When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders

With government backing, behavior had shifted entirely by 1930, and the default was that streets were for cars, and pedestrians should limit themselves to crosswalks. The industry had successfully changed attitudes from always blaming the driver to assuming any collision was an unavoidable accident and probably the fault of a reckless pedestrian—an

In December 1924, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, convened the first National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, with the aim of drawing up a set of safety rules that could be used across the country. The industry got Hoover to water down his initial hostility toward cars and installed its own representatives on the key committees

Under the banner of road safety and pedestrian education, cars had taken over the streets. Walking in the street had gone from being a right to being wrong.

Of course cars burn gasoline that could be used to make food. Of course they are dangerous and costly. But the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way. Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remot