Before the American city could become a largely automotive city, the automobile had to win a superior right to most of the street’s surface. Unless it succeeded in this claim, in crowded towns those motorists who were unwilling to run down pedestrians would be forced to a virtual standstill. Yet before 1920 American pedestrians crossed streets wherever they wished, walked in them, and let their children play in them. The extent of these practices was such that in one of the first organized street safety campaigns in 1914, the Chamber of Commerce, in Rome, New York, had to ask pedestrians not to “visit in the street” and not to “manicure your nails on the street car tracks” — with limited success. Under these circumstances, an automotive city seemed a dim prospect.
The transformation was not a natural evolution, a side effect of technological progress, the choice of a democratic majority, or the product of a free market. Despite centuries-old cultural and legal legacies that led to answers unfavorable to automobiles in cities, automotive interest groups developed a positive case for new ways to fight traffic accidents and congestion, coinciding with their new self-identification as “motordom.” It was a strategic effort waged on three fronts: laws, social norms, and engineering standards. Often the proponents of the motor age presented their position clothed in a rhetoric of freedom. 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.