The Conspiracy to Blame the Pedestrian

“It won’t be long before children won’t have any right at all in the streets.” 

Those are the words of a Philadelphia judge from the early 1920s, lecturing drivers from the bench about the newly invented automobile that had swept the country. He meant it as a warning. It turned out to be prophetic.

The street belonged to everyone

Only a decade earlier, the street was uncontested public space, shared by vendors, pedestrians, horses, streetcars, bicyclists, and carriages. No one mode of transportation had supremacy over any other. Streets were not just transportation corridors, they were the connective tissue of a city that everyone had a right to use. They were where you could talk to a neighbor, where you shopped, where kids played. A Chicago judge named this plainly: the streets of Chicago belonged to the city, not to the automobilists. 

When cars arrived, they did not inherit that space. They intruded on it. Motorists were labeled speed demons and road hogs. Their cars were called juggernauts and death machines. Pedestrian deaths had climbed steadily in response to the presence of this new technology. Cities raised public memorials to the children who were killed, newspapers kept running tallies, and the public turned hard against this new menace in their streets.

The law was on the pedestrian’s side.

This deep cultural opposition to the car was backed by the legal system. At this time, the car was not seen as the epitome of American life and freedom. It was seen as the antithesis of it. “The pedestrian”, a Brooklyn man explained, “as an American Citizen, naturally resents any intrusion upon his prior constitutional rights.”

That resentment had teeth. In 1913, the New York Court of Appeals observed that the size and weight of automobiles made them a serious danger, and that responsibility for the safety of the street therefore lay overwhelmingly with the people driving them. In New York City’s traffic court in 1923, a judge stated that nobody had any inherent right to run an automobile at all, and that driving was a privilege granted by the state, one that could and should be hedged in or withdrawn entirely with whatever limits the state found necessary to keep the public safe. 

And there was nothing in the law that limited the pedestrian’s use of the street. A traffic survey commissioned by the Chicago Association of Commerce in 1926 admitted as much: nothing in the law prohibited a pedestrian from using any part of any roadway, at any time, at any place they desired. By custom and by law, every street had always been free to all. 

Motordom gets organized

That was about to change, and the people who changed it had no reservations about saying so out loud.

Charles Hayes, president of the Chicago Motor Club, warned his colleagues that bad publicity over traffic deaths would soon lead to legislation that would place almost unbearable limitations on the use of automobiles. Indeed, many cities had grown close to requiring speed governors on all cars, and setting speed limits as low as 8 or 10 miles per hour. If measures like these had passed, the industry would have been finished before it started. Hayes proposed the solution that would define the next fifteen years of the motor industry: persuade city people that the streets were made for vehicles to run upon, rather than for all.

The alliance that formed around that idea called itself “Motordom”, the automakers, the dealers, the tire and parts and oil companies, and the auto clubs that spoke for them. A coalition that stood to gain immense financial power if the goal of motordom succeeded. With the public, the press, and juries, and the courts all against them, Motordom could not win the street through the courts or through public opinion, at least not without first rewriting the story of who the street was for.

Peter Norton, a historian who documented this shift, is blunt about what followed. It was not an evolution, but a “bloody and sometimes violent revolution”. It was a campaign fought on three fronts at once by an organized industry lobby: the law, social norms, and engineering standards. It was a campaign in which the industries profiting from the automobile blamed the victims of their product for behavior that streets had been used to for as long as streets had existed. 

The invention of the jaywalker

“Jay” was a slur at the time for someone rural, unsophisticated, and out of place in a city. Motordom took it and used it to redefine how people crossed streets as “jaywalking”.  The term was pushed into newspapers, plastered on walls, and handed out on the sidewalk by Boy Scouts with cards reading “Stop Jaywalking”. In Detroit in 1922, the Packard Motor Company built an imitation tombstone mocking the real memorials cities had raised for children killed by cars, reading “Erected to the memory of Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped From the Curb Without Looking”.

Motordom also ran its own news service. It collected crash reports from newspapers, rewrote them to shift responsibility onto the persons who had been hit, and sent them back out for publication, along with statistics assembled on the same logic. Papers, who increasingly had advertisers from Motordom, ran the stories on threat of losing ad revenue. Auto clubs funded safety education in public schools, teaching children directly that the street was for cars, and not for them.

None of this was subtle, it was simply relentless until it became background noise, and it was background noise until it became true.

Manufacturing the expert

Early academic work on the design of streets treated the automobile as one street user among many. Then an automobile manufacturer funded a bureau for street traffic research at Harvard and Yale that changed the tune of traffic research. A generation of traffic engineers were trained and placed in cities across the country and treated as impartial technical experts with no visible connection to the companies of motordom that paid for their education. Even academics who had previously treated cars as equal street users were soon designing traffic codes that fined jaywalkers.

Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, convened the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety in 1924 on the principle that the industry should help write the rules it would live under. The conference was dominated by automotive interests; by its very nature, there was no pedestrian industry. The conference produced the Uniform Vehicle Code and, in 1928, a Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance that provided off-the-shelf legislation cities could adopt. It overturned the pedestrian’s ancient legal supremacy in the street, confining people on foot to crosswalks and requiring them to yield everywhere else. By 1930, nearly half of all states had this code adopted.

In the process, opinions funded by the automotive lobby had been presented as impartial expert knowledge, and redefined the problem of traffic. Pedestrian deaths and congestion were not caused by the design of cars, but instead by a street design that didn’t allocate enough exclusive space to the automobile. That reframing enabled the car industry to reshape streets to serve their needs: wider roads, more pavement, fewer obstructions. In doing so, motordom ensured they would be supported by the very experts and credibility that they had manufactured.

Selling the street as a free market

Most insidiously, Motordom changed what Americans meant by freedom.

They sold the car as innovation, as personal liberty, and they recast the street as a marketplace. Space should be allocated not by right, or equality, but demand — and cars generated that demand disproportionately because of their size and incompatibility with every other use of the street. That incompatibility could have been a reason to restrict the automobile. Instead it became the reason to restrict everyone else.

It worked. By the 1930s crosswalks had been installed in most American cities, and people who used the streets the way they always had were subject to fines and public scorn. The street that had belonged to everyone was narrowed to the margins. Everything else was handed to the automobile. This was not the result of impartial data analysis, or public votes, but through 15 years of manufactured consent. Within a single generation, the American pedestrian who naturally resented any intrusion to their constitutional rights had become a ridiculed jaywalker who had it coming.

What was constructed can be reconstructed

It is necessary to understand that all of this happened inside one lifetime, driven by the choices of people in power following financial incentives. There is nothing natural or inevitable about the order of our streets that this process created. It was built, deliberately and recently, by a small number of people who stood to profit from it.

Which means it can be built differently. Every crosswalk, every speed limit, every lane width, every rule about who yields to whom is a decision that somebody made in favor of the automobile, a decision that somebody else can remake in favor of people. The people who stole the streets from the pedestrian knew it was a political campaign. So should we.

 Written by Jack Evans, Complete Streets Specialist.

Sources: Peter D. Norton, “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City” (2008) & “When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders” (2022)