|
Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Inside Technology) | 
 enlarge | Author: Peter D. Norton
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $16.95
You Save: $18.05 (52%)
New (20) Used (7) from $16.95
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 478191
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 396
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0262141000
Dewey Decimal Number: 388.321097309042
EAN: 9780262141000
ASIN: 0262141000
Publication Date: June 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New Books! Orders ship within 1 business day!
| |
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution.
Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users?pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"?a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States.
Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Forgotten history August 9, 2008
Harold Henderson (Indiana USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
The product description is good, except that it wasn't just an anti-automobile "campaign" exactly. Streets had always been public places, open to all comers under reasonable public regulation. Automobiles were fast, deadly, unregulated intruders in this world. Yet "common sense" was reversed 180 degrees in two decades.
Norton has documented a forgotten history that is more complicated, and more interesting, than the after-the-fact "consumer demand" theory of the right and the corporate conspiracy theories of the left. Another piece of the story is that traffic engineers weren't always automobile promoters. At the beginning, they used impartial efficiency models that showed the obvious: streetcars were far more efficient users of public streets than private cars. (Full review at http://buildingcommunities.nd.edu/news)
|
|
|
Navy Advancement Study Guide
Top Selling Navy Enlisted Books | |
