The New York Occasions of 2024 is a rag of transphobia and genocide denial, however 100 years in the past the paper wasn’t fairly so cowed by the American halls of energy. Again in 1924, the paper was talking fact to energy about the menace vehicles posed to American pedestrians, and the paper’s considerations are as legitimate as as we speak as they had been a century in the past. In addition they go arduous as hell.
Again in 1924, the grey woman ran a chunk entitled Nation Roused In opposition to Motor Killings about efforts by the Hoover administration to reign in visitors deaths, which appropriately attributes visitors collisions to their enabler: vehicles. The piece additionally has a few of the least punch-pulling writing I’ve ever seen within the paper of file. It opens:
The horrors of warfare seem like much less appalling than the horrors of peace. The car looms up as a much more damaging piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist offers extra dying than the artilleryman. The person on the street appears much less protected than the person within the trench.
Fifty thousand of our males had been killed in motion or died of wounds within the nineteen months of this nation’s participation within the World Battle. That is on the price of two,600 fatalities a month—a modest common compared with the starling toll of seven,000 lives destroyed month-to-month by accidents in america.
Jesus Christ. The comparability being drawn right here, that vehicles are worse for humanity than World Battle One, is staggering in its severity but strains up factually with the deaths-by-months breakdown. There actually was, as the author later pens, a “homicidal orgy of the motor automobile.” Dibs on that as a band title.
The 12 months 1924 would go on to see 23,600 deaths from vehicles, a quantity we’ve upped to 40,990 in 2023. Fewer deaths per capita, positive, however that lower might be credited to developments that prioritize motorists over all else — developments the New York Occasions warned about again in 1924. The paper ends its piece with a quote from visitors court docket Justice of the Peace W. Bruce Cobb:
It’s devoutly to be wished that motor insanity and motor selfishness wherever discovered could notice its personal frailties and never ascribe all blame to the widespread citizen sweepingly stigmatized as a “jay-walker.”
“Motor insanity” positive seems like our fashionable street rage, however “motor selfishness,” a phrase seemingly not used since this piece, is one thing way more insidious. It’s the isolating impact of being in a automobile, during which the motive force by no means interacts with the world round them besides via the lens of the auto. It’s why you don’t speak to the opposite driver who sit simply toes away from you in your commute, why you say you’re lower off by a “white Volkswagen” slightly than its occupant, and why the old-timey neighborhood that so many individuals declare they lengthy to retvrn to has been changed with fashionable atomization.
Vehicles kill. They kill individuals, they kill the setting, and the societal atomization created by car-centric infrastructure, driveway-equipped low-density housing, and a scarcity of public transit as an area shared by all has killed our empathy. The writer of this New York Occasions piece was proper to rage towards the “homicidal orgy of the motor automobile.” Extra proper than they know.
