Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

like the Strausser clan are forced to drive two hours north, south, or east. And they have ensured that these new developments will, in turn, resist most efforts to change or adapt them over time.
    When Freedom Got a New Name
    This reorganization of cities could not have happened without breathtaking subsidies for roads and highways, a decades-long program that itself required a cultural transformation, with roots in a concept that Americans hold especially dear. A century ago, Americans redefined what it meant to be free in cities.
    For most of urban history, city streets were for everyone. The road was a market, a playground, a park, and yes, it was a thoroughfare, but there were no traffic lights, painted lanes, or zebra crossings. Before 1903 no city had so much as a traffic code. Anyone could use the street, and everyone did. It was a chaotic environment littered with horse dung and fraught with speeding carriages, but a messy kind of freedom reigned.
    Cars and trucks began to push their way into cities a few years after Henry Ford streamlined the mass production process at his automobile assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan. What followed was “a new kind of mass death,” says urban historian Peter Norton, who charted the transformation in America’s road culture during the 1920s. More than two hundred thousand people were killed in motor accidents in the United States that decade. Most were killed in cities. Most of the dead were pedestrians. Half were children and youths.

    Last Days of the Shared Street
    Woodward Avenue, Detroit, circa 1917: When streetcars and private automobiles moved slowly, everyone shared the street. Speed—and a concerted effort by automobile clubs and manufacturers over the next decade—changed the dynamic forever. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection)
    In the beginning, private motorcars were feared and despised by the majority of urbanites. Their arrival was seen as an invasion that posed a threat to justice and order. Drivers who accidentally killed pedestrians were mobbed by angry crowds and convicted not of driving infractions, but of manslaughter. At first, all levels of society banded together to protect the shared street. Police, politicians, newspaper editors, and parents all fought to regulate automobile access, ban curbside parking, and, most of all, limit speeds to ten miles per hour.
    But drivers joined with automobile dealers and manufacturers to launch a war of ideas that would redefine the urban street. * They wanted the right to go faster. They wanted more space. And they wanted pedestrians, cyclists, and streetcar users to get out of the way. The American Automobile Association called this new movement Motordom.
    “They had to change the idea of what a street is for, and that required a mental revolution, which had to take place before any physical changes to the street,” Norton told me. “In the space of a few years, auto interests did put together that cultural revolution. It was comprehensive.”
    Motordom faced an uphill battle. It did not take an engineer to see that the most efficient way to move lots of people in and out of dense, crowded downtowns was by streetcar or bus. In the Chicago Loop, streetcars used 2 percent of the road space but still carried three-quarters of road users. The more cars you added, the slower the going would be for everyone. So Motordom’s soldiers waged their psychological war under the cover of two ideals: safety and freedom.
    First they had to convince people that the problem with safety lay in controlling pedestrians, not cars. In the 1920s, auto clubs began to compete directly with urban safety councils, campaigning to redirect the blame for accidents from car drivers to pedestrians. Crossing the street freely got a pejorative name—jaywalking—and became a crime. †
    Most people came to accept that the street was not such a free place anymore—which was ironic,