The Life-Sized City Blog

First reference to "jaywalking" - Kansas City Star, 30 April 1911. I've posted about the brilliant book " Fighting Traffic - The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" by Peter D. Norton before but I just can't get enough of it. Previous posts are The Anti-Automobile Age and what we can learn from it and Fighting Traffic . The Canadian writer, Chris Turner, wrote today about how there are no jaywalkers on sustainable streets over at Mother Earth Network . Here's some back-up for that brilliant article. The very term "Motor Age" was invented by the automobile industry as a promotional term aimed at turning public opinion away from the massive societal protest at the appearance of cars on city streets. The term "... carried a built-in justification for overturning established custom. It combined rhetorical closure and problem redefinition, just as similar phrases have been used in more recent years to justify workplace smokin...

I've continued reading the excellent Fighting Traffic - The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton . It's a digestive book. I find myself reading a few pages at a time and then putting it down, finding it necessary to reflect. Norton has divided it up into three parts and the first part deals with the way automobiles were regarded in the public eye between 1900 and up through the 1920's. To put it mildly, automobile traffic was not popular. Almost a century on it seems that certain myths persist. That apart from some growing pains at the beginning, cars were always just a given in cities. I've been quite amazed to learn how massive the resistance to them was. Norton writes about the 'street' and the perception of what the street was for. The public at the time regarded the street much in the same way as people had since cities were first formed. It was a space for people. A place to walk, a place to play, a place to alight from a s...

Just got a book in the post today. "Fighting Traffic - The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" by Peter D. Norton. It's looking good already. Under 'The Social Reconstruction of the Street' I can read that: "Until the 1920's, under prevailing conceptions of the street, cars were at best uninvited guests. To many they were unruly intruders. They obstructed and endangered street uses of long-standing legitimacy. As a Providence newspaper editor expressed the problem in 1921, 'it is impossible for all classes of modern traffic to occupy the same right of way at the same time in safety.'" And: "Today we tend to regard streets as motor thoroughfares, and we tend to project this construction back to pre-automotive streets. In retrospect, therefore, the use of streets for children's play (for example) can seem obviously wrong, and thus the departure of children from streets with the arrival of automobiles can seem an obvious and si...