How The Car Destroyed Detroit

[DetroitDad]

This is a book I came across not to long ago, I do believe it may be available at Detroit Public Libraries, but am not 100% sure, I'll check this week.

Thanks Detroit's Automotive Industry....

Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

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.



Podcast of the Author, Peter Norton discussing the book...
Sustainability Segments: Peter Norton Episode | KEXP Presents Mind Over Matters Sustainability Segment
Guest Peter Norton, Assistant Professor, Department of Science, Technology, and Society, University of Virginia, speaks with Diane Horn about his book "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City."

I recommend listening to the podcast above, if this topic interest you. They do talk about how public opinion was turned on streetcars as well.

[Todd_Scott]

I'm in the middle of reading this book, which I'm really enjoying. As expected, it includes many historic references to Detroit and how they managed traffic.

[Mikeg]

Attachment 1419
Horse-drawn buggies on Belle Isle Park bridge; c.1890
[[Early Detroit Images from the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library)

In my genealogical research, I've found one relative who was killed when his horse drawn farm wagon collided with another at the intersection of Harper and St. Cyril. Another relative died when he was hit by an Interurban car at Gratiot and Utica Roads in the village of Roseville. I've not found yet anyone who was killed by an automobile either as a pedestrian or as a driver or passenger.

Looking at the street scene above, one is tempted to say that if the car hadn't come along, Detroit would have eventually still choked on its horse drawn personal vehicles, farm wagons, commercial delivery wagons, bicycles and pedestrians, not to mention the tons of horse shit deposited in the middle of the streets being used by all.

[MikeM]

Travel by horse has the highest fatality rate per vehicle-mile of any form of transportation.

[DetroitDad]

Horse and buggies and streetcars did not travel at 35mph in Downtown, did not require the removal of roads as a public space, and did not mow over neighborhoods for dangerous freeways. By their nature, horse and buggies did not breed excessive use either. How many people drive just down the street to get a gallon of milk, or around the block for a burger because there is a giant cinder-block wall to prevent pedestrian access? Horse and buggy operators also did not see the buggies as extensions of their personalities, leading to road rage, show boating, and blaring their radio through sub-woofers at 3am, instead of just being viewed as a piece of machinery.

Cars led to overuse and took a lot from us. They had their benefits, but the negatives often outweigh the positives.

[Mikeg]

You folks can navel-gaze all you want about the "destructive" impacts the auto and the internal combustion engine had on cities, but I would venture to say that without them, our national standard of living, the availability/cost of food and manufactured goods, plus personal mobility would still be "stuck in the nineteenth century" and the majority of people would still be living in rural areas, not cities like they are today. In other words, we would still be more of an agrarian society and cities would never have reached the level of importance that they did.

[Huggybear]

It's far from clear that the car detroyed Detroit.

1. Detroit was planned and built as a reaction against overcrowded, "unhealthy" coastal and European cities. It was never designed to look like Boston or New York - precisely why the DIA and Library are sited away from the city center [[recalling, of course, that both predate any significant segment of the public's owning cars). Except for the CBD, there has never been a density ethos - cars or no cars.

2. Detroit's road plan largely predates cars. Wide avenues were a feature of the Woodward Plan - which had everything to do with post-Revolution Paris and nothing to do with motor transit. And the first freeways did not come about until WWII, by which point the city was mostly built out.

3. The DSR - wide-coverage public transit that largely preceded development - facilitated sprawl before cars became popular and freeways were built. From what I recall, it reached Grosse Pointe, Dearborn and Oakland County in the early teens. I think the role of having too much transit too early is too easily overlooked in the orthodoxy of "cars good, transit bad."

[DetroitPlanner]

I wish to go back to the good old days of chollera and dissentary. Why should we have indoor plumbing when people used outhouses behind the home it gave them an opportunity to say hi to neighbors? People cared about each other back then.

Better yet, lets go back to the days of tennements where 20 people lived in apartments with one window.

I also long for the days of when the streets were full of foul smelling horse poop and kids used it like playdough and it was FREE!

[iheartthed]

It's far from clear that the car detroyed Detroit.

1. Detroit was planned and built as a reaction against overcrowded, "unhealthy" coastal and European cities. It was never designed to look like Boston or New York - precisely why the DIA and Library are sited away from the city center [[recalling, of course, that both predate any significant segment of the public's owning cars). Except for the CBD, there has never been a density ethos - cars or no cars.

2. Detroit's road plan largely predates cars. Wide avenues were a feature of the Woodward Plan - which had everything to do with post-Revolution Paris and nothing to do with motor transit. And the first freeways did not come about until WWII, by which point the city was mostly built out.

3. The DSR - wide-coverage public transit that largely preceded development - facilitated sprawl before cars became popular and freeways were built. From what I recall, it reached Grosse Pointe, Dearborn and Oakland County in the early teens. I think the role of having too much transit too early is too easily overlooked in the orthodoxy of "cars good, transit bad."

Detroit was absolutely built to be a dense city. Detroit needed to be one in order to support its economy as a trading post and then manufacturing center. Before the widespread use of trucks and interstate highways, manufacturing facilities needed to be located close to train stations and water ports in order to minimize transportation costs.

[East Detroit]

Part II in this series will be entitled:

"How driving an import and shopping at Walmart saved Detroit for future sandwich artists."

[Sstashmoo]

Quote: "How driving an import and shopping at Walmart saved Detroit for future sandwich artists."

And goat herders..

[detourdetroit]

it's not so much the car that destroyed detroit, but our region's myopia about the car's role in building a healthy and sustainable transportation network. for a society that prides itself of the availability and importance of choice in the marketplace, we've done ourselves a great disservice over the better part of the last century.

[Todd_Scott]

Keep in mind that the title of the this thread is apparently the DetroitDad's opinion. This book is not about how the car destroyed Detroit.

[Mikeg]

.....but our region's myopia about the car's role in building a healthy and sustainable transportation network. for a society that prides itself of the availability and importance of choice in the marketplace, we've done ourselves a great disservice over the better part of the last century.

During the first two decades of the 20th Century, residents of this region had a variety of transportation choices available to them, some of them more developed and affordable than others. Prior to her death in 1917, family oral history tells that my elderly widowed great-great grandmother who lived in Warren Twp. would spend a week or more at a time visiting her daughter at their home near North Branch in Lapeer County. Her bachelor son would drive her three miles in his Model T Ford to the Warren Village train station and a short time later her daughter would be waiting in her horse buggy to pick her up at the train station in Kings Mill, Lapeer County. I do not know the exact route she took, but she could have gotten there several ways using steam & electric railroads [1917 rail transportation map of the lower peninsula]. The Lapeer Co. roads they traveled would have been nothing more than graded earth, possibly improved with gravel, while the Warren Twp. roads of those days were probably only slightly better.

My great-great grandmother could have also traveled in about the same amount of time from her Warren Twp. farmhouse to downtown Detroit by having her son drive her two miles to Center Line where she would pick up the DUR-operated electric streetcar that would take her to Harper and Mt. Elliott [photo], where she would transfer to another streetcar line to complete the journey downtown.

If there was any "myopia", it resided in the inability of the steam and electric railroads to visualize emerging threats to their business model and react to the changing transportation preferences of their customers. The notion that a transportation system or network can and should be "sustainable" is in itself myopic, since in a free society, most of the challenges that surface to threaten that "sustainability" are outside the control of management and they often find themselves too constrained to be able to adapt quickly enough.

[xD_Brklyn]

Listened to the podcast this morning. The author has an issue with how our public roads have been taken over by automobiles and how other forms of transportation have suffered because of the automobile's dominance. He highlights how the automobile industry won over the public with publicity campaigns to promote pedestrian safety as a concern of the pedestrian and not the automobile driver. He has an interesting take of how the colloquial term "jaywalker", which meant to describe a country bumpkin who blocked the sidewalk staring at store windows or tall buildings became the definition of someone who did not cross the street at a designated crosswalk.

He places a lot of importance on the automobile industry and automobile clubs like AAA for creating this idea of automobile ownership of the roads. Don't see this book as being about horse and carriage vs. the automobile. Interesting little history on traffic but did not catch any other strong over-reaching agenda on the author's part other than a pro-mass transit perspective that is hardly radical.

Thought the podcast was worth listening to, but don't think I would pick up the book.

[detourdetroit]

just like it did in the mid to late 19th century, the government had much to do with the planning and implementation of our car based transportation networks one hundred years later...so much for the free market.

myopia is near sightedness... you are right the railways may have been myopic as well. the autos believers have been myopic in the sense that they believe there is no need for other modes and are blind to the idea that sustainable cities cannot exist without a healthy mix of transit.

[Danny]

The car didn't just destroy Detroit. GLOBALIZATION of the autombile industry did. Detroit used to have over 50 car industries, most of the car industries either shutdown or merge with the Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Now there are dominate role in American car industry. The those Japanese, Europeans, U.S. presidents Reagan and Bush tried to destroy it in which they did. Resulted into massive layoffs of our manufacturing infrastructure which forces the goverment to give the big three some bailout money so we the American taxpayer have to pay back

[Retroit]

DetroitDad, have you seen this documentary on PBS?:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/blueprintame...cumentary/648/

It supports your views somewhat, but is a little more tolerating of the automobile. I agree that we've become a little too overdependent on the automobile at the expense of walking, biking, and mass transit, but I also think that quality of life is improved when people don't have to live on top of each other. There is a trade-off.

[ghettopalmetto]

Oh, there is so much in the way of misinformation, lies, and propaganda on this thread. All of it, of course, flies in the face of reality. Detroitplanner seems to think that cities where people can walk are merely nostalgic. Everyone else forgets that, quite literally, I-375 destroyed Paradise Valley. That's because Detroit is such a modern metropolis, a paragon of "mobility" and "freedom" and "success", if you will, not like those "unhealthy" coastal and European cities.

This is my favorite statement in the thread:

You folks can navel-gaze all you want about the "destructive" impacts the auto and the internal combustion engine had on cities, but I would venture to say that without them, our national standard of living, the availability/cost of food and manufactured goods, plus personal mobility would still be "stuck in the nineteenth century" and the majority of people would still be living in rural areas, not cities like they are today. In other words, we would still be more of an agrarian society and cities would never have reached the level of importance that they did.

Yes, New York City is quite an anomaly. By all means, it should still be agrarian, because over half its residents do not have access to a private automobile. The explosive economic development in New York City in the 1920s and 1980s was due to the mobility they provided by running freeways willy-nilly all over the city, and doing away with such outdated concepts as public transit and walking.

I mean, don't they realize that EVERYONE WANTS TO DRIVE EVERYWHERE, no matter what the cost? How quaint and 19th century of them!

[Mikeg]

In the haste to ridicule, Ghettopalmetto misses the point I was trying to make. I intentionally included the internal combustion engine along with the auto in my statement because it permitted the the widespread use of cleaner, safer, cheaper and more efficient means of tilling and harvesting on the farms and providing transportation of goods to and within the cities. The shift from horse and steam to the internal combustion engine freed-up huge numbers of farm laborers who out of necessity migrated to jobs in the city. At the same time, the cleaner and more efficient gasoline powered trucks allowed the dense cities to get even denser through more efficient deliveries of goods and services as well as collection of refuse.

In a free society, the application of the internal combustion engine could not be limited to just non-automotive uses and thus many rural and urban residents who could afford to purchase automobiles bought and used them for private transportation. City officials could no more deny them the right to use city streets than they could all of the delivery trucks that played an increasing role in the local economy and in the delivery of municipal services.

[ghettopalmetto]

In the haste to ridicule, Ghettopalmetto misses the point I was trying to make. I intentionally included the internal combustion engine along with the auto in my statement because it permitted the the widespread use of cleaner, safer, cheaper and more efficient means of tilling and harvesting on the farms and providing transportation of goods to and within the cities. The shift from horse and steam to the internal combustion engine freed-up huge numbers of farm laborers who out of necessity migrated to jobs in the city. At the same time, the cleaner and more efficient gasoline powered trucks allowed the dense cities to get even denser through more efficient deliveries of goods and services as well as collection of refuse.

In a free society, the application of the internal combustion engine could not be limited to just non-automotive uses and thus many rural and urban residents who could afford to purchase automobiles bought and used them for private transportation. City officials could no more deny them the right to use city streets than they could all of the delivery trucks that played an increasing role in the local economy and in the delivery of municipal services.

Yes, but the transition from an agrarian to a metropolitan society is not the point of this thread.

The point raised at the outset of the thread is that Detroit has gutted itself, by design, to accommodate ever-increasing amounts of cars and automobile traffic at the expense of any other activity that would take place on a street of proper scale.

[Mikeg]

Well, if you want to take the narrow and unrealistic view that cities who were benefiting greatly from the development of motorized vehicles should have had the "foresight" to ban their citizens from using their personal automobiles on their own public streets regardless of what was happening on the roads just outside their city limits, then I guess just about anything I'm going to write here will be accused of being off-topic.

[DetroitPlanner]

Detroitplanner seems to think that cities where people can walk are merely nostalgic. Everyone else forgets that, quite literally, I-375 destroyed Paradise Valley. That's because Detroit is such a modern metropolis, a paragon of "mobility" and "freedom" and "success", if you will, not like those "unhealthy" coastal and European cities.

You fully missed the sarcasm of my point. I also find it to be quite humorous your assertions that I am pro one mode of transport. Attacking my position as if my or anyone else's opinion does not matter does not serve a lively discourse and goes against the spirit of the Forum. You can't go back or you will get stuck. This does not mean you cannot learn anything from history, but to not evolve or try to evolve is certainly death. People are very selective about what they criticize and I don't see coastal or European Cities as having no mistakes in them should you look back. Lots of stuff in New York or Europe was destroyed too, but you don't see people wholesale cursing folks like Robert Moses. Yes he did do slum clearence, but he gave new york state some wonderful parks and infrastructure in ways that could never be done today [[thank goodness).

Cities evolve over time. Sometimes I'm surprised I've not heard anyone on this forum suggest ripping down the Guardian to recreate one of the old Forts that used to be Downtown.

[ghettopalmetto]

Mikeg, no one ever suggested that cities ban automobile traffic. I think you're smart enough to see the results of what happened when Detroit started to favor automobile usage over any other sort of use of the urban environment. How you can stand behind such a preposterous position is beyond me.

Detroitplanner, there is nothing "natural" or "evolutionary" about gutting cities for cars. All you have to do is read the history books. There was a methodical procedure that was followed to recreate cityscapes for cars over people. Detroit is NOT the outcome of successful urban evolution. If this were the case, do you think Detroit would LOOK the way it does?

If you think that no one ever lambasts Robert Moses for the horrific mistakes he made in New York, then you certainly don't read much about your own profession. Moses wanted to go even further than he actually did. There were plans for the West Side Highway [[now West Avenue) to extend all the way downtown [[to the WTC site) and I believe there were plans for a cross-town expressway in the vicinity of 14th Street. Instead of a web of freeways [[like Detroit has), New York was able to save neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, TriBeCa, and SoHo. It was the "nostalgic" people like Jane Jacobs who banded together to stop the freeways and allow these types of neighborhoods to remain.

[Fury13]

...without them, our national standard of living, the availability/cost of food and manufactured goods, plus personal mobility would still be "stuck in the nineteenth century" and the majority of people would still be living in rural areas, not cities like they are today. In other words, we would still be more of an agrarian society and cities would never have reached the level of importance that they did.

That all sounds good to me.

In 1900, people ate real food [[it's now called "organic")... the slower pace allowed for more human interaction with one's neighbors... families stayed in touch with members living near each other, not spread out all over the country... cities were walkable, and strip malls and freeways didn't exist... the farmer and the products he provided were respected... there was more civility and trust... goods were shipped by rail, so that there were few trucks to clog the roadways...

Not saying there weren't some negatives to life a century ago [[disease/infant mortality/public health hazards, corruption, long travel times over distances, monopolies, etc.), but have we really made THAT much progress?