Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

Peter D. Norton, University of Virginia
2008. MIT Press. 396 pp. $35.

“Before 1920 American pedestrians crossed streets wherever they wished, walked in them, and let their children play in them,” writes Peter Norton in his new book. {70} They weren’t crazy to do that. The automobile was still an unwelcome newcomer on the public’s streets. One St. Louis newspaper published a cartoon in which a driver kneels to offer human sacrifice to a gigantic gape-mouthed automobile, the “Modern Moloch.” A competing newspaper editorialized that no motorist could plead “unavoidable accident” after striking a child who darted into the street. Such a claim, it said, would be “the perjury of a murderer.” {28, 29} Baltimore, New York, and Pittsburgh held public memorial ceremonies for children killed in accidents (mostly in traffic) — complete with inscribed temporary monuments and “White Star Mothers.” {39-45} Charles Price of the National Safety Council urged cities to “make their traffic regulations more and more rigid till they can point to low death rates from automobile accidents. … automobile traffic must be slowed down and controlled until it becomes safe.” {35, 96, 139f.}

It seems like another world, and it was. We have to think our way back into it because common sense was different then. “Today,” writes Norton, “we tend to regard streets as motor thoroughfares, and we tend to project this construction back to pre-automotive streets. In retrospect, therefore, the use of streets for children’s play (for example) can seem obviously wrong, and thus the departure of children from streets with the arrival of automobiles can seem an obvious and simple necessity. Only when we can see the prevailing social construction of the street from the perspective of its own time can we also see the car as the intruder. Until we do, not only will we fail to understand the violent revolution in street use circa 1915-1930, we will not even see it. This is why the full scale of the wave of blood, grief, and anger in American city streets in the 1920s has eluded notice.” {2} (emphasis added)

By 1930 or so, common sense had largely been reversed: streets were for automobiles first and for others on sufferance (“cross on the green”). Even so, streets and cities were beginning to be rebuilt to suit automobiles better and pedestrians not at all.

How did this happen? Norton covers the whole cast of characters: dead children, grieving parents, schools, safety councils, police, auto clubs, auto manufacturers, pedestrians, street railways, planners, traffic engineers, and highway engineers. In chronologically overlapping chapters he depicts the ebb and flow of the decade’s battles. One turning point came in 1923-24, when two events galvanized automobile partisans into united action as “motordom” (an awkward coinage that Norton revives). First, auto sales declined in those years, suggesting that the market for automobiles might have become saturated. Second, Cincinnati held a referendum on a proposal to require speed governors on cars. {153f., 95f.}

The forces of motordom united in response to these threats, turned them back, and then went on the offensive. They adopted the rhetoric of “freedom,” and to back it up, they bought the necessary engineering expertise (although Norton doesn’t put it so bluntly).

To engineers, the problem with street traffic looked a lot like water, gas, sewage, and other urban public utilities for which they had successfully devised “ways to manage heavy loads on city service networks of limited capacity.” {105} Streetcars were far more efficient at moving people around town than the equivalent number of private automobiles could ever be. As a result, writes Norton, “In most cities for most of the 1920s, engineers fought traffic by restricting the private automobile,” treating it “as an abuse of the street as a public service.” {125} Traffic control expert Miller McClintock said in 1925 that “all traffic accidents can be reduced to one cause, that is, too great speed under a given set of conditions.” {234-5} His book, Street Traffic Control, opposed widening streets because they would just fill up and remain equally congested. Building a separate set of elevated streets would be too expensive. Instead, he wrote, “it seems desirable to give trolley cars the right of way under general conditions.” {163-167}

Then automobile manufacturer Studebaker created the Albert Russel Erskine Bureau for Street Traffic Research, funded it, hired McClintock to run it, and in 1926 ensconced it at Harvard University as a seemingly disinterested expert authority. Norton doesn’t explain this last trick, but he knows what happened next: “McClintock’s traffic control principles soon evolved; his definition of efficiency changed and he began to attack the ‘floor space’ problem” – no longer seeking ways to use existing streets most efficiently, but ways to remake the city to suit the automobile. By 1930 McClintock was advocating elevated streets and proposing that speed limits be abolished altogether – and educating a new generation to think likewise. {234-235} “Engineers no longer manipulated traffic demands in the name of efficiency, as their predecessors had sought to do,” concludes Norton. “Their job was to identify demands and supply them.” {243}

Streets had quickly evolved from public spaces into commodities, with only one legitimate customer. In 1927 a committee met to draw up a model city traffic ordinance. Chicago street railway engineer E.J. McIlraith proposed that it include the previously standard phrase that cities seek “the greatest good for the greatest number.” The motordom-dominated committee rejected his proposal. Henceforth efficiency would be measured by the greatest good for the greatest number…of cars.

In the decades since, traffic and highway engineers have been much scorned for their single-minded devotion to automobility. Norton’s careful work reminds us that the best engineering judgment, pre-purchase, was quite otherwise. That judgment was quietly dropped, not refuted.

Norton doesn’t write as a partisan; in fact, he does an exemplary job of refuting dogmatic views on both sides: on the right, that cars were destined to win out because they were in demand and more efficient, and on the left, that they were foisted on an unwilling public by a conspiracy of corporations. Both are too simple. The battle for public opinion had to be fought precisely because it was not a foregone conclusion. Norton’s great contribution is to remind us that it was fought, and why it had to be.

“To safety reformers, to pedestrians angry at motorists, and to grieving parents, the street was their space — a place to alight from a streetcar, a place to walk, a place to play. In this traditional construction of the city street, motorists could never escape suspicion as dangerous intruders. While this perception prevailed, the motor age could not come to the American city.” {46}