Fighting Traffic

By Peter D. Norton,

Book cover of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City

Book description

The fight for the future of the city street between pedestrians, street railways, and promoters of the automobile between 1915 and 1930.

Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Fighting Traffic as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that our streets have been designed through a process of simplification. I did not realize that this all started in the 1920s with the advent of the mass-produced automobile.

The first ‘traffic engineers’ came from water management, and because of that, our streets have become pipelines that should never be clogged! Mind = blown! All this made a lot of sense a hundred years ago, but does it still today? Or should we take this newfound freedom to create new languages to think about and design our streets?

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