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

As well as slowing sales and rising road deaths, the industry faced another challenge: growing support for the idea of fitting mechanical devices, called governors, to cars to limit their maximum speed. This proposal had been floating around for a couple of years as a potential safety measure, but in 1923 it became a far more concrete prospect when

In retrospect I understand that this was utter insanity. Wider, faster, treeless roads not only ruin our public places, they kill people. Taking highway standards and applying them to urban and suburban streets, and even county roads, costs us thousands of lives every year. There is no earthly reason why an engineer would ever design a 14-foot lane

Make parking and driving

Today it is the motor vehicle, rather than the horse, that seems unsustainable. The Horseless Age, a magazine founded in 1895 to champion the new technology, proudly declared that “in cities and in towns the noise and clatter of the streets will be reduced,” because of cars’ rubber tires—yet it is still difficult today to hear yourself think on Bro

A handful of thinkers like Mumford were even beginning to venture a revolutionary opinion: that automobiles—and highways—should be barred from certain central areas of the city, that some congested avenues and streets should, instead of having their roadways widened for cars, be closed to cars and turned into “pedestrian malls.”