Town of Los Angeles has rightfully gripped the nation’s consideration this month as wildfires rage on. Whereas the devastation induced by our changing climate calls for superhuman effort to squelch it, the transportation sector (stubbornly liable for the greatest share of U.S. emissions) is mockingly observing a major milestone. January 24, 2025, marked the centennial of the implementation of the Traffic Ordinance for the City of Los Angeles. This 35-page bureaucratic doc redefined using America’s streets, tailoring them to the advantage of the automotive trade.
American streets had been as soon as dominated by individuals. A documentary travelogue of New York City captured by Scenska Biografteatern from 1911 is crowded with pedestrians crisscrossing streets of their every day routines. Trollies, carriages, and the occasional vehicle jostle by, unhindered by visitors indicators or centerlines. To us at this time, it could appear chaotic, however the tempo of the road is gradual, and folks navigate one another with fluency.
San Francisco’s A Trip Down Market Street, shot only a 12 months earlier than the 1906 earthquake, exhibits the view from a streetcar, picturing the Ferry Constructing on the road’s finish obscured by intertwining streetcars, horses, bicyclists, automobiles, and folks. Pedestrians stand undaunted within the heart of the road, ready to board the slow-moving streetcar. A boy playfully darts in entrance of the prepare, as if he’s difficult it to a recreation of tag. Rising up in American cities meant playing in the streets, even within the nation’s most dense neighborhoods.
Again then, individuals shared the roadway with streetcars and bikes. Within the early 1900s, Los Angeles had essentially the most intensive electrical streetcar system wherever. From Minneapolis and Chicago to Washington D.C. and New York Metropolis, bicycles had been utilized by men and women commuting to work within the Eighteen Nineties. And so they weren’t alone. As Evan Friss chronicles in The Cycling City, individuals rode bikes in U.S. cities as a lot as they now experience in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the perfect biking cities on this planet.
This was all earlier than the Los Angeles Visitors Ordinance was handed. The Ordinance was written by Miller McClintock, then a doctoral scholar of municipal authorities at Harvard College, who was recruited by a champion of the auto trade, Paul Hoffman. Hoffman had dropped out of the College of Chicago to promote Studebakers at 18-years-old. At 33, he was shut to creating his first million {dollars} within the trade and had been appointed chairman of the Los Angeles Visitors Fee—a physique liable for regulating streets. For the primary time, the Ordinance prioritized automobiles on the town’s more and more congested roadways. It shortly grew to become the template for the nation.
With a up to date eye, the provisions created by the Ordinance could appear extra logical than they had been to metropolis dwellers on the time. Historian and creator Peter Norton has spent his profession researching the auto period and has effectively documented it in his books Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City and Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving. Norton has scoured letters to the editors of native newspapers, written by on a regular basis individuals who passionately argue for his or her place on American streets, simply because it was being usurped. With the anniversary of the Los Angeles Visitors Ordinance approaching, I interviewed him to know its significance.
Norton says that sharing streets all the time required negotiation, however earlier than the Ordinance, “the pedestrian had absolutely the proper to the road, to walk into it at any level, and to cross it wherever she selected . . . even a toddler had the suitable to the road.” This was a social norm, however as Norton’s analysis suggests, it was additionally defended by judges in U.S. courtrooms all through the nation. For instance, in Combating Visitors, he cites a Philadelphia choose who, in 1924, lectured drivers in his courtroom, saying, “It received’t be lengthy earlier than youngsters received’t have any rights in any respect to the road.” He decided that motorists deserved restraint if they may not assume the accountability of making certain youngsters’s security and resolved, “One thing drastic have to be performed to finish this menace to pedestrians and to youngsters specifically.”
It could be laborious to think about at this time, in a rustic the place the vast majority of people commute by car, however in Los Angeles and plenty of U.S. cities within the early twentieth century, most individuals didn’t use automobiles to get round. The vast majority of American ladies didn’t get driver’s licenses till the Nineteen Sixties, and if a household owned a automobile, males normally monopolized using it. Folks usually walked, rode streetcars, or biked. Norton argues that whereas the transition to auto-dominated streets is usually seen because the arc of progress stimulated by client demand, it was truly a well-crafted marketing campaign produced by these with an curiosity in promoting vehicles.
The Los Angeles Visitors Ordinance modified who was prioritized on metropolis streets. Between 1914 and 1922, the variety of cars on the streets of Los Angeles quadrupled. To proceed to spice up gross sales, the auto trade required an edge over its competitors with the streetcar and considered one of its benefits was pace. On the time, a streetcar traveled at roughly 10-15 miles per hour, and with out devoted lanes, at even slower speeds after they had been blocked by automobiles. Within the Ordinance, McClintock imposed a 35-mile-per-hour threshold virtually all over the place aside from a couple of restricted instances. However 35 miles per hour was unprecedented within the early twentieth century. Based on Norton, most cities held motor autos to eight–10 mile per hour speeds. In his phrases, the automotive trade realized that, “If drivers can’t go sooner than a streetcar, then they’re not going to purchase a automobile, particularly if they’ve a streetcar service accessible to them . . . So, we can’t afford to let pace be the wrongdoer in visitors security.”
As a substitute of specializing in pace, the Ordinance decried recklessness. Most significantly, it pinned “reckless conduct” on pedestrians reasonably than dashing automobiles. The Ordinance calls out “jaywalkers,” criminalizing pedestrians who don’t “obey indicators” or who stroll outdoors crossings. “Jaywalking,” as soon as used as derogatory slang, was employed formally to repair attitudes in opposition to wayward pedestrians. McClintock writes that, “Excessive-speed motor visitors makes the apply referred to as ‘jay-walking’ virtually suicidal” as a substitute of questioning the imposition of hurtling motor autos on streets occupied by individuals. As Norton suggests, “You might use precisely the identical info that he’s utilizing to say that driving at pace is homicidal.”
Within the 1920’s, visitors accidents and fatalities had been climbing. In his e-book Fighting Traffic, Norton observes that between 1920-1929 motor autos killed greater than 200,000 individuals in america (roughly 4 instances the dying toll of the earlier decade), lengthy earlier than most adults drove. Horrifically, lots of these killed had been essentially the most weak, together with the aged and kids, particularly in dense cities the place the casualties had been the best. The general public was naturally involved about security and the Ordinance addressed their considerations concerning the risks of blending automobiles and pedestrians, saying, “These conflicts account for the nice majority of the accidents and fatalities in Los Angeles and in each different metropolis.”
Nonetheless, the Ordinance co-opts security as a tactic to make extra room for automobiles. For the “management and safety of pedestrian visitors,” McClintock suggests limiting pedestrians to striped crosswalks, raised platforms on broad roads known as “security zones,” and even tunnels created to guard schoolchildren from motor autos. He overlooks the social lifetime of the road and even requires that pedestrians “not cease or stand on the sidewalk besides as close to as bodily attainable to the constructing line” to treatment what he calls the “too frequent congestion of pedestrian visitors by informal teams gathering on the sidewalk.”
The Ordinance didn’t change metropolis streets by itself. It was accompanied by a intelligent public relations marketing campaign focused at cultural norms and superior by E.B. Lefferts, president of the Vehicle Membership of Southern California. Lefferts designed the marketing campaign to succeed the place different cities had failed. As Norton paperwork, Lefferts informed an viewers on the Chicago conference of the Nationwide Security Council that the Ordinance labored as a result of “We’ve acknowledged that in controlling visitors, we should take into accounts the research of human psychology, reasonably than method it solely as an engineering drawback.” As Norton summarizes, Lefferts’ techniques aimed to make individuals “really feel embarrassed, maybe ashamed . . . to really feel the sting of ridicule.”
Radio broadcasts aired a public training marketing campaign about conduct on the road, the Boy Scouts had been deployed to problem playing cards to offenders, letting them know they had been “jay-walking.” In the end, the police had been emboldened to blow whistles at anybody making an attempt to cross the road in opposition to the sign or outdoors marked areas—shaming them into submission. Norton found a number of instances the place individuals had been humiliated by cops who “picked up pedestrians . . . (principally ladies) and put them on the curb.” Those that protested this new therapy had been arrested.
The Los Angeles Visitors Ordinance established that streets wouldn’t be shared however dominated by automobiles. It was primarily a land seize. As soon as the roadway was secured for the advantage of motor autos, they had been the heavyweight champion on streets that had as soon as been for everybody. The Ordinance required that pedestrians had been “topic to the identical instructions and indicators as govern the motion of autos” with out acknowledging that they had been exceptionally weak. Dealing with the mass of a dashing automobile, no different customers of the roadway may compete within the bodily battle to say the streets.
By upping speeds on American streets and designing them for accelerating automobiles, motordom prevailed. Even at this time, Norton says, “we nonetheless maintain the view that you simply attempt to make quick driving secure as a substitute of signaling to drivers that they have to be paying consideration and slowing down.”
The logic of the Los Angeles Visitors Ordinance quickly made its method into the Mannequin Municipal Visitors Ordinance, which handed in 1928 underneath the path of Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, in shut session with the auto trade. It grew to become the template for related ordinances all through the nation. As Norton maintains, “Nearly all over the place you go whenever you’re coping with the native guidelines . . . they’re descended from this ancestor, the Los Angeles Visitors Ordinance.”
McClintock went on to creator a proposal for “foolproof highways,” within the mid-Nineteen Thirties, promising security by gradual turns, grade separations, and streets for the unique use of the auto—once more with the promise of accelerating speeds. These highways would in the end carry extra automobiles into the hearts of city areas, with a rising human toll. Outpaced by automobiles, and bullied to the margins, bicyclists additionally misplaced their place on the highway. Ultimately, streetcar tracks were pulled up, some changed by buses. Nonetheless, mass transit was more and more restricted as tax {dollars} secured by the Highway Trust Fund had been inconsistently divided by an 80-20 cut up favoring spending on highways.
Sadly, dedicating streets to automobiles didn’t assure security. In 2021, greater than 43,000 people died on U.S. roads. Automobiles have change into bigger, sooner, and heavier, making them much more lethal, particularly to youngsters. In America, from the time a toddler can stroll till she reaches maturity, being hit by a automobile has been the number one cause of death for a lot of many years (surpassed solely not too long ago by firearms).
Norton objects to our collective historical past informed as if auto dominance was the inevitable path of progress. He has uncovered the mass of people that urged the nation in a distinct path. “It was unusual Individuals from all walks of life, wealthy and poor, Black, Brown and White, female and male who had been objecting to their lack of using the road.” Amongst them was Philadelphian Barnett Bartel who, because the Mannequin Municipal Visitors Ordinance was being deliberated, urged Hoover to guard individuals on roads. Bartel describes the appalling lack of his sons to what he identifies as “murderers.” Bartel’s 9-year-old was killed on his stroll dwelling from faculty by a truck that jumped the curb on his stroll dwelling from faculty, and his 18-year-old was run over by a automobile on his bike in a hit-and-run and left to bleed to dying.
Bartel was considered one of many bereaved dad and mom whose letters crowded the native papers. Their protests continued within the Nineteen Fifties when women-led “baby carriage blockades” obstructed streets so youngsters may play safely outdoors. Norton acknowledges that “it’s extremely useful to get better these misplaced views as a result of then we are able to step out of the views that we grew up in, and that we had been socialized into, and take a look at them afresh with new eyes and probably see alternatives.”
As jaywalking laws are repealed in cities and states throughout the nation, as congestion pricing removes vehicles from the center of the biggest U.S. metropolis to pay for transit, as pandemic-era open streets evolve into new everlasting city parkways, and as a brand new administration hangs its hat on advancing “freedom,” Norton encourages us to rethink the 100-year historical past ushered in by the Los Angeles’ Visitors Ordinance. He suggests a brand new model of our historical past that avoids the false promoting that Individuals have all the time had a love affair with the auto. Maybe with the brand new area allotted on our streets, and the legal guidelines that govern them, we’ll reclaim the cultural historical past we gave up and the liberty of selection we as soon as exercised in order that at any age, we can walk, bike, and experience the place we wish to. “If we get better that historical past,” says Norton, “we empower ourselves in selecting various futures.”
This story was initially revealed by Next City, a nonprofit information outlet protecting options for equitable cities. Join Subsequent Metropolis’s newsletter for his or her newest articles and occasions.