Pedestrian Victim-blaming Playbook Halts new Stop Signs at Parrish in 1924

Within just a few months of opening Parrish School in 1924, parents were immediately concerned about speeding drivers on Capitol Street, which was the Pacific Highway at that time.

December 12th, 1924

In mid-December the afternoon paper said

Complaints of parents of some of the 860 children now attending the Parrish school that truck and car drivers are speeding past the school house without regard for the safety of the children are chiefly responsible for the agitation for immediate action.

A few days later an ordinance for stop signs was at Council.

December 16th, 1924

Alas, the victim-blaming playbook was already effective and support for the stops ebbed away.

Fad for Radium Quackery prompts Legislature to try out Radium Water in 1925

In the lead up to the 1925 Legislative session, the morning paper published a humorous moment in regional jockeying and health fads.

December 12th, 1924

100 years ago the morning paper announced "radium water will be tried out....This water is said to act as a preventative for goiter, cancer and whatever ails a person." It was a third option besides Salem tapwater from the Willamette and Portland area Bull Run mountain water. Between local pride and likely very real differences in taste, apparently a significant number of people did not like Salem water, which at this time still came from the gravel beds at Minto Island.

October 23rd, 1924

Radium was newly popular as a miracle drug. But it may have achieved quite the opposite. Or, perhaps it is better to say, it could be effective and helped usher people closer to the "door of the great unknown."

Hoover's Conference on Traffic Safety Established Link with Zoning

If you needed any proof of the close relation between traffic safety reform and zoning reform, the very first National Conference on Street and Highway Safety from mid-December 1924 saw a report that asserted, even created, a strong link between traffic safety, city planning, and zoning.

Traffic safety and zoning nexus, Dec. 1924

It's right there at the inception of our autoist paradigm!

Even though the conference was on safety, the primary problem to be solved was congestion and facilitating through-travel. In this report especially "safety" is deceptively understood and mystified.

Flow, not safety, is the main thing

Yet they understood the inefficiency of cars, "uneconomical in [their] use of street space per passenger." They also correctly identified the problem of "day storage space for automobiles" and did not mainly use the term parking, which laundered the notion of storage and absorbed it into the beautification of lawn and curb strip shrubbery.

They understood the geometric inefficiency of cars!

"Traffic movement is the primary consideration in designing streets": Again, not safety, even though that was the primary aim for the conference.

Hoover's Conference on Street and Highway Safety Marked a Pivot to our Autoism

In the lead up to the centenary of Hoover's mid-December Conference on Street and Highway Safety, historian Peter Norton has been posting daily.

Trying to tame cars and drivers - Bluesky

It's clear he sees the conference as a pivot in our autoism, a key moment when the discourse shifted from seeing cars and drivers as a danger and menace, with the primary object to protect people on foot, to seeing cars and drivers as the primary users to oblige, with the objects to redefine safety as the problem of recklessness and to get people on foot out of the way and properly contained.

Across multiple posts, Norton keyed in repeatedly on the changes between the draft of Hoover's opening remarks and the remarks as delivered. Autoist interests asked for changes and they got them.

In announcing the conference, Hoover dropped his plan to call the automobile a “deadly weapon.” He was responding to pressures from motordom. Responding to the same pressures, Hoover also rewrote his opening address to the conference. In his own draft of his speech, he planned to frame the conference’s task as finding ways to rein in motorists so as to protect pedestrians....Hoover had planned to call the moving automobile “a tremendous and deadly instrument of power” with “a capacity for destruction equal to any deadly weapon,” and to say “I approach this subject largely in terms of these pedestrians.”.... Instead, following meetings and memos, Hoover rewrote his speech, recasting motorists as victims of a reckless minority and calling the car “a complete necessity.”

The speech, delivered December 15, 1924, was widely covered in the press....

This address...is an origin point of a national approach to traffic safety that deters walking (and thereby also deters transit), that promotes ever-more driving, and that still strives in vain to safely accommodate and prioritize fast driving nearly everywhere.

Interestingly, the Conference did not receive much attention here. Norton has all these great clips with headlines and illustrations (like at top, but note the "reckless speeder" and not ordinary driver), but here in Salem comment was muted. This is the primary article.

December 15th, 1924

It's possible that the developing snow storm and freeze, as well as other local matters, was more pressing. But it is interesting that the conference was framed as "solving [the] problem of traffic regulations," and not centrally about safety. The tone from a couple of weeks earlier was gone.

• "'The Deadly Auto': 1924 Editorial Compares Road and War Fatalities"

If you are interested in Norton's discussion in the full national context, check out his feed!

Something else and related that he has posted on are ways that many of our current traffic safety countermeasures, as well as ones yet to be adopted very widely, are not anything new, and not anything mainly developed in Amsterdam or Copenhagen or Stockholm in the late 20th century, but instead are revivals of things we knew much earlier in the 1920s.

In our mid-century mania for speed, flow, and capacity, we "forgot" about them by design.

They don't Make Freezes like they Used to: Christmas Freeze of 1924

100 years ago the Christmas Freeze of 1924 started. It started with snow.

December 15th, 1924

It lasted two weeks and featured lows below ten degrees.

December 19th, 1924

Parts of the river were completely covered in ice.

Disconnects between Present and Future Needs in Budget and VMT

The City budget crunch is on the front page today.

Front page today

In the packet for the meeting of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board for tomorrow, Thursday the 12th, members can read a timely and thoughtful letter Planning Commissioner Slater writes, in his personal capacity as Salemite, about the disconnect between capital investments and operations budgets.

excerpt from letter in Dec. SPRAB packet

Slater writes

When the City follows the 2013 parks master plan and adds developed park acreage to our system, we do not have a discussion with SPRAB, the City Council, or the general public about impact to the general fund.

Slater is particularly focused on parks acquisition, parks operations, and parks programming.

Jaydriving and Lunacy in our Language

In today's paper is another story of jaydriving, but the story erases the driver, ascribing agency to the truck: "the truck did not obey road signs and was too tall...."

Today's paper

The headline on photos and video online and not yet accompanied by a story also erases the driver in talk about a "truck that drove into south Salem house."

Online only today

And last week in Salem Reporter about the sign, "frequently wrecked by car crashes," recently removed at the border with Keizer, the language is about a problematic sign well off the roadway and not anything about jaydriving or drivers who keep hitting the sign:

Now, Salem officials plan to replace the sign with a new one that is more financially sustainable for the city and easier for its Public Works Department to replace, according to Kathleen Swarm, the city’s recreation program manager.

“This sign has been causing problems for years and years, and is a huge burden for this city to keep up,” Swarm said at a Salem Public Arts Commission meeting on Nov. 13.

The sign was most recently hit around April and then sat dented for seven months, with the brick wall behind it broken into pieces. This time, fixing it would have cost around $40,000....

The frequent damage to the sign began a year after it was built.

There are two big problems here in the way we talk about these crashes.

First, in every instance of a crash there is a person operating and in charge of a motor vehicle. There is a driver with primary agency. We are not yet talking about robot cars.

Second, whether it's a bridge with prominent warning signs, a house set back from the street, or a welcome sign also well recessed from the street, drivers zoom along too fast on our streets and cause great damage.

Not the solution! via the former Twitter

Did we fail to put high-viz safety gear on the bridge, house, and welcome sign? If bridges aren't safe, and houses aren't safe, and brick welcome signs aren't safe, why do we keep insisting that people on foot or on bike are primarily responsible for safety? And why do we keep talking around the agency of drivers?

It's the cars and their drivers. We have a car problem and driving problem. As we move to a "safe system" approach, we still need to center motor vehicles, their operators, and speed.

Previously:

• Notes on Erasing the Driver here
  
• Notes on Vision Zero here
  
• Notes on the recent Metropolitan Transportation Safety Action Plan