Nowtopian

February 16, 2003, protesters fill Market Street in San Francisco, opposing the impending attack on Iraq.

(My presentation at the “Towards Car-Free Cities,” Guadalajara, Mexico, September 8, 2011)

“Whose Streets? OUR Streets!” yell rowdy demonstrators when they surge off the sidewalk and into thoroughfares. True enough, the streets are our public commons, what’s left of it, but most of the time these public avenues are dedicated to the movement of vehicles, mostly privately owned autos. Other uses are frowned upon, discouraged by laws and regulations and what has become our “customary expectations.” Ask any driver who is impeded by anything other than a “normal” traffic jam and they’ll be quick to denounce the inappropriate use or blockage of the street.

We meet here at the “Towards Carfree Cities Conference” to address how cities are designed, with an overriding interest in redefining what is proper and customary with respect to how streets are used. Part of the emergence of social movements in cities around the world to contest the car, whether bicycling, pedestrians, or street closures, is in response to the seeming inevitability of cars dominating our public space. But automobiles didn’t always fill our streets.

Bicyclists have been working to make space on the streets of San Francisco for bicycling, and to do that they’ve been trying to reshape public expectations about how streets are used. Predictably there’s been a pushback from motorists and their allies, who imagine that the norms of mid-20th century American life can be extended indefinitely into the future. But cyclists and their natural allies, pedestrians, can take heart from a lost history that has been illuminated by Peter D. Norton in his recent book “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.” He skillfully excavates the shift that was engineered in public opinion during the 1920s by the organized forces of what called itself “Motordom.” Their efforts turned pedestrians into scofflaws known as “jaywalkers,” shifted the burden of public safety from speeding motorists to their victims, and reorganized American urban design around providing more roads and more space for private cars.

Critical Mass in San Francisco, August 2007.

But before we look at how motor cars took over our thoroughfares and our imaginations, let us go further back into history, to the end of the 19th century. It was an era of horses, wagons, and streetcars, muddy streets and wooden sidewalks. Different kinds of self-propelled velocipedes and bicycles were invented in the 1870s and became massively popular in the 1890s with the invention of the safety bicycle. In San Francisco, and around the United States, a movement emerged primarily among bicyclists demanding “good roads.”

In 1875 these "boneshakers" were all the rage.

Bay City Wheelmen, 1894, in San Francisco's Mission District.

An 1896 newspaper illustration of the notoriously bad road conditions in San Francisco at the time.

On July 25, 1896, thousands of cyclists filled the streets in the largest demonstration seen in San Francisco’s history. In the last decade of the 19th century, San Francisco was a muddy, dirty town, long past its glory years as a boomtown, but still one of the ten largest cities in the U.S. The streets were full of horseshit and between the ubiquitous cable car slots and tangled web of streetcar rails, pedestrians and bicyclists had a hazardous course to traverse en route to their destinations. After months of organizing among the thriving bicycling clubs of the city, a huge parade was organized that drew as many as 100,000 spectators.

The "Good Roads' bike parade-protest of 1896.

Continue reading Whose Streets? People vs. Automobiles: The 20th Century Battle over Cities, Streets, and Freeways