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

The automotive city was not simply the product of mass demand for automobiles. In 1920 there was a free market for automobiles but not for the use of city streets.

Success in such historical investigations requires not merely looking back from where we stand today at the actors of times past, but getting back to them, so we can stand next to them and adopt their perspective.

"motordom." Often they presented their position clothed in a rhetoric of freedom.9

rhetorical closure, problems

Applied to traffic problems, the loss of street capacity to curb-parked cars became "the parking evil."

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.

The car had already cleaned up its once bloody reputation in cities, less by killing fewer people than by enlisting others to share the responsibility for the carnage.