The fight for the future of the city street between pedestrians,
street railways, and promoters of the automobile between 1915 and
1930.
Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse
and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most
streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not
belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In
Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles,
the American city required not only a physical change but also a social
one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists,
its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists
belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes
violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to
define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in
the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a
broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or
"speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers
the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become
"traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers
(who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile
promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral
terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to
regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest
groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking
"freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.
Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the
automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological
change.
