If the temporalities of infrastructure are socially produced and relational, how might alternative temporalities be brought into being? The intimate connections between speed and power and between power and automobility mean that street infrastructure is typically allocated and regulated to prioritize speed for those in cars, and in doing so tends to produce slowness for others. Yet these claims and connections are not fixed. This chapter explores a range of activities designed to rework the temporalities of infrastructure on the streets of San Francisco, California. I focus on two practices: prefiguring, in which activists quietly and anonymously make unsanctioned ‘improvements’ to city streets in an effort to speed up the provision of protected infrastructure for walking and cycling; and heckling, in which activists loudly and comically redirect traffic so as to highlight and challenge the degree to which speed in cars is paid for by slowness outside them. While heckling is often controversial, I use this loaded term deliberately to emphasize the power relations at stake. Like hecklers, protests disrupting traffic are frequently frowned upon, and successful interventions must be skilful and sophisticated. The central claim in both sets of practices is the same: the temporalities of street infrastructure are not inevitable but are instead the result of choices that could be changed – and that change can be fast.

Infrastructure and automobility

The control of infrastructure connects to the control of time, enabling the powerful to be fast, and rendering the powerless slow (Wajcman and Dodd, 2016). The intimate connections between infrastructure, time, and power are clearly apparent on streets, making these a frequent site of conflict (Hubbard and Lilley, 2004; Cresswell, 2006; Norton, 2011). Streets are ubiquitous, encompassing a third of all developed urban land worldwide (Southworth and Ben-Joseph, 2013: 5). Far beyond the journey, differential access to speed on streets results in vast differences in social and economic opportunities, from access to employment and education, to health and life expectancy (Sheller, 2018). Much of the conflict over streets centres on the place of cars, recognizing that the emphasis on speed and mobility for those inside cars has produced slowness and immobility for others.