Book recommendation: Fighting Traffic by Peter D. Norton

[Roland Beinert]

This book takes a look at how we went from viewing streets as spaces mainly for pedestrians to spaces meant mainly for cars. There was actually a lot of resistance to cars in cities when cars first appeared. This resistance was not just from pedestrians, but also from police and politicians, who tended to side with pedestrians when accidents occurred. Then car proponents started a campaign to change the way we think about streets (the author calls this the social reconstruction of the city street). So, for example, pedestrians who walked in the middle of the street were labelled jaywalkers. This is also when the whole cars=freedom argument came about.

I still haven’t finished the book. The reading is a bit dry, but it’s interesting to know how our cities came to be dominated by cars in the first place.

[Author]

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