Highway Roadblock as Protest Tactic

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Highway Roadblock as Protest Tactic

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Wed Nov 23, 2016 11:26 am

Placeholder until I sort this one out, but I need to sort this one out. The recent prevalence of protesters blocking highways has me curious. It's so stupid and counter-productive; yet suddenly such a persistent pattern. I am curious as to why.

Via: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/10 ... ys/381963/

Reaction to the protest was decidedly mixed among Atlantans, with some people going on Twitter to criticize the action with comments such as, “I support the protests in #Ferguson, but why are they shutting down a highway in Atlanta so that BLACK folks can't get home from work?” and “Look, I get standing in solidarity w/ #Ferguson, but #Atlanta traffic is already bad. So yeah, if you're stuck in that, I'm POd w/ you.”

Blocking city streets has been an urban protest tactic since there were urban protests. In the European revolutions of 1848, barricades made out of stones and other construction material became the front lines in cities around the continent, where great masses of ordinary people rebelled against the old social order. Almost 200 years later, during the Occupy movement, the old standby chant of “Whose streets? Our streets!” became ubiquitous once again. In Hong Kong, the blocking of city streets by pro-democracy protesters has caused frustration among many residents, and even sparked violent backlash.

Blocking major roads in the United States, however, is much more rare. Most notably, the Selma to Montgomery marches that were pivotal in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s used U.S. Route 80, a move that was upheld in a ruling by Federal District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. His opinion was deeply controversial at the time: "The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups,” said the judge, “and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways."



Via: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... s-protest/

The latest blockades, after a week in which graphic videos documented the police-involved deaths of Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, follow dozens of others over the past two years. Protesters in Chicago have blocked Lake Shore Drive. In New York, they've gnarled traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. In Washington, they've targeted the 14th Street Bridge.

Researchers at the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University, in a forthcoming study, counted more than 1,400 protests in nearly 300 U.S. and international cities related to the Black Lives Matter movement from November 2014 through May 2015. Half or more of the protests in that time in Saint Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., wound up shutting down transportation infrastructure.

"We systematically show that the political protest today is now almost totally focused on transportation systems, whether it’s a road, a bridge, in some cases a tunnel — rather than buildings," said Mitchell Moss, the director of the center and one of the authors of the study.

He draws a contrast with the occupations of schools, restaurants and administrative offices that commonly occurred during protests in the 1960s and 1970s, as an earlier generation rallied against segregated lunch counters or the Vietnam War.


Via: http://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen ... 775567.php

...the Bay Area has its own tradition of shutting things down on the major bridges.

In January 1991, thousands of war protesters shut down the Bay Bridge for almost two hours during a furious day of demonstrations that led to 600 arrests and injuries.

But maybe the most famous bridge protest was in January 1989, when members of the San Francisco group Stop AIDS Now or Else shut down traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge for more than an hour. It’s amazing to read the stories from that time — you can substitute the quotes from “angry commuters” in this week’s stories with no dissonance at all.

“We thought long and hard about whether it was the right time for that tactic,” said Kate Raphael, a former member of the group that was on the bridge that day. “We definitely only did it because we were in a crisis, but the general public was unaware of the depth of the emergency.”

Raphael also told me that while they were “very afraid” to be out there on the bridge, and that some people were extremely angry — “One guy brandished a knife,” she remembered — others understood the message.
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Re: Highway Roadblock as Protest Tactic

Postby tapitsbo » Wed Nov 23, 2016 8:05 pm

Protests that shut down cargo shipping (with its giant environmental and economic footprint) interestingly seem more rare
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Re: Highway Roadblock as Protest Tactic

Postby Grizzly » Sat Nov 26, 2016 1:51 am



“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Highway Roadblock as Protest Tactic

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:27 am

Protesting within modern urban infrastructure requires this tactic at a minimum or at least something like it. Even our non-permitted marches turn into parades.

This being the data dump, let me try to back this up. First, two trends:
Image
vs.
Image

We saw mass occupation of public urban pedestrian thoroughfares back in late 2011 and early 2012 to little effect other than a small psychological shift which are now bearing a little more fruit. What captured society's attention were the times that those occupations left the encampments and general assemblies in the parks away from the roads and disrupted commutes. The commute, of Goofy "Motor Mania" lore, has only become more of a holy american sacrament in the intervening 67 years, as evidenced by the above charts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZAZ_xu0DCg

Kshama Sawant calls for shutting down highways on May Day and cites the mass disruption at the airports. While I acknowledge that we tried to disrupt modern life at the airports during Muslim Ban pt. I, self-critique tells me that we didn't really. Our group, even the tough and confrontational sit-in where we exchanged words with the chief of police via a megaphone, was shepherded by police into a remote corner of the international terminal with no pedestrian egress. The "march" was a corralled parade.

Here is a reactionary piece from local Seattle media covering Sawant:
…Councilmember Kshama Sawant is adding fuel to the annual May Day demonstrations in Seattle by promoting workplace disruptions and shutting down highways and airports.…

“The ‘chaos’ we created at the nation’s airports gives a hint of what’s possible,” Sawant wrote in reference to the protests that immediately followed Trump’s travel ban executive order.

“…we need to think deeply about where our strength lies and how to create disruption on an even greater scale,” she wrote.

The column is the latest in a recent trend of Sawant calling for protests, strikes and other demonstrations in the wake of Trump’s election. In November, she requested a “wall of mass resistance.” She also called for a nation-wide shutdown. More recently, she put out a call for a rally following the detainment of a DACA-protected immigrant.

But the councilmember gets more specific in her most recent effort to “create disruption on an even greater scale.” May Day is the next mass demonstration she promotes.

May Day is already a day of mass demonstrations in cities across the United States. In Seattle, however, it has become a day known for violent and destructive marches through downtown. An annual, peaceful immigrant and worker march takes place during the day on May 1. But that message is generally lost as anarchists usually descend upon downtown during the evening. The result is often broken windows, damaged property, and police responding with pepper spray and blast balls. In fact, additional officers from neighboring police departments are called into Seattle to manage the demonstrations.

Sawant’s call to action does not promote violence or damage, rather highlights disrupting the economy, stating, “working people have enormous potential power to shut down the profits of big business by taking action in their workplaces like slowdowns, sickouts, and strikes.”

For the 2017 May Day demonstration, Sawant is also asking for greater actions targeted at shutting down infrastructure. She writes:
Let’s use the coming weeks to begin planning for workplace actions as well a mass peaceful civil disobedience that shuts down highways, airports, and other key infrastructure. Students can organize walkouts in their schools to send a powerful message that youth reject Trump’s racism and misogyny.


http://www.kiro7.com/news/local/kshama- ... /496453959

The last time I tried to shut down a highway was in protest of the murder of Freddie Gray almost two years ago and we were met with a massive phalanx of police, trucks, and motorcycles blocking the ramp. Shutting down the highway was pretty much the number one goal of that protest and it failed.
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Re: Highway Roadblock as Protest Tactic

Postby stefano » Thu Mar 23, 2017 3:40 pm

Just saw this now - not sure why you think it's counterproductive, Wombat? Big in Algeria, they do it all the time.
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