What's Fighting Traffic about?

In Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, I try to explain how American cities came to be dominated by automobiles. I claim that the motor age city was not the result of Americans' "love affair" with the car; it was the result of a struggle for the future of the American city—a struggle waged mostly in the 1920s. Even in 1930 most city people still did not own cars, but by then the motor age had dawned; American cities would be automotive. Many city people in the 1910s and 1920s had an affair of hatred for cars as usurpers of pedestrians' ancient rights to the pavement and as threats to the lives of city children. The transformation is sometimes ascribed to elite city planners, who saw the automobile as a way to deconcentrate crowded cities, but in fact city planners had relatively little influence. Neither was the transformation due to a deliberate subversion of electric street railways by the automotive industries (as many have alleged); street railways declined for other reasons. The automotive city was the result of a successful campaign to redefine city streets as motor thoroughfares. Those with a stake in a strong future for automobiles in cities fought this battle to shift responsibility for horrific traffic casualties (especially among pedestrians, in particular children) away from motorists. These groups collaborated to rewrite the rules of city traffic, to delegitimize pedestrians' use of streets, and to train a new generation of Americans that streets are for cars. This campaign was a substantial success, and in the decades following it, American cities were rebuilt to accommodate the automobile. We are dealing with the consequences today.