A History Lesson: The Auto Industry Has Brainwashed Us

Here’s fascinating history on how we’ve been brainwashed, explained in Peter Norton’s book,  Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “In ad after ad during the Super Bowl, auto companies… have long promised us nirvana. And we’ve blindly shilled out our life savings” to buy, insure, maintain and park cars. The 1920s program at Harvard taught “the first generation of traffic engineers to prioritize traffic lights for faster driving and more difficult walking.”

We need to use language and educate to make sure messages like “biking is normal,” “walkability,” and “good transportation choices” become better understood and more widely accepted over the next decade.

The conversation continues about scooters, “…as a transportation choice – and other micro mobility vehicles are not a novelty, and we should give everything we can to helping them succeed.”

 

To take back our streets, remember how we lost them to cars

Ford Motor’s “Road of Tomorrow” from the 1939 World Fair

Streets are now thoroughly car-centric, and the idea of people-centered streets remains a difficult concept for most people to grasp. These groups recognized they needed to shift the perceived cause of collisions away from drivers and onto pedestrians. Under the name Motordom, the interest groups were quoted in a 1922 edition of Engineering News-Record that they would lead the effort in a “revision of our concept of what a city street is for.”

A 1937 anti-jaywalking ad from the Federal Art Project. Source

Read more…

https://mobilitylab.org/2015/10/09/how-we-lost-streets-to-cars/

The Scooters Of The Early 20th Century

Who knew? From around 1919 through the 1930s scooters were considered a great alternative to motorcars. As scooters are being re-introduced to cities all over the world, they’re being met with derision, suspicion, and outright anger by drivers. The auto industry has effectively ensured that cars became the dominant means of transportation over any other means of transport- scooters, bikes, and streetcars were phased out of cities from the 20s onward.

1916 SUFFRAGETTE ON A SCOOTER

Lady Florence Norman on her Autoped.

by Chris Wild

Yes, she is a suffragette, and yes, that is her scooter!   And the U.S. postal service tested the Autoped as a means of fast transport for its special delivery service. ABC Motorcycles produced the Skootamota, which had a top speed of 15 mph (24 km/h), and The Gloster Aircraft Company introduced the Reynolds Runabout in 1919, followed by the Unibus in 1920. The Unibus was promoted as the “car on two wheels.”

c. 1916 Lady Norman on her scooter.

c. 1915 Four special delivery postmen for the US Postal Service try out new scooters.

c. 1919 A folded Rouline scooter, Paris.

Read about this fascinating history, and see more amazing photos!

https://mashable.com/2015/06/15/1916-suffragette-scooter/?utm_cid=mash-com-pin-link

The Beauty And Frustration of Riding A Bike In The City-A Graphic Story

This charming and thought-provoking graphic story illustrates the beauty of riding a bike in the city, and also the frustration and danger – and asks whether motorist entitlement making us question our confidence in the human race.  In this case the bike rider arrives at a happy ending.

Drivers display behaviors on the road that indicate that they feel entitled, but in a weird way it’s not the fault of drivers themselves. The titans of the auto and oil and gas industries have made a concerted effort since the 1920s to  brainwash the populace, when the first affordable cars rolled off the assembly line, making them affordable and available to almost everyone, and cities built roads that accommodated cars, and marginalized people.

In the interest of promoting car culture the industry has deliberately co-opted our vernacular to take responsibility away from drivers, using words like “accident”, which is a rare, pre-ordained and unavoidable incident, rather than “crash”, which all vehicle related incidents are.   “Jaywalking” is a completely made up word intended to marginalize, and even criminalize walkers. The term “parking”, which now is only applied to parking vehicles, is originally a West Germanic word, pre-4c., meaning “fencing”, in Medieval Latin, “enclosure, park“, in old French, as well as Italian parco, Spanish parque, etc.  We even use a driving license as the main form of ID in the US.

Asbury Park, like many cities in the US is working on changing car culture with incremental infrastructure improvements, improving mass transit, adding micro-mobility options, and making it less convenient to drive in the city, and more desirable and safer to ride a bike and walk.

‘Motorists undercut any confidence you ever had in the human race’: New York cycling – a cartoon

Marcellus Hall is a New York-based illustrator

The Illustrated City: Despite its traffic, for cyclists, Manhattan is a contained sprawl that unfolds like a pop-up book, its history evident everywhere

See the story:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/sep/20/motorists-undercut-any-confidence-you-ever-had-in-the-human-race-new-york-cycling-a-cartoon

 

 

We Let The Automobile Take Over

These amazing news clips from the 20s and 30s tell a story of how the automobile took over, but not without pushback from citizens and lawmakers. The US has a long way to go to become a nation that is willing to change the car culture, but it can happen. Even Copenhagen wasn’t always the bicycling capital of the world.

THEY SAW IT COMING: The Car Was Always The Cause of All the Problems in Our City

As we start the new year, let’s take a look back at how everyone knew the automobile was a menace, yet somehow let it take over anyway.

By Ben Verde 

“The automobile has ruined our cities — choking our streets and making our communities less livable.

But Americans who care about cities saw it coming from the very first days of the Age of the Automobile. Residents wrote to their local newspapers, begging lawmakers to not capitulate to motorists or car makers as they sought to turn public streets into free parking lots. Reporters covered the rise of private ownership of cars as a scourge on our cities. Judges decried what too many people today think is normal: streets clogged by privately owned single-occupancy vehicles in the public right of way.”

See the news clippings:

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/01/01/they-saw-it-coming-the-car-was-always-the-cause-of-all-the-problems-in-our-city/