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 reality to energy about the menace vehicles posed to American pedestrians, and the paper’s considerations are as legitimate as right now as they have been a century in the past. Additionally they go onerous as hell.
Again in 1924, the grey girl ran a bit 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 report. It opens:
The horrors of warfare look like much less appalling than the horrors of peace. The auto looms up as a much more harmful piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist offers extra demise than the artilleryman. The person on the street appears much less secure than the person within the trench.
Fifty thousand of our males have been killed in motion or died of wounds within the nineteen months of this nation’s participation within the World Struggle. That is on the fee of two,600 fatalities a month—a modest common when put next with the starling toll of seven,000 lives destroyed month-to-month by accidents in the USA.
Jesus Christ. The comparability being drawn right here, that automobiles are worse for humanity than World Struggle 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 automotive.” Dibs on that as a band title.
The 12 months 1924 would go on to see 23,600 deaths from automobiles, a quantity we’ve upped to 40,990 in 2023. Fewer deaths per capita, certain, however that lower could 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 understand its personal frailties and never ascribe all blame to the widespread citizen sweepingly stigmatized as a “jay-walker.”
“Motor insanity” certain appears like our trendy street rage, however “motor selfishness,” a phrase seemingly not used since this piece, is one thing much more insidious. It’s the isolating impact of being in a automotive, wherein the motive force by no means interacts with the world round them besides by the lens of the auto. It’s why you don’t discuss to the opposite driver who sit simply ft away from you in your commute, why you say you’re reduce off by a “white Volkswagen” relatively than its occupant, and why the old-timey neighborhood that so many individuals declare they lengthy to retvrn to has been changed with trendy atomization.
Automobiles kill. They kill individuals, they kill the surroundings, and the societal atomization created by car-centric infrastructure, driveway-equipped low-density housing, and an absence 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 automotive.” Extra proper than they know.
