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

In the 1920s, automotive interests (or motordom, as they were sometimes called)

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

"Safety is essentially an advertising and selling proposition,"

In 1939 motordom's work culminated in one of the most monumental works of promotional showmanship in the history of technology: the Futuramamodel depicting the motorized city of 1960, displayed in General Motors' "Highways and Horizons" pavilion at the New York World's Fair. It was a motor age dream city, entirely dependent on automobiles

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.

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.

efficiency.

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

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.

proposed that street uses that impeded automobiles were misuses of the street.