Description
Reading responses should be no more than two pages. the reading response should be in a short essay format (including an introduction and a conclusion paragraph). It has to be single-spaced and the title page and/or references do not count against the page limit. Here is what needs to be answered.
a) Identify and discuss the main thesis of the author(s): what they are arguing and what they found. (3 points)
b) Why did the author(s) write this material? (1 points)
c) What competing perspectives might exist to this reading response? Have others found similar results and/or arrived at similar conclusions? In particular, how does this reading compare to other assigned readings? (4 points)
d) Did the reading lead you to have broader questions (e.g. about transportation policy)? (2 points)
THERE ARE 3 READINGS. TWO OF THEM ARE PDS WHICH ARE MENTIONED DOWN BELOW.
Readings:
– Flyvbjerg, Bent, Mette Skamris Holm, and Soren Buhl. 2002. “Underestimating Costs in Public Works Projects: Error or Lie?” Journal of the American Planning Assocation, Vol. 68, No. 3, pp. 279-295.
– Standage, Tom. 2021. “Who Owns the Streets?” in A Brief History of Motion, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York.
– Morris, Eric. 2007. “From Horse Power to Horsepower.” Access Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 30, pp. 2-9. https://escholarship.org/content/qt6sm968t2/qt6sm9…
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Tom Standage
Bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses
A BRIEF
HISTORYoF
MOTION
From the Wheel,
to the Car, to What Comes Next
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BLOOMSBURY PUBLISH ING
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHI NG, and the Diana logo are trademarks
of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in the United States 2021
Copyright © Tom Standage, 2021
All rights reserved . No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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no responsibility for any such changes.
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ISBN: H B: 978-1-63557-361-9; eBook: 978- 1-63557-362-6
24681097531
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CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Wheels in the Ancient World
2. Your Carriage Awaits
IX
l
3. Under One’s Own Steam
4. The Rubber Hits the Road
5. You Are What You Drive
6. Who Owns the Streets?
7. The Road to Suburbia
8. Car Culture
9. The Fall and Rise of the Electric Car
IO. All Hail the Ride
II. From Horseless to Driverless
12. The Road Ahead
I7
31
51
69
88
ro8
129
146
168
184
203
Acknowledgments
Notes
Sources
Image Credits
Index
219
221
227
235
237
6
Who Owns the Streets?
The obvious solution. … lies on.ly in a radical revision of our conception
of what a city street is for.
– EN GINEERING NE WS-REC ORD, 1922
“THE AUTOMOBILE HAS TASTED BLOOD”
On the evening of September 13, 1899, Henry H. Bliss, a New York real
estate broker, stepped off a streetcar as it came to a halt at the junction
of Central Park West and Seventy-fourth Street. Bliss, a well-known
figure in the business community, had been on a date, and as he turned
to help his companion down from the vehicle, he was hit by a passing
automobile and caught beneath its wheels. He was taken to a nearby
hospital but died of his injuries a few hours later. He was the first pedestrian to be killed by an automobile in the United States.
The driver of the car, Arthur Smith, was arrested and charged with
homicide. He insisted that the collision was unavoidable. He had been
swerving to avoid a heavy truck, and Bliss had stepped directly into his
path. “The Automobile has Tasted Blood,” declared one newspaper headline. But most papers referred to Bliss’s death as an accident, rather than
WHO OWNS THE STREETS?
blaming automobiles in general or Smith in particular (the charges against
him were dropped, on the basis that Bliss’s death was unintentional).
Under the headline “Fatally Hurt by Automobile,” the New York Times
noted that incident had occurred on a road known as Dangerous Stretch
because of the many accidents that had taken place there over the summer.
But a pedestrian being killed by an automobile was something new.
Bliss was not, in fact, the first such victim. In 1896 an Englishwoman,
Bridget Driscoll, had been knocked down and fatally injured by a petrolpowered car in London. Its driver, like Arthur Smith, was arrested but
released without charge; the coroner who examined Driscoll’s body said
he hoped “such a thing would never happen again.” But happen again it
did, and the death toll rose steadily in the early years of the twentieth
century as cars proliferated.
One reason was that automobiles were faster and less predictable when
compared with horse-drawn vehicles, which could not change direction
quickly, or with horsecars and streetcars, whose courses were predetermined by the rails they ran on. It did not help that most drivers in this
period were, by necessity, inexperienced. There were no restrictions on
who could drive motor vehicles, drivers were unfamiliar with the behavior
of vehicles traveling at speed, and there were no laws against driving while
intoxicated with alcohol. A more fundamental change was that the pattern
of street use was also in flux. Having long been shared by pedestrians and
horse-drawn vehicles, and used as public spaces where children played
and pushcart vendors plied their trade, streets were now having to make
room for increasing numbers of streetcars, cyclists, and, most of all,
automobiles.
The result was a much more chaotic environment, particularly in
America, which was home to the vast majority of the world’s cars in the
early twentieth century. As their numbers shot up, so did the number of
fatalities on American roads, from thirty-six in 1900 to eleven thousand
in 1920. The questions raised by Bliss’s death in 1899 were a taste of things
to come. Who was to blame for accidents, and were they really unavoidable? How could the roads be regulated to square the needs of drivers
with the safety of other road users? The debate over road safety that played
out in America during the 1920s led to rules and conventions that were
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOTION
subsequently adopted around the world and are still in force a century
later. Everyone alive today has grown up with these rules, and it is difficult to imagine things working any other way. Street furniture, including
traffic lights and signs, was also introduced to regulate the flow of both
cars and pedestrians. The events of the 1920s reshaped the relationship
between people and vehicles, and the nature of city streets, in ways that
have persisted ever since.
CHILDREN VERSUS CARS
Most of those killed on America’s roads in the early twentieth century
were pedestrians, and most of those pedestrians were children. Although
drivers involved in fatal accidents faced heavy fines and were often charged
with manslaughter, such sanctions seemed to have little effect. As the
death toll rose, public outrage found expression in hostile newspaper
coverage of dangerous drivers. Reports of accidents frequently contrasted
the innocence of victims (whether children, young women, or the elderly)
with the guilt of drivers (often drunk, speeding, or criminals fleeing the
scene of a crime). “In the view of some of the press, the automobile is
today a juggernaut, a motoring speed-monster, intent on killing and
maiming all who stand in its way,” one chronicler of the industry noted
with despair in 1916. Drivers were depicted as deliberate “killers” or
“murderers.” Cartoons showed the grim reaper behind the wheel.
Pedestrians complained that cars had invaded the streets and deprived
them of their former rights and freedoms. Because people had previously
been free to step into the streets whenever they liked, the onus was on
motorists, as newcomers, to avoid collisions-so drivers were widely
assumed to be at fault in any accident.
Safety campaigners organized marches in many American cities, calling
on motorists to exercise more caution. The National Safety Council
(NSC), an existing body that oversaw workplace safety, expanded its remit
to address road safety as well. Many women joined its affiliated local councils to campaign for safer roads and greater protection for children,
transforming a business-oriented organization into something more like
90
WHO OWNS THE STREETS?
NATION R01,JSED AGAINST. MOTOR KILLINGS
ISec:retarj
Hoover’a ~~ n c c Will ~Sua:~t .Many Ways to Check The! •
Alanni:n& lni;:reaae Automobile Fata.lit:iee..-Studyihc Huge Probk:.m ·1
o(
Illustration depicting cars as killing machines, New York Times,
November 23, 1924.
a social movement. Cities began to observe “Safety First” weeks, in which
local chambers of commerce, the police, Boy Scouts, schools, churches,
and newspapers worked together with safety councils and local auto clubs
to promote road safety. Auto clubs took part because they were keen to
be seen as part of the solution, not part of the problem; they blamed
accidents on a small number of inconsiderate drivers. The expansion of
road-safety campaigns in America was overseen by Charles Price, a former
salesman who was put in charge of reducing accidents at an agriculturalmachinery company. Price swiftly reinvented himself as a safety expert
and had become head of the NSC in 1919. Regular safety campaigns were
taking place in fifty American cities by 1923 .
As well as demonizing dangerous drivers, safety campaigns also memorialized children, like soldiers who had fallen in war. Detroit adopted the
custom of ringing church bells after each road death, and announcing
the victim’s name in schools . In Memphis, the safety council put up a
black flag wherever a child was killed on the roads. Baltimore’s innovation, in 1922, was a giant monument in wood and plaster, twenty-five feet
tall, painted to resemble a stone war memorial and bearing the names of
130 children killed by cars in the previous year. That same year New York
held a safety procession of 10,000 children, including a “memorial division” of 1,054 children, each of whom represented an accident victim
killed during 1921. A delegation of Boy Scouts carried a papier-mache
91
A BRIEF HISTORY O F MOTION
tombstone, and open-top cars conveyed children who had been maimed
in road accidents. The safety parade in Washington, D.C., included a
group dressed up as shroud-wearing corpses; that in Louisville had models
of coffins and skeletons. In St. Louis, an airship dropped flowers around
a newly unveiled safety monument as a band played a dirge. “Drivers of
automobiles must be taught to adhere to the doctrines of the St. Louis
Safety Council,” said the mayor in his speech.
Yet although everyone supported the idea of safety, there was no
consensus about exactly what that meant in practice. To keep the unlikely
coalition of campaigners, industry interests, and car clubs together, safety
campaigns were rather vague, emphasizing the importance of caution and
adherence to local safety rules. But these rules varied widely, as different
cities took different approaches. In many places, the police imposed speed
limits, typically of IO mph or less, though these were difficult to enforce,
and in some cases were so low that they could not be obeyed without
causing cars’ engines to stall. Some cities experimented with one-way
streets to regulate the flow of traffic; in others, horse-drawn vehicles were
given right of way over motor vehicles. Whether motorists had to defer
to pedestrians, or vice versa, also varied from place to place or was left
unspecified beyond general appeals to common sense and “safety first.”
Little wonder the result was deadly chaos.
SILENT POLICEMEN AND MILWAUKEE MUSHROOMS
Efforts to formalize the rules of the road had first begun in 1900 in New
York, which led the way because it had the most vehicles of any American
city-and because it was the home town of an eccentric billionaire with
an unusual obsession for traffic regulation. William Phelps Eno inherited
a fortune in 1899 from his father, and rather than going into the family
real estate business, he devoted himself instead to the cause of road safety,
publishing a manifesto on the topic in January 1900. Though few motor
vehicles were on the streets in New York, he could see that automobiles
were likely to grow in number and wanted to preempt any problems that
might arise. He was confident that ” properly understood and regulated,
several times the present traffic in our streets could go on with less delay,
92
WHO OWNS THE STREETS?
d
a
::nore safety and more comfort than what there is now.” Eno established
himself as an expert in “scientific” traffic management, despite having
dropped out of college and having no formal qualifications.
In 1903 he had one hundred thousand copies printed of his four-page
pamphlet, “Rules of Driving,” after officials in New York City agreed to
distribute it and adopt its rules. Eno’s motto was ex chao ordo (order from
chaos), and his rules chiefly consisted of a formalization of existing
customs. Motorists were directed to drive on the right and pass on the
left; to use hand signals when turning; to yield to emergency vehicles;
and not to exceed a “safe and proper” speed (though no actual figure
was given). But Eno also threw in a few ideas of his own. His most
important innovation was the notion of the “wide” or “outside” turnthat when turning left, drivers should not simply swerve across the road
and cut off the corner, but turn as late as possible, as though driving
around an imaginary post in the center of the road. Indeed, at Eno’s
suggestion, posts were installed at some junctions in New York in 1904
as a reminder of “the necessity of passing around the central point.”
As other cities began to adopt traffic regulations of their own, they
borrowed some of Eno’s rules from New York, and in particular that of
the outside left turn, which became standard practice. In 1915, as part
of the mobilization for the First World War, national traffic rules were
drawn up for the first time, and Eno got the outside left turn included.
This prompted many cities to install posts or signs in the center of intersections, often marked with the words KEEP TO THE RIGHT. This was the
first example of street furniture that told drivers what to do, instead of
assuming they were familiar with the local traffic rules. By specifying
the path a vehicle should take as it rounded a corner, and forcing it to
slow down, these signs, which came to be known as silent policemen,
improved safety for pedestrians. They were also much cheaper than
stationing a police officer to act as a “cornerman” to regulate traffic at a
busy junction, something that many cities were starting to find increasingly costly.
But although there was general agreement about the outside left turn,
the devices used to enforce it varied from one city to another, confusing
motorists who ventured away from their hometown. “If we were to
93
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOTION
collect specimens of traffic control devices from those cities where traffic
regulation is active, we could fill a museum with signs and signals, no
two of which would be alike in color, shape, size or marking,” noted a
report on traffic control written in 1923. Some cities made their own
silent policemen; others bought them from a thriving community of
entrepreneurs who saw a lucrative market opening up and hoped their
devices would become the national standard. They touted their wares to
city officials at trade fairs such as the Good Roads Show, held in Chicago
in 1922, where many variations on the silent policemen were on display,
in a range of shapes and sizes, some illuminated, some not. There was
plenty of scope for improvement because wooden posts were all too easily
knocked down by careless (or malicious) drivers.
The City of Milwaukee found itself having to replace four hundred
silent policemen every year and had given up on the idea by 1923 in favor
of a local innovation: the Milwaukee mushroom. This pe1forated cast-iron
dome, rather like an inverted colander, was fixed to the center of an intersection and illuminated from below. Motorists would drive around it, as
they did with silent policemen, but advocates of the mushroom pointed
out that if struck by a passing vehicle it would stay put, providing a warning
jolt to the driver but doing no damage to the vehicle. Some judges had
ruled that cities were liable for damage caused to vehicles that struck silent
policemen, so this was an attractive feature. The mushroom seems to have
been pioneered in Detroit a few years earlier, but without illumination;
the illuminated “Milwaukee-type” mushroom proved popular for a few
years in the 1920s, with several firms manufacturing competing versions.
One model was even spring mounted, allowing it to retract into the road
if a vehicle passed over it. Of the various competing forms of street furniture, however, mushrooms did not prove to be long-term survivors.
Another device ended up ruling the streets: the traffic light.
GREEN LIGHT, GO !
The first traffic light was installed on Westminster Bridge in London in
1868, to improve the safety of pedestrians. John Peake Knight, a railway
engineer, invented a set of semaphore arms, mounted on a tall post on
94
WHO OWNS TH E STREETS?
:ne bridge, that could be raised and lowered manually by a policeman.
=
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