The street is an extremely important symbol because your whole enculturation experience is geared around keeping you out of the street. “Just remember: Look left, look right, look left again… No ball games… Don’t talk to strangers… Keep out of the road.” The idea is to keep everyone indoors. So, when you come to challenge the powers that be, inevitably you find yourself on the curbstone of indifference, wondering “should I play it safe and stay on the sidewalks, or should I go into the street?” And it is the ones who are taking the most risks that will ultimately effect the change in society.
The car system steals the street from under us and sells it back for the price of gasoline. It privileges time over space, corrupting and reducing both to an obsession with speed or, in economic lingo, “turnover.” It doesn’t matter who “drives” this system, for its movements are already pre-determined.
– from the website of the London advocacy group “Take Back the Streets”
In the early 1920s, Norton writes, “Motordom claimed that a new age had dawned, making the old customs obsolete.” Indeed, it was named “The Motor Age.” A “new age” demanded new ways of thinking and behaving, and new laws to reinforce them. “Freedom” was their rallying call; the fewer laws the better. Speed was reframed from a danger to a “right.” Previously “speed” was considered an integral, and even primary, element of “recklessness;” motordom’s spinmeisters decoupled the two. Now pedestrians could be deemed “reckless” for doing what they had done for centuries, and motorists could go fast without being called “reckless.”
Part of the strategy was to avoid differentiating between “groups” (motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians) and focus on behaviors (motoring, bicycling, walking). It’s acceptable to criticize a bad behavior; not to criticize a group of people by association. But this hinged on whether or not an automobile was considered to be “inherently dangerous.” If it was, then motorists must be strictly controlled due to the very nature of their vehicles, not their individual actions. Auto interests won this argument not with any dispassionate assessment of physics, but with better propaganda.
The motoring propaganda machine launched campaigns to blame pedestrians for crashes. Since there were no Uniform Vehicle Codes, they led the effort to create them, holding the lion’s share of the seats on both state and federal committees writing them. Support for these changes came from the very top. Then Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover helped motoring interests get what they wished. Pedestrian interests, having no organization to speak of, had no seat at the table.
Not surprisingly, the new codes limited pedestrians to sidewalks and crosswalks. Thinking long term, auto interests ran their heaviest propaganda efforts in the elementary schools – “streets are for cars…no playing in the streets.” The campaign in the streets themselves progressed from ridicule to arrests as police had to uphold the new laws. With the introduction of traffic signals, officers were no longer needed to control traffic at busy intersections. Unfortunately for pedestrians, this meant there was no-one there to defend their right-of-way in the crosswalks. Motorists promptly started using their size and speed to scare pedestrians to the curbs. Bear in mind that this was in a country where there were only 19 million automobiles but a total population of about 114 million. Motorists were still well outnumbered, but had the force of law and the power of petroleum on their side.
It’s startling to conceive of how quickly things changed. In a few short years, pedestrians went from being historic rulers of the streets, to an outcast majority.
States started imposing gas taxes in the early ‘20s. Initially they were condemned by motoring interests, but in a few short years they realized that gas taxes in effect “bought” them not only more roadway space, but also a stronger claim to “ownership.” The perception of our streets changed from public spaces and public utilities managed by government for the good of all, to a “commodity” paid for by users. Pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-motorized users, not paying into this system, now had a lessened economic claim to the streets.
Next came the propaganda of the “forgiving highway,” which began in the late ‘20s. The belief was that safe highways could be designed that would require very low driving competence. One need only spend a few minutes on an American street today to see that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy…except for the safety part.
Bicyclists were just collateral damage in this overthrow. Norton makes very little mention of us. American adults gave up cycling for motoring and didn’t pick it up again until the 1970s when the first good-quality multi-speed bikes hit the U.S.* The high-speed “forgiving highway” concept had all but taken over by then. It was the speed of these new roads that had the biggest impact; combined with the keep-as-far-right-as-practicable laws, it helped push bicyclists literally and figuratively to the edge of the roadway, where they had to suffer the stress and risk of being passed too closely by speed- and time-obsessed motorists. Being told one was an intruder on “somebody else’s road” only made it worse.
The public relations and social marketing firm Salter-Mitchell, in a new study for Florida Bicycle Association through a Winter Park Health Foundation grant, heard a common refrain from motorists: “Roads were viewed as ‘belonging’ to cars; cyclists and pedestrians should stay out of the way as much as possible.”
Cops shifted from protecting vulnerable users by upholding their rights, to keeping them out of the way. Today, even after cops are shown that basic cyclist violations such as no lights, wrong-way riding, and red light running are the primary causes of cyclist/motorist crashes, and that group rides rarely result in crashes with motorists, they still put more focus on group rides because they get in the way of the “rightful owners” of the roads. Cyclists putting themselves at risk are of little concern; cyclists impeding motorists is evidently a far more serious problem. Pedestrians fare no better with today’s law enforcement philosophy. A Florida Highway Patrol officer once said during a discussion of crosswalk laws, “I’m not going to stop six lanes of traffic on SR 436 so some guy can cross the street to get a Frosty at Wendy’s.” We see law enforcement agencies focusing much more on “jaywalking” than on motorists violating crosswalk laws. Delaying motorists is evidently the bigger sin.
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Read on.
