Fighting Traffic - The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Inside Technology)

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Inside Technology)



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English | April 18, 2008 | ISBN: 0262141000, 0262516128 | True EPUB | 408 pages | 10.6 MB

The fight for the future of the city street between pedestrians, street railways, and promoters of the automobile between 1915 and 1930.

Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution.