The town of Los Angeles has rightfully gripped the nation’s consideration this month as wildfires rage on. Whereas the devastation induced by our changing climate calls for superhuman effort to squelch it, the transportation sector (stubbornly accountable for the greatest share of U.S. emissions) is paradoxically observing a major milestone. January 24, 2025, marked the centennial of the implementation of the Traffic Ordinance for the City of Los Angeles. This 35-page bureaucratic doc redefined the usage of America’s streets, tailoring them to the advantage of the automotive business.
American streets have been as soon as dominated by individuals. A documentary travelogue of New York City captured by Scenska Biografteatern from 1911 is crowded with pedestrians crisscrossing streets of their every day routines. Trollies, carriages, and the occasional vehicle jostle by, unhindered by site visitors alerts or centerlines. To us as we speak, it could possibly appear chaotic, however the tempo of the road is sluggish, and folks navigate one another with fluency.
San Francisco’s A Trip Down Market Street, shot only a 12 months earlier than the 1906 earthquake, reveals the view from a streetcar, picturing the Ferry Constructing on the avenue’s finish obscured by intertwining streetcars, horses, bicyclists, automobiles, and folks. Pedestrians stand undaunted within the heart of the road, ready to board the slow-moving streetcar. A boy playfully darts in entrance of the prepare, as if he’s difficult it to a sport of tag. Rising up in American cities meant playing in the streets, even within the nation’s most dense neighborhoods.
Again then, individuals shared the roadway with streetcars and bikes. Within the early 1900s, Los Angeles had probably the most in depth electrical streetcar system wherever. From Minneapolis and Chicago to Washington D.C. and New York Metropolis, bicycles have been utilized by men and women commuting to work within the Nineties. And so they weren’t alone. As Evan Friss chronicles in The Cycling City, individuals rode bikes in U.S. cities as a lot as they now journey in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the most effective biking cities on the planet.
This was all earlier than the Los Angeles Site visitors Ordinance was handed. The Ordinance was written by Miller McClintock, then a doctoral pupil of municipal authorities at Harvard College, who was recruited by a champion of the car business, Paul Hoffman. Hoffman had dropped out of the College of Chicago to promote Studebakers at 18-years-old. At 33, he was shut to creating his first million {dollars} within the business and had been appointed chairman of the Los Angeles Site visitors Fee—a physique accountable for regulating streets. For the primary time, the Ordinance prioritized automobiles on the town’s more and more congested roadways. It shortly grew to become the template for the nation.
With a up to date eye, the provisions created by the Ordinance could seem extra logical than they have been to metropolis dwellers on the time. Historian and creator Peter Norton has spent his profession researching the car period and has properly documented it in his books Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. Norton has scoured letters to the editors of native newspapers, written by on a regular basis individuals who passionately argue for his or her place on American streets, simply because it was being usurped. With the anniversary of the Los Angeles Site visitors Ordinance approaching, I interviewed him to grasp its significance.
Norton says that sharing streets all the time required negotiation, however earlier than the Ordinance, “the pedestrian had absolutely the proper to the road, to walk into it at any level, and to cross it wherever she selected . . . even a baby had the suitable to the road.” This was a social norm, however as Norton’s analysis suggests, it was additionally defended by judges in U.S. courtrooms all through the nation. For instance, in Combating Site visitors, he cites a Philadelphia choose who, in 1924, lectured drivers in his courtroom, saying, “It gained’t be lengthy earlier than youngsters gained’t have any rights in any respect to the road.” He decided that motorists deserved restraint if they may not assume the duty of making certain youngsters’s security and resolved, “One thing drastic should be accomplished to finish this menace to pedestrians and to youngsters specifically.”
It could be laborious to think about as we speak, in a rustic the place the vast majority of people commute by car, however in Los Angeles and plenty of U.S. cities within the early twentieth century, most individuals didn’t use automobiles to get round. Nearly all of American girls didn’t get driver’s licenses till the Nineteen Sixties, and if a household owned a automobile, males normally monopolized the usage of it. Folks typically walked, rode streetcars, or biked. Norton argues that whereas the transition to auto-dominated streets is commonly seen because the arc of progress stimulated by shopper demand, it was really a well-crafted marketing campaign produced by these with an curiosity in promoting cars.
The Los Angeles Site visitors Ordinance modified who was prioritized on metropolis streets. Between 1914 and 1922, the variety of cars on the streets of Los Angeles quadrupled. To proceed to spice up gross sales, the car business required an edge over its competitors with the streetcar and certainly one of its benefits was pace. On the time, a streetcar traveled at roughly 10-15 miles per hour, and with out devoted lanes, at even slower speeds once they have been blocked by automobiles. Within the Ordinance, McClintock imposed a 35-mile-per-hour threshold virtually in all places aside from a couple of restricted instances. However 35 miles per hour was unprecedented within the early twentieth century. In accordance with Norton, most cities held motor automobiles to eight–10 mile per hour speeds. In his phrases, the automotive business realized that, “If drivers can’t go sooner than a streetcar, then they’re not going to purchase a automobile, particularly if they’ve a streetcar service obtainable to them . . . So, we can’t afford to let pace be the wrongdoer in site visitors security.”
As an alternative of specializing in pace, the Ordinance decried recklessness. Most significantly, it pinned “reckless conduct” on pedestrians reasonably than rushing automobiles. The Ordinance calls out “jaywalkers,” criminalizing pedestrians who don’t “obey alerts” or who stroll exterior crossings. “Jaywalking,” as soon as used as derogatory slang, was employed formally to repair attitudes towards wayward pedestrians. McClintock writes that, “Excessive-speed motor site visitors makes the observe often known as ‘jay-walking’ virtually suicidal” as a substitute of questioning the imposition of hurtling motor automobiles on streets occupied by individuals. As Norton suggests, “You can use precisely the identical details that he’s utilizing to say that driving at pace is homicidal.”
Within the 1920’s, site visitors accidents and fatalities have been climbing. In his guide Fighting Traffic, Norton observes that between 1920-1929 motor automobiles killed greater than 200,000 individuals in the US (roughly 4 instances the demise toll of the earlier decade), lengthy earlier than most adults drove. Horrifically, a lot of these killed have been probably the most weak, together with the aged and kids, particularly in dense cities the place the casualties have been the very best. The general public was naturally involved about security and the Ordinance addressed their issues in regards to the risks of blending automobiles and pedestrians, saying, “These conflicts account for the good majority of the accidents and fatalities in Los Angeles and in each different metropolis.”
Nonetheless, the Ordinance co-opts security as a tactic to make extra room for automobiles. For the “management and safety of pedestrian site visitors,” McClintock suggests proscribing pedestrians to striped crosswalks, raised platforms on broad roads referred to as “security zones,” and even tunnels created to guard schoolchildren from motor automobiles. He overlooks the social lifetime of the road and even requires that pedestrians “not cease or stand on the sidewalk besides as close to as bodily attainable to the constructing line” to treatment what he calls the “too frequent congestion of pedestrian site visitors by informal teams gathering on the sidewalk.”
The Ordinance didn’t change metropolis streets by itself. It was accompanied by a intelligent public relations marketing campaign focused at cultural norms and superior by E.B. Lefferts, president of the Car Membership of Southern California. Lefferts designed the marketing campaign to succeed the place different cities had failed. As Norton paperwork, Lefferts informed an viewers on the Chicago conference of the Nationwide Security Council that the Ordinance labored as a result of “Now we have acknowledged that in controlling site visitors, we should consider the research of human psychology, reasonably than strategy it solely as an engineering drawback.” As Norton summarizes, Lefferts’ techniques aimed to make individuals “really feel embarrassed, maybe ashamed . . . to really feel the sting of ridicule.”
Radio broadcasts aired a public training marketing campaign about conduct on the road, the Boy Scouts have been deployed to difficulty playing cards to offenders, letting them know they have been “jay-walking.” In the end, the police have been emboldened to blow whistles at anybody making an attempt to cross the road towards the sign or exterior marked areas—shaming them into submission. Norton found a number of instances the place individuals have been humiliated by cops who “picked up pedestrians . . . (largely girls) and put them on the curb.” Those that protested this new remedy have been arrested.
The Los Angeles Site visitors Ordinance established that streets wouldn’t be shared however dominated by automobiles. It was basically a land seize. As soon as the roadway was secured for the advantage of motor automobiles, they have been the heavyweight champion on streets that had as soon as been for everybody. The Ordinance required that pedestrians have been “topic to the identical instructions and alerts as govern the motion of automobiles” with out acknowledging that they have been exceptionally weak. Going through the mass of a rushing automobile, no different customers of the roadway might compete within the bodily battle to say the streets.
By upping speeds on American streets and designing them for accelerating automobiles, motordom prevailed. Even as we speak, Norton says, “we nonetheless maintain the view that you simply attempt to make quick driving protected as a substitute of signaling to drivers that they should be paying consideration and slowing down.”
The logic of the Los Angeles Site visitors Ordinance quickly made its means into the Mannequin Municipal Site visitors Ordinance, which handed in 1928 underneath the course of Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, in shut session with the car business. It grew to become the template for related ordinances all through the nation. As Norton maintains, “Nearly in all places you go while you’re coping with the native guidelines . . . they’re descended from this ancestor, the Los Angeles Site visitors Ordinance.”
McClintock went on to creator a proposal for “foolproof highways,” within the mid-Nineteen Thirties, promising security by gradual turns, grade separations, and streets for the unique use of the car—once more with the promise of accelerating speeds. These highways would in the end carry extra automobiles into the hearts of city areas, with a rising human toll. Outpaced by automobiles, and bullied to the margins, bicyclists additionally misplaced their place on the highway. Finally, streetcar tracks were pulled up, some changed by buses. Nonetheless, mass transit was more and more restricted as tax {dollars} secured by the Highway Trust Fund have been inconsistently divided by an 80-20 break up favoring spending on highways.
Sadly, dedicating streets to automobiles didn’t assure security. In 2021, greater than 43,000 people died on U.S. roads. Automobiles have turn out to be bigger, sooner, and heavier, making them much more lethal, particularly to youngsters. In America, from the time a baby can stroll till she reaches maturity, being hit by a automobile has been the number one cause of death for a lot of a long time (surpassed solely not too long ago by firearms).
Norton objects to our collective historical past informed as if auto dominance was the inevitable course of progress. He has uncovered the mass of people that urged the nation in a special course. “It was atypical People from all walks of life, wealthy and poor, Black, Brown and White, female and male who have been objecting to their lack of the usage of the road.” Amongst them was Philadelphian Barnett Bartel who, because the Mannequin Municipal Site visitors Ordinance was being deliberated, urged Hoover to guard individuals on roads. Bartel describes the appalling lack of his sons to what he identifies as “murderers.” Bartel’s 9-year-old was killed on his stroll residence from college by a truck that jumped the curb on his stroll residence from college, and his 18-year-old was run over by a automobile on his bike in a hit-and-run and left to bleed to demise.
Bartel was certainly one of many bereaved mother and father whose letters crowded the native papers. Their protests continued within the Nineteen Fifties when women-led “baby carriage blockades” obstructed streets so youngsters might play safely exterior. Norton acknowledges that “it’s extremely useful to get well these misplaced views as a result of then we will step out of the views that we grew up in, and that we have been socialized into, and take a look at them afresh with new eyes and probably see alternatives.”
As jaywalking laws are repealed in cities and states throughout the nation, as congestion pricing removes cars from the guts of the most important U.S. metropolis to pay for transit, as pandemic-era open streets evolve into new everlasting city parkways, and as a brand new administration hangs its hat on advancing “freedom,” Norton encourages us to rethink the 100-year historical past ushered in by the Los Angeles’ Site visitors Ordinance. He suggests a brand new model of our historical past that avoids the false promoting that People have all the time had a love affair with the car. Maybe with the brand new area allotted on our streets, and the legal guidelines that govern them, we are going to reclaim the cultural historical past we gave up and the liberty of selection we as soon as exercised in order that at any age, we can walk, bike, and journey the place we need to. “If we get well that historical past,” says Norton, “we empower ourselves in selecting various futures.”
This story was initially revealed by Next City, a nonprofit information outlet overlaying options for equitable cities. Join Subsequent Metropolis’s newsletter for his or her newest articles and occasions.
Add comment