Fighting Traffic

To the Editor

I have no wish to question Bruce Epperson’s overall assessment of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (January 2009, pp. 235–37), but I believe readers of Technology and Culture deserve corrections of three important errors in Mr. Epperson’s review.

First, the reviewer alleges that the book attributes the transformation of the city street “to a powerful coalition of industry representatives and elite automobile clubs” which “hijacked a series of urban transportation-safety conferences convened by Commerce secretary Herbert Hoover.” In fact, this very small but important episode, confined in the book to six pages (187–93), describes no hijacking, just perfectly legal interest-group politics of the usual variety. This event was not important enough to merit any mention in the summary of the book’s argument in the introduction.

Second, according to the reviewer, “Norton eschews systematic quantification in favor of an anecdotal approach.” The reviewer thereby dismisses substantial research in archival and published primary sources as “anecdotal,” though such research is the foundation of nearly all professional historical monographs. I should note that reviewers who have published books in the field have characterized Fighting Traffic as “exquisitely researched” (Zachary Schrag) and as founded upon “rigorous research” (Gijs Mom). I cannot judge these assessments myself, except to say that as professional historians these reviewers distinguish research from anecdote.

The reviewer purports to present nineteenth-century data that refute my claim that traffic casualties in the early 1920s were unprecedented in scale. The data presented, however, do not serve this purpose. Epperson claims that in 1867, 200 New Yorkers were killed by horse traffic. The data originate from Maxwell Lay’s Ways of the World (1992, p. 132), but are in fact figures for London (as reference to Lay’s source will indicate). In fact, in 1925 automobile fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants in New York City were three times higher than the comparable 1867 London fatality rate attributable to horse traffic.

Other data the reviewer presents as a refutation of my statement that fatalities rose “fast” merely confirm the data in Fighting Traffic; both show a rise in traffic fatalities that was, by any standard, fast. The reviewer notes that fatalities in 1920–1930 rose only 2.57 times (in fact a steeper rise than in any decade since). In the four years following World War I, fatalities rose 64 percent, a rate never since approached in any four-year period; hence, by 1923, cars were under attack by the non-motoring majority in cities. The reviewer notes correctly that fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles declined overall in the 1920s. I used casualty data to explain antipathy to cars among the non-motoring majority, however, for whom casualties per 100,000 inhabitants mattered, not fatalities per 100,000 vehicles.

The book’s argument has much less to do with actual casualty figures (though these are provided) than with the evolving perceptions of competing street users’ rights of access to streets. The strength of these perceptions is substantiated, as it must be, not by casualty figures but by textual evidence. That there was a prevailing perception (justified or not) circa 1920 that automobiles were dangerous, and that pedestrians were presumed innocent when they were struck by them, is a claim substantiated by overwhelming evidence, and perhaps most convincingly by the well-documented anxiety these perceptions fostered among automotive interest groups.

Perceptions (as opposed to accident data) are exceedingly difficult to quantify, but where possible, this has been done. For example, the views of the authors of letters to a newspaper are surveyed (p. 270), police chiefs’ opinions on the causes of accidents are measured (p. 53), and the 42,000 signatures on a speed-governor initiative in Cincinnati (which implicitly blamed automobiles for accidents) are offered as evidence (p. 96). Whether accident data would justify their opinions or not, those who blamed motorists threatened the automobile’s urban future, and this threat led some social groups to organize to extend responsibility for casualties to non-motorists, and to defend motorists’ right to the streets...