Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Inside Technology Series) [Paperback]

The product description is good, except that it wasn't just an anti-automobile "campaign" exactly. Streets had always been public places, open to all comers under reasonable public regulation. Automobiles were fast, deadly, unregulated intruders in this world. Yet "common sense" was reversed 180 degrees in two decades.

Norton has documented a forgotten history that is more complicated, and more interesting, than the after-the-fact "consumer demand" theory of the right and the corporate conspiracy theories of the left. Another piece of the story is that traffic engineers weren't always automobile promoters. At the beginning, they used impartial efficiency models that showed the obvious: streetcars were far more efficient users of public streets than private cars. (Full review at http://buildingcommunities.nd.edu/news)

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. By Peter D. Norton. Published 2008 by MIT.

Review by Dom Nozzi

This book is provocative, exceptionally enlightening, and a must-read for all pedestrian and bicycle professionals, urban designers, traffic engineers, elected and appointed officials.

Another title that the author could have considered to accurately describe the message of this book is "The Fall of the Pedestrian Street."

The book is an analysis of how the American street, its perceived purpose, and its design paradigm has been transformed over the past century. Up until the dawn of the 20th Century, the rights of and sympathy for the pedestrian were supreme. Street rules (to the extent that any existed) and street design were focused on pedestrian travel.

The emergence of the motor vehicle, however, radically changed all of this.

Motorists and auto makers united and organized in the first few decades of the 20th Century to overthrow the prevailing paradigm of the street. As motor vehicles started to be found on streets, they were quickly seen as inefficiently consuming an enormous amount of space. And combined with their horsepower, weight, and high speeds, motor vehicles were soon killing an alarmingly high number of pedestrians--particularly children and seniors.

Huge numbers of citizens at this time rallied to fight against the motor vehicle. There was a consensus that in a crash, the motorist was always at fault and the pedestrian (particularly children) were innocent. The media regularly faulted motorists for being "speed maniacs." And "murderers." Particularly in Cincinnati, there was a strong campaign to require cars to have "governors," which would not allow a car to be driven over 25 mph.

The growing number of motorists and auto makers became alarmed that the "freedom" and speed of car travel was being threatened by these nationwide campaigns. "Motordom" united, and in the course of a few decades, completely transformed the American transportation paradigm.

First, they succeeded in convincing the public that the car itself was not to blame for crashes. Nor was the problem due to speed. Instead, the motorist lobby succeeded in (falsely) convincing Americans that the problem was entirely due to "reckless" motorists. The lobby also achieved another crucial victory: No longer were pedestrians always innocent in crashes. Increasingly, the lobby convinced us that "reckless" pedestrians were often at fault.

Instead of motorists being vilified as speed maniacs, the new villain became the "jaywalker," a derogatory term that assigned blame to pedestrians who were irresponsibly crossing streets in unexpected locations (as they had done throughout history). Unexpected, carefree walking had become an incompatible public safety threat in the age of high-speed car travel. It was essential that uncontrolled pedestrians not using their designated crosswalks be seen as irresponsibly unsafe and immoral.

So the paradigm shift managed to reshape our thinking. Cars and car speeds are not a problem. What is needed, instead of slowing cars, is to vigorously prosecute "reckless" motorists and be vigilant in urging pedestrians to be careful. Comprehensive public safety education campaigns must teach all of us (particularly children) to be careful near roads. And to insist that pedestrians (and playing children) be kept out of the way of cars by keeping them off roads--or at least confined to intersection crosswalks.

Thus, the "forgiving street" (what the author calls the "foolproof street") was born. Dominating street design for nearly 100 years, this paradigm strives to design streets not to be safe and convenient for all users (including bicyclists, pedestrians and transit users), but to keep all non-motorized travelers out of the way of freedom- (and speed) loving American motorists. Streets are to be designed for safe driving at high speeds. And because forgiving street designers assume we will always have reckless drivers, streets must be designed to forgive reckless, inattentive driving. Grade separated intersections are needed. As are pedestrian skywalks. Move street trees and buildings and pedestrians away from the street.

The ultimate result, after several decades of this new motorist speed paradigm, has been an annual roadway death rate that remains extremely high. High levels of speeding and inattentive driving. Streets that are designed and safely usable only by cars, instead of being Complete Streets accessible to all. Unimaginably high levels of car dependency, heavy and worsening congestion, plummeting quality of life, a near absence of pedestrians, bicyclists and transit users, endless suburban sprawl and strip commercial, and declining downtowns.

I'm certain the author would agree with me that an essential task for safety and quality of life is to return our communities to a lower-speed environment. And this must largely be achieved not through laws against speeders or speed limit signs, but through the design of streets that effectively ratchets down urban travel speed via such tactics as human-scaled dimensions to achieve traffic calming--and Monderman's "shared space" concept (what I like to call "attentive" streets). High-speed car traffic is simply incompatible with the human habitat.

This is not a call to re-vilify cars, but to reshape our world to obligate motorists to behave themselves.

Fighting Traffic is a remarkable and important book. Many visions of change are inspired by travel--when we are transported to other worlds of possibility. Many Americans get the bug of inspiration when they visit walkable European cities. But Norton transports us through time travel, to our own world where our public space and streets operated according to different expectations.

Norton's own inspiration came from living in the archives of photos that preceded contemporary streets. Scenes depicted therein were a stark contrast from the present-day, and he sought to understand that social transformation. In so doing, he puts on display the tangle of struggles involved in overturning the existing order of the city.

His meticulous account of this journey from 1910 to 1930 is so rich and layered with theory of cultural and technological change that there is no substitution for reading the entire book. The rise of "Motordom" is told as a story of upending the world through transformations in language and justice.

Since reading the book, I've wanted to relate the story to friends. But I find it difficult to encapsulate my experience or summarize without leaving out key parts of the story. To me, few books succeed in making use of their medium the way this one does. Put simply, there is no substitute for reading Fighting Traffic. This is not a book that could have been published as an article. Norton has truly lived in this material and he has woven it together compellingly. Reading the book completely can shift your perspective on traffic on a fundamental level.

Fighting Traffic also succeeds in providing valuable concepts that explain technological change. In particular, it shows describes three phases found with other innovations: conflict, utility, and imagination. He also provides this account of how the auto lobby, or "Motordom", succeeded in redefining the problem of fatalities. Rather than the automobile being the cause of children being maimed and killed, Motordom succeeded in defining the problem as people being in the streets--a bias that still holds a tight grip on us. In adopting that frame, people sacrificed their right to use the streets unless driving or riding in a motor vehicle.

The focus on just two decades of 1910-1930 is also quite vital in his success. Other books that deliver the car culture retrospective often span a half century or more. Reflecting on this, I see that when a historical account covers an expansive swath in time, the reader is left feeling that change was from technological momentum and fatalism--that the world had to turn out this way. (Indeed, I recall coming away with that feeling from other long span books, even when the narrative specifically argued against the inevitability of the outcome.) Fighting Traffic's focus on a shorter segment presents insights into the more rapid processes of cultural acclimation and framing that typically precede proliferation of new inventions.

Readers of Fighting Traffic see the way streets and the automobile's claim to it were shaped in the 1920s. After seeing who maneuvered for this outcome and what was usurped, it reveals the ugly face underlying Americans' over-accommodating relationship to cars. In telling this story, Norton also provides tools that I think serve as the means to deconstruct the present order.

I found the book devoid of rants or tiresome fatalism, but stocked with seeds for planting more livable communities. Fighting Traffic may serve as a guidebook to bringing home the change from our travels to other possibilities. This guidebook is needed if we are to create streets as shared spaces and if we are to revitalize the public realm.