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 risk vehicles posed to American pedestrians, and the paper’s issues are as legitimate as immediately as they had been a century in the past. Additionally they go laborious as hell.
Again in 1924, the grey woman ran a bit entitled Nation Roused Towards Motor Killings about efforts by the Hoover administration to reign in site visitors deaths, which accurately attributes site visitors collisions to their enabler: vehicles. The piece additionally has among the least punch-pulling writing I’ve ever seen within the paper of document. 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 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 Warfare. That is on the charge of two,600 fatalities a month—a modest common in comparison with the starling toll of seven,000 lives destroyed month-to-month by accidents in the US.
Jesus Christ. The comparability being drawn right here, that vehicles are worse for humanity than World Warfare One, is staggering in its severity but traces up factually with the deaths-by-months breakdown. There really was, as the author later pens, a “homicidal orgy of the motor automotive.” Dibs on that as a band title.
The yr 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 site visitors courtroom 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 frequent citizen sweepingly stigmatized as a “jay-walker.”
“Motor insanity” positive feels like our fashionable highway 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 automotive, wherein the motive force by no means interacts with the world round them besides by the lens of the car. It’s why you don’t speak 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 group that so many individuals declare they lengthy to retvrn to has been changed with fashionable atomization.
Vehicles kill. They kill folks, they kill the surroundings, 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 creator of this New York Occasions piece was proper to rage in opposition to the “homicidal orgy of the motor automotive.” Extra proper than they know.
