-
Chapter 8. Negotiating Automobile Risk
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8 Negotiating Automobile Risk The automobile hurtled into American life nearly simultaneously with the gospel of safety first. Introduced as a toy for the wealthy in the last hours of the gilded age and as an alternative to the fast horses preoccupying the time and wallets of the wealthy, its transformation into transportation for the masses began with Henry Ford’s 1908 introduction of the Model T. By 1919, the year the NSC staged its first urban safety campaign, an estimated 7.5 million motorized vehicles sped along the country’s roads. In the next half decade, the number of cars, trucks, and buses reached almost 20 million. Not surprisingly, accidents followed. In 1920, 12,155 men, women, and children died on the roads (already ten times the fatalities of 1910). A decade later, the death toll reached 31,000, as motor vehicle accidents became an increasingly familiar part of everyday life, as well as the single most statistically significant cause of accidental death.1 Numbers made an impression, not only on safety professionals, but also on politicians, educators, and community leaders.2 Automobile safety advocates pressed for sweeping changes in how Americans used the roads. They applied the safety movement’s accumulated tool kit to transform unorganized public spaces into well-ordered, predictable systems. Their tools included creating and enforcing uniform traffic laws; educating, testing, and licensing drivers; and reengineering roads to make them more predictable. Experts and policy makers gradually recognized that significant numbers of accidents were, and would probably remain, unavoidable. A socio-technological system in which consumers had significant agency could never be controlled to the same extent as a rail- 164 r i s k i n a c o n s u m e r s o c i e t y road or a steel mill. Acceptance of inevitability led to the safety movement’s last great conceptual innovation: reengineering not to prevent accidents, but rather tolessentheseverityofinjuries.Theenormousscaleoftheautomobileaccident problem also redefined and invigorated insurance and tort law as means for redistributing costs, binding them into a symbiotic relationship. Simultaneously the epicenter of an emergent consumer culture and a revolution in transportation , traffic safety rapidly became the twentieth century’s most important locus for public deliberations and negotiations about how to protect the common goodfromthemisguidedorself-servingactionsofindividualsandcorporations. Educators and automobile clubs, Herbert Hoover and Henry Ford all contributed to the discussion.3 At the same time, a robust vernacular culture took shape around the public’s perception and use of motor vehicles. Because cars and trucks arrived into a society already in the midst of adopting modern, expert-generated ways of managing risk, the automobile vernacular developed as part of a dialogue. Drivers, passengers, and pedestrians selectively accepted, reinterpreted, rejected, or simply ignored expert-prescribed rules and technologies meant to keep them safe.Trafficsignsandsymbols,oncenoveltiesneedingexplanation,becamenaturalized . Habits and heuristics, which had first been taught in schools by safety professionals—lookleft,lookrightbeforesteppingoutintothestreet—cameto This woodcut from a driver’s education manual portrays the events following an automobile accident. Albert Whitney, Man and the Motorcar (1936), Hagley Museum and Library. [54.157.35.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:44 GMT) n e g o t i a t i n g a u t o m o b i l e r i s k 165 be inculcated as a normal part of child raising. In other circumstances, a familiar pattern of trade-offs including cost, convenience, and the preservation of individualautonomyledtotherejectionofsafetymeasures .Thepersistentautomobile safety problem also revealed the gap in risk perception between experts and the public, reinforced by the automobile’s potent image as a consumer object in control of the user. Despite extensive efforts at education, many people continued to believe that skill and luck would protect them from becoming a statistic.4 And finally, on the roads and in the offices of insurance agents and the chambers of traffic judges, clear distinctions between the two cultures seemed to disappear . Somewhere in the middle a kind of hybrid took shape. Accidents Happen According to police detectives, this was the sequence of events: late on Easter Sunday,twenty-one-year-oldclerkHarryOeschegerandhiswifedrovebackinto Philadelphia after spending the day in Trenton, New Jersey. At the intersection of Third Street and Oregon Avenue, Oescheger’s car hit a pedestrian. Oescheger then swerved, hitting a second bystander before fleeing the scene. Investigators speculated that the car had been traveling at “terrific speed” because both victims were lifted...