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

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

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

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

rhetorical closure, problems

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

order.

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.

efficiency.

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