Why Cars Are Killing People

Approximately 30,000 Americans will die from automobile collisions this year - but it doesn't have to be this way

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford

There's an open secret in America: If you want to kill someone, do it with a car. Today, despite the efforts of major public-health agencies and grassroots safety campaigns, few are aware that car crashes are the number one cause of death for Americans under 35. But it wasn't always this way.

History of Cars Vs. Pedestrians

"If you look at newspapers from American cities in the 1910s and '20s, you'll find a lot of anger at cars and drivers, really an incredible amount," says Peter Norton, the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. "My impression is that you'd find more caricatures of the Grim Reaper driving a car over innocent children than you would images of Uncle Sam."

Though various automobiles powered by steam, gas, and electricity were produced in the late 19th century, only a handful of these cars actually made it onto the roads due to high costs and unreliable technologies. That changed in 1908, when Ford's famous Model T standardized manufacturing methods and allowed for true mass production, making the car affordable to those without extreme wealth. By 1915, the number of registered motor vehicles was in the millions.

Within a decade, the number of car collisions and fatalities skyrocketed. In the first four years after World War I, more Americans died in auto accidents than had been killed during battle in Europe, but our legal system wasn't catching on. The negative effects of this unprecedented shift in transportation were especially felt in urban areas, where road space was limited and pedestrian habits were powerfully ingrained.

When Walkers Ruled

For those of us who grew up with cars, it's difficult to conceptualize American streets before automobiles were everywhere. "Imagine a busy corridor in an airport, or a crowded city park, where everybody's moving around, and everybody's got business to do," says Norton. "Pedestrians favored the sidewalk because that was cleaner and you were less likely to have a vehicle bump against you, but pedestrians also went anywhere they wanted in the street, and there were no crosswalks and very few signs. It was a real free-for-all."

Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. "Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle," says Norton, "so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian." Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren't a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.

In an effort to keep traffic flowing and solve legal disputes, New York City became the first municipality in America to adopt an official traffic code in 1903, when most roadways had no signage or traffic controls whatsoever. Speed limits were gradually adopted in urban areas across the country, typically with a maximum of 10 mph that dropped to 8 mph at intersections.

By the end of the 1920s, more than 200,000 Americans had been killed by automobiles. Most of these fatalities were pedestrians in cities, and the majority of these were children. "If a kid is hit in a street in 2014, I think our first reaction would be to ask, 'What parent is so neglectful that they let their child play in the street?,'" says Norton.

"In 1914, it was pretty much the opposite. It was more like, 'What evil bastard would drive their speeding car where a kid might be playing?' That tells us how much our outlook on the public street has changed-blaming the driver was really automatic then.

A Shift to Protection - and Blame

In 1924, recognizing the crisis on America's streets, Herbert Hoover launched the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety from his position as Commerce Secretary (he would become President in 1929). Any organizations interested or invested in transportation planning were invited to discuss street safety and help establish standardized traffic regulations that could be implemented across the country. Since the conference's biggest players all represented the auto industry, the group's recommendations prioritized private motor vehicles over all other transit modes.

Meanwhile, the auto industry continued to improve its public image by encouraging licensing to give drivers legitimacy, even though most early licenses required no testing. Working with local police and civic groups like the Boy Scouts, auto clubs pushed to socialize new pedestrian behavior, often by shaming or ostracizing people who entered the street on foot. Part of this effort was the adoption of the term "jaywalker," which originally referred to a clueless person unaccustomed to busy city life ("jay" was slang for a hayseed or country bumpkin).

"Drivers first used the word 'jaywalker' to criticize pedestrians," says Norton, "and eventually, it became an organized campaign. They had people dressed up like idiots with sandwich board signs that said 'jaywalker' or men wearing women's dresses pretending to be jaywalkers."

Today's Perspective

"The real battle is for people's minds, and this mental model of what a street is for," Norton says. "That's the main obstacle for people who imagine alternatives-and it's very much something in the mind."

This piece was adapted from "Murder Machines: Why Cars Will Kill 30,000 Americans This Year," originally published by Collectors Weekly and printed here with permission. Read the full article at www.collectorsweekly.com.