as dangers to safety on the streets, the Estonian document's purpose was mainly to manage the dangers posed by motor vehicles; pedestrians’ responsibilities were not mentioned. ⁴⁹ In addition, later documents such as the 1922 document did not address pedestrians, other than requiring vehicle users to exercise caution in the vicinity of pedestrians: ⁵⁰

Drivers are required to warn, in a timely fashion, pedestrians whom they drive by: motorised vehicles, passenger vehicles, and trucks with relevant horns and horse-drawn vehicles with a shout, and then pass the pedestrian carefully on the left-hand side.

In these regulations, the responsibility for behaviour was firmly on the side of drivers.

However, “the motor revolution”, according to traffic historian Peter Norton, made police in the United States in the 1920s step out of their usual roles as “arbiters of individual traffic conflicts” and take responsibility for the formulation and enforcement of codified traffic rules in an attempt “to bring order out of chaos”. ⁵¹ While rules for pedestrians emerged later than in the United States, pedestrian regulations in Estonia were drafted over the course of the 1930s and eventually required pedestrians to yield to the traffic system.

The increasing codification of driving and walking on city streets was coterminous with the coinage of the word liikleja in Estonian, introduced by the linguist Johannes Veski in 1925 with reference to a dialect of Estonian, from a word meaning “to be connected, related, and in interaction” with other human beings. ⁵² The earlier regulations cited above could not yet avail themselves of such a word. They had placed greater responsibility on car drivers. Increasingly, however, pedestrians, instead of being treated as figures within custom-governed landscapes, have become formalised. The “efficient and docile body” of the pedestrian – now, in fact, an “automated pedestrian” – with rhythms structured by the surrounding environment was thus created at the time when cars were entering the streets and roads. ⁵³ Pedestrians, so deemed “drivers on foot”, are nowadays assigned similar rhythms as those possessed by cars, with certain “technical requirements”: they are supposed to make 90-degree turns (as is attested by the need to cross streets in the least amount of time) or wear a reflector.

The regulated body of such a walker contrasts markedly with how the walker figures in the walking discourse. Here this sort of walker is flexible, immersed in an environment and in sensory contact with the surrounding world through the body. To go even further: the act of walking can be seen as an act tied to thinking, to the entire philosophical realm of thinking via processes and concepts. ⁵⁴ The walker in traffic discourse, conversely, is a mere follower of a behavioural logic that has been written out beforehand, foreordained in advance.

The Estonian regulations nonetheless developed with the new word liikleja being used, as it has remained in use. The word thus enabled a certain conception to manifest itself in traffic discourse. With the new word now in use, further restrictions on pedestrian movement began to emerge. Though Estonian has a word for pedestrian (jalakäija) as well as different words for walking (kõndima, jalutama), the traffic discourse utilised the notion of liikleja to convey a specific logic outlining what pedestrians should do. The country's Traffic Act states that a pedestrian liikleb [a verb form of liikleja] or moves, which is a neutral way of stating, but it does not state that pedestrians walk (kõndima or jalutama). ⁵⁵ This logic, as this paper argues, misses the philosophical, phenomenological and experiential aspects of walking explicated in the walking discourse. ⁵⁶ It is difficult to imagine a regulated pedestrian to be a revolutionary figure in a march, or to see someone navigating detours and traffic lights as the radical figure of a flâneur enjoying urban space.

In 1933, new and more comprehensive traffic rules were introduced in Tallinn, setting out various requirements, mainly for vehicular behaviour on the city's streets (speed limit, one-way streets, etc.). However, the code also contained a set of rules for pedestrians to follow. The city ordinance urged pedestrians to use sidewalks instead of walking or standing in the road space, and it recommended using the sidewalk on the right of the street as well. These regulations on pedestrian behaviour, though minuscule, represented a significant step in treating walkers as part of the traffic system, since pedestrian movement on the street was not left up to custom but was directly regulated. A newspaper article from 1933 explaining those emerging rules noted that pedestrian regulations were necessary because “many accidents resulted from the carelessness of pedestrians who did not at all abide by the accident-avoiding rules”. ⁵⁷ Increasingly, the emerging traffic discourse in 1930s Estonia dictated that pedestrians must walk on sidewalks and not “obstruct the movement of vehicles”. ⁵⁸

Similarly, the police in the 1930s cast blame on those pedestrians who were not careful or were drunk. ⁵⁹ Carelessness, for proponents of the traffic discourse, represents the main cause of accidents. ⁶⁰ Further echoing the modernist machine-oriented narratives of traffic as explicated and criticised in critical accounts of walking discussed before, the Estonian article concludes that there is much to do before “we reach an ideal situation in fast-paced traffic [liikluses]”. ⁶¹

In 1936, the traffic rules that were initially made for Tallinn were applied nationwide. ⁶² They did not yet include a separate section outlining rules for pedestrians, but in various ways, the traffic code had already attempted to regulate pedestrian behaviour. The 1936 code reiterated the requirement that pedestrians should not use road space and give vehicles the right of way. However, it added requirements: pedestrians must cross the road by the shortest route possible and at designated points. The code strictly stresses that pedestrians are not supposed to hinder the mobility of cars. It also requires pedestrians to take due care when crossing streets.

Yet the pedestrian rules were harder to enforce and, indeed, violations by car drivers were more frequently enforced that those of pedestrians. Not only did car enthusiasts worry about pedestrian behaviour; so, too, did governing officials who were responsible for streets and roads: “Experience has shown that pedestrians still do not know the right ways of moving in traffic [liiklusviise] and cause many accidents”. ⁶³

This concern with safety and the responsibility of all road users with written norms that, at that time, were not so strict at least in comparison to what one encounters today prompted the creation of Estonia's first public traffic-safety event in 1938, which lasted a week. It was repeated in May 1939, but the outbreak of World War II pre-empted other such events. In both years, rules for pedestrians were drafted and distributed via leaflets, even though such guidelines were not part of the official traffic code. The 1939 event, for instance, included 12 demands made on pedestrians, featuring forthright statements such as “the road belongs to vehicles, which is why one must be careful before stepping into the road”. ⁶⁴ Similarly, pedestrians were urged not to read newspapers while walking (today's worries about smartphone use echo these concerns of the past). Such a logic of pedestrian regulation, in which their behaviour was regulated much in the same manner as that of cars, was rationalized by noting the weakness of pedestrians – who were also the most prominent road users – and transforming their vulnerability into a sense of responsibility that they were bound to accept. ⁶⁵ The responsibility to exercise caution was thus placed upon the weaker road users – pedestrians – and this meant that their right to road use was marginalised. ⁶⁶ In cities, pedestrians are part of a large “circulation machine” that posits that they negotiate all sorts of elements. ⁶⁷ This perspective resonates with Amato's discussion of how pedestrians were disciplined, akin to the discipline imposed on factory workers (as well as on military personnel) via the processes of industrialisation, turning “hordes of diverse strangers of various regions, languages, professions, body sizes, walks, strides, and gaits” into a “uniform body”. ⁶⁸ One can walk as a form of enjoyment, but one “liikleb” [traffics] only as part of a disciplined system. This discussion highlights the emergence of the understanding that traffic is an organised system whose rules must be followed – and if the rules are not followed, an accident will result.

After the Second World War, the pedestrian was explicitly regulated by the traffic code and a set of punishments was laid out. ⁶⁹ In addition to a special section listing requirements for pedestrian behaviour, including the already known need to walk on the pavement as well as to cross the road as directly and unswervingly as possible, there were also requirements for crossing at designated points, such as at traffic lights. Moreover, a special section listed fines that could be issued to pedestrians – something that had been missing from the regulations of the 1930s. Since the post-war period in Estonia, the requirements for pedestrians have only gotten more precise and prescriptive and arguably stricter. Looking at the number of paragraphs dealing explicitly with pedestrians, we can conclude that today's Traffic Act is stricter in terms of how one should behave (where to cross streets and in what manner, where to walk, etc.) but also on what are the punishments (different fines for infringements). Similarly, we can see the critical perceptions of pedestrian behaviour by officials as outlined at the beginning of this vignette.

Conclusion: The walking discourse against normative pedestrians in the traffic discourse

This article highlighted the traffic discourse that casts pedestrians as subjected to the traffic system, at once mechanised elements – cogs in the machine, in a sense – and disciplined negotiators of the traffic machine. While the discussion revealed similar lines of thinking about traffic regulations in Estonia as one finds in the existing literature based on the North American and Western European experiences, it also highlighted the locally rooted use of those discourses. It did so by, first, showing a novel term employed to capture the users of the traffic system and, second, the intense formalisation of walking, emphasised by the discourse of regulators in Estonia. This highlights that the traffic discourse is persuasive not only by its usefulness for approaching the traffic as a machine but also by its cultural rootedness that historically has appeared through discursive inventions such as the word liikleja. The novel word liikleja denotes the artificial fragmentation of human activity, separating interactions on the move from other interactions and subsuming the former under norms and rules codified in the traffic code and doing all those with language as a way of mediating means. This perspective was explicated here through a study of regulations that emerged in Estonia in the 1920s and 1930s, which preceded a similar discourse, that of contemporary regulators.

Such logic is encapsulated perhaps most strongly in the logic of a device – the safety reflector – that is compulsory for pedestrians in Estonia, and thus highlights the logic of traffic as a machinic system with pedestrians cast as automatic devices. On the one hand, the norm of wearing a safety reflector makes pedestrians akin to “drivers on foot”. Technical preparedness is required from pedestrians, just as it is from cars (via good brakes, etc.). However, the compulsory use of safety reflectors in traffic also highlights how the logic of traffic resembles that of a factory assembly line, as discussed by Hornsey. ⁷⁰ It is noteworthy that in industrial sites, for instance, clothing is often equipped with reflective materials. Thus, requiring a particular item on clothing places pedestrians within the framework of a system of traffic in a very specific role: that of a careful rule-follower.

With the advent of autonomous vehicles and the challenges to align these technologies with the behaviour of pedestrians, the critique of the systemic logic of traffic and its associated normative pedestrians might be even more apt than ever before. ⁷¹ Future research could thus delve deeper into the traffic machine as something potentially shaped and significantly altered by new autonomous technologies. It is still unclear how power relations in the city streets will play out bearing in mind technological trends – including autonomous vehicles but also other technologies such as smart crossings – but also shifting ideas on sustainable and resilient cities. The latter puts 15-minute cities focused on good design and a compact environment at the centre, supposedly thus favouring walking at the expense of driving. Nevertheless, even such practical design-focused approaches are not attentive enough to walking in its truly diverse meanings and relations as captured in the walking discourse.

This article has aimed to open up our understandings and conceptions about what and who the pedestrian is. It argued for walking discourse as the pathway to a more holistic view, in line with walking studies that note the many aspects that make pedestrians more than mere traffic subjects. A pedestrian, then, might not only be a road user, as embedded in the notion of liikleja in Estonian, but also someone engaging with the world in a more embodied and holistic manner. A walker, seen in such a holistic fashion, participates in the sociality of streets and represents something more than what the traffic discourse normalising the notion of liikleja in Estonia has prescribed. I will conclude here with a quote from Solnit's Wanderlust that aptly captures the multifaceted side of walking discourse putting walking at the centre of being in connection with one's surroundings:

Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human nature, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them – drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes – that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are travelled still. ⁷²