Troesken on Norton, _Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City_

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Published by EH.NET (August 2008)

Peter D. Norton, _Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the 
American City_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.  ix + 396 pp. $35 
(cloth), ISBN: 978-0-262-14100-0.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Werner Troesken, Department of Economics, 
University of Pittsburgh.


_Fighting Traffic_, by Peter D. Norton, is about defining property 
rights, specifically the property rights to roads and streets.  At the 
turn of twentieth century, the definition of these rights was hotly 
contested.  Traditional users of streets -- pedestrians, children at 
play, horse drawn vehicles, and so on -- believed that they owned the 
streets and had the primary right to use them as they saw fit.  Motordom 
-- automobile owners, retailers, and manufacturers—believed that they 
too had a legitimate right to use the streets and that the rights and 
practices of traditional users should not trump the interests of 
motordom.  According to Norton, previous studies have emphasized the 
political activities of motordom at the expense of understanding the 
activities of traditional users.  Norton seeks to redress this imbalance 
and bring a multi-interest group perspective to the problem of defining 
property rights over roads and streets.

That there was a conflict between motordom and traditional street users 
should come as no surprise.  According to the Millennial Edition of the 
_Historical Statistics of the United States_, between 1909 and 1923, the 
number of automobiles registered in the U.S. grew by a factor of 43. The 
same source indicates that the number of traffic fatalities grew by a 
factor of 16 over the same period.  Initially, when pedestrians were 
killed by motorists those deaths were cast as murder.  The presumption 
was that the child or adult walking in the street had the right to be 
there; the motorcar was the trespasser.  Moreover, the “overwhelming 
majority” (p. 29) of accident victims were children and a large 
proportion of the rest were young women.  Cities throughout the country 
began erecting monuments to memorialize the deaths of innocent children. 
  Norton argues that the deaths of so many women and children gave the 
traffic safety movement a “feminine” face.  Evidence for this can be 
seen in the many posters showing mothers grieving over children lost to 
automobile accidents.

Early critics of the automobile attributed accidents to excessive speed, 
referring to car drivers as “speed maniacs” or “speed hogs.”  The 
popular press encouraged such views with editorials and partisan 
reporting that did not consider the possible role that pedestrians might 
have played in accidents.  Many cities experimented with passing speed 
limits as low as 8 or 10 miles per hour.  Still others launched 
ill-fated plans to control speeds by installing governors on cars.  One 
problem common in all cities was that of reckless drivers cutting 
corners.  To prevent this, posts were often installed at the center of 
intersections to prevent drivers from cutting into on-coming traffic to 
make short turns.  Policemen placed at the center of intersections also 
helped to prevent unsafe turns and speeding, but putting a policeman at 
every intersection in a city was very expensive and eventually gave rise 
to cost-saving technologies such as the traffic light.

In 1926, a Detroit court convicted a truck driver of manslaughter for 
killing a pedestrian.  After the conviction, the judge in the case 
called the truck driver “a disgrace to humanity” (p. 69).  This same 
judge admitted that “his sympathies were always with the pedestrian” and 
that motorists who came before him should expect the most severe 
treatment the law would allow.  This judge, and many others, appeared to 
work from the assumption that city streets were like city parks -- open 
to all and for whatever activity you wanted so long as you did not 
impose undue harm on others.  Such a vision absolved pedestrians and 
children at play from any responsibility in traffic accidents.  One way 
motordom tried to combat such views was through the reinvention of the 
word jaywalking.  The first word, “jay,” referred to a hayseed, someone 
with little or no knowledge of the city and lacking the sophistication 
of an urban dweller.  According to Norton, one of the most clever 
anti-jaywalking campaigns was initiated in Detroit in 1922 by the 
Packard Motor Company.  Mimicking the memorials built to remember 
children killed by cars, Packard built a giant tombstone which 
“redirected” the blame for automobile accidents away from car drivers 
toward pedestrians.  The tombstone was marked: “Erected to the Memory of 
Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped from the Curb Without Looking” (p. 77).

Downtown business interests also played an important role in shaping the 
regulation of traffic.  Large downtown department stores, for example, 
worked to eliminate on-street parking, while smaller boutique shops 
wanted to preserve it.  Eliminating on-street parking was a means of 
widening streets and relieving traffic jams without undue expense. 
Business interests brought a sense of efficiency and cost-effectiveness 
to the problem of traffic regulation and supported the regulation of 
streets for many of the same reasons that they supported regulation of 
public utilities.  For a time, Norton explains, traffic engineers 
conceived of streets as a public utility and natural monopoly that 
should be regulated by experts.  While street railway companies were 
active lobbyists in all of this, they were often viewed as an antiquated 
technology with little political power.  Partly this resulted from the 
fact that street railway riders were not especially engaged in the 
political process.

The death knell to the “city streets as public parks” ideology came in 
the mid to late 1920s when motordom “began its quest to reconstruct city 
traffic problems for the motor age.”  This reconstruction involved 
redefining the traffic control problem not as the result of an excess of 
cars -- as the traditionalists would have argued -- but as a result of a 
shortage of city streets.  With the help of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce 
and state and local governments -- which saw cars as a valuable source 
of tax revenue -- motordom was able to secure much of what it wanted: 
relegating pedestrians to sidewalks and cross walks and much wider 
streets with faster speed limits.  Part of the success motordom realized 
was the result of their strategy of commodifying streets and recasting 
the rights of automobile users as a matter of personal freedom.

There is today a large literature exploring the social construction of 
new technologies.  _Fighting Traffic_ fits nicely into this literature 
and should be of broad interest to readers of that literature. 
Quantitative historians interested in the history of the automobile and 
economic regulation might also find some material of significance.


Werner Troesken is Professor of Economics at the University of 
Pittsburgh.  He is the author of three books.  The most recent is _The 
Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster_ (MIT Press, 2006).

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