How did cars come to monopolise our streets?

You only need to look at this fantastic video of San Francisco’s streets in the very first years of the 20th century to get an understanding that the concept of shared streets, which Auckland seems to be embracing at the moment, is hardly a new one. In fact, in the early days of the car they were very much given equal priority with all other street users – including pedestrians.

I’m reading the book Fighting Traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city at the moment, which delves into the transition from treating our streets as equal spaces for all, to becoming largely monopolised by cars. Here are a few key paragraphs from near the end of the first chapter:

The struggle for the future of urban transportation was less a contest between vehicles than a competition for their urban medium: the street. There were far more participants in this contest than motorists, auto manufacturers , street railways, and city planners.  The sudden arrival  of large numbers of cars forced cities to face new questions about the street. The  answers were of urgent interest to many, including professionals and business people, local and national interest groups, motorists, and pedestrians. Must cities find or make room in their streets for the private cars of all the motorists who choose to drive there? Can people walk in the street wherever they choose? Will congestion deprive downtown merchants of their custom? Can a motorist claim curb space freely? Should children play in the streets? Must a few people in private vehicles impede the many in public vehicles? Must regulations deprive the motorist of the advantages of the car? Can traffic experts rightly decide who belongs in the street and who does not? Those questions pitted street users against one another?

In the current way we treat our streets, it’s almost difficult to imagine that they could be places where all users have equal rights. Or that the car wouldn’t immediately have precedence. But that is how things once were. The books continues:

Centuries-old cultural and legal legacies led to answers unfavourable to automobiles in cities. In 1920 the city street was considered a public amenity for uses considered public, such as street railway service and walking. As a public good, the street was to be regulated by experts in the name of the public interest. Automobiles were individual, private property. Motorists were tolerated when they did not impede or endanger other users, but wherever congestion or accidents took their toll the automobile bore most of the legal responsibility and most of the popular blame.. 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. Cities, using police power delegated to them by the states, strictly regulated motorists on the grounds that automobiles were newcomers that moved few people at a heavy cost to street capacity.

That’s quite a different attitude towards cars than we see today, where streets (at least beyond the footpath) are very much the exclusive domain of the car. And huge swathes of our city are given over to the exclusive use of cars. So how did things change so much?

The automotive city arose in part from an attack on the old customs of street use and an effort to let individual liberty and free markets rule there too. From American ideals of political and economic freedom, motordom fashioned the rhetorical lever it needed. In these terms, motorists, though a minority, had rights that protected their choice of mode from intrusive restrictions. Their driving also constituted a demand for street space, which, like other demands in a free market, was not a matter for expert scrutiny.

The struggle was difficult and sometimes fierce. In motordom’s way were street railways, city people afraid for the safety of their children in the streets, and most of the established traffic engineering principles of the 1920s. Motordom, however, had effective rhetorical weapons, growing national organization, a favorable political climate, substantial wealth, and the sympathy of a growing minority of city motorists. By 1930, with these assets, motordom had redefined the city street.

In the new model, some users of once unquestioned legitimacy (notably  pedestrians) were restricted. Traffic engineers no longer burdened motorists with the responsibility for congestion; their goal now was to ease the flow of motor vehicles, either by restricting other users or by rebuilding city thoroughfares for cars. New urban roads were treated as consumer commodities bought and paid for by their users and to be supplied as demanded. On this basis, over the following four decades, the city was transformed to accommodate automobiles.

Interestingly, in much the same way that Auckland’s low level of public transport use is very much the result of deliberate policy decisions to not invest in the public transport system, the prominence given to cars on our streets was not necessarily a natural outcome – but rather the results of a political battle for the street which took place in the USA in the 1920s. Before that battle was won by what the book calls ‘motordom’ (essentially the various groups promoting ascendancy for the car) the street was a very different place.

You can read the book’s introduction here.

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