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When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders
It would be a massive cultural and behavioural shift to radically recast the automobile as a symbol not of freedom, but of restriction.
Medium • There Are No Cars in Wakanda
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.
Peter D. Norton • Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Inside Technology)
Under the banner of road safety and pedestrian education, cars had taken over the streets. Walking in the street had gone from being a right to being wrong.
Tom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
With government backing, behavior had shifted entirely by 1930, and the default was that streets were for cars, and pedestrians should limit themselves to crosswalks. The industry had successfully changed attitudes from always blaming the driver to assuming any collision was an unavoidable accident and probably the fault of a reckless pedestrian—an
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