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

By 1930, in the city street, motorists had all of the benefits of the free market (virtually unrestricted access to street capacity), but they had few of its costs (they did not pay a market price for the street capacity they used). Individuals took advantage of this as soon as they could, but the cost to the whole was paid in the resulting ineffic

As long as automobiles were "pleasure cars" there were few grounds for tolerating the injury and death they caused.

While nearly all accidents could be explained by any of several faults, certain explanations were favored at the expense of others.

"Safety is essentially an advertising and selling proposition,"

order.

In the city street of 1920 the automobile was a nuisance, even an intruder. Automobiles were extravagant in their use of scarce space, they were dangerous (especially to non-motorists), they had to be parked, and they served only a small minority of city people.

justice.

persist, but promotional language is used to assert the success of the new way,

The street was understood not as a marketplace for transportation demands but as a public service, subject to official regulation (however imperfect) in the name of the public interest. In the 1920s, motordom proposed that street uses be treated like demands in a free market, then fought for this new model. The contest was fierce. It was a struggle

efficiency.