Hoover's Conference on Street and Highway Safety Marked a Pivot in 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.

Again, Norton is drawing from a pool of evidence nationwide, and he is free to select the very best, most vivid examples. Here in Salem the examples are not always so vivid, but they were in the newspapers nonetheless.

August 2nd, 1924 (compare to Norton)

Walter Chrysler had a regular column in the paper titled "Traffic Talks." Here's one from August of 1924 that talks about turning radius and the safety benefits of squared off corners and turns.

Another talks about leading pedestrian intervals and the special hazard of right-on-red.

October 26th, 1924

He revisited this a year later.

Nov. 15th, 1925

In December of 1924 he talked about pedestrian refuge medians and Paris boulevards.

December 7th, 1924

You might remember this from the old stroad-to-boulevard tumblr, and more recent examples posted to our Strong Towns group (here and here).

A Nelson/Nygaard proposal to convert a stroad
(now defunct Stroad to Boulevard tumblr)

This is what we need on our biggest stroads, especially those we've zoned now for mixed uses.

A modern concept, which may not have any real antecedent from a century ago, is the new bike box on Liberty at Trade.

via FB

The City hyped it on social media recently. They instructed people biking to "position yourself to turn or to go straight while being clearly visible to drivers."

This is weirdly written, written most likely by someone who doesn't bike. Bike boxes are generally to help with left hand turns, but no left hand turn is legal here because of the one-way couplet on Trade/Ferry. The bike box could help a little bit with a right hand turn, when a person needs to merge left quickly in order to make a left-hand turn on Church Street from the left-most lane. But most turns would be right-hand turns into the right-hand bike lane, and no positioning in the bike box is at all necessary to make that maneuver. In fact, that turn, at least for the moment, hardly requires stopping in a right-on-red turn. Moreover, that paint-only bike lane on Trade Street (a State Highway there) is yucky, and few will want to use it.

• See the discussion of Bike Box at NACTO

The real use case for the bike box is for people who want to continue north on Liberty Street, who are stopped, and who with a green light will be "taking the lane" through downtown. This is not a standard use case. These users are confident and skilled cyclists! The paint itself might help with visibility against right-hooks when the light for northbound travel is already green, but that's less help than the box positioning from a stop when the light is red.

The City talks like the bike box is for anyone who would like to bike, but it really only serves a very few "confident and fearless" types. (Indeed, as an inducement to infrequent cyclists it might even be counterproductive.)

And in fact it is not very well integrated into the lane network. A Salemite turned around to show the old-school door-zone bike lane that was left untouched.

via Bluesky

It will be interesting to see how long the plastic wands last there. Drivers generally knock them over pretty quickly. (Significantly, hardened impediments like bollards were more popular in the early 1920s. They knew!)

All in all the bike box is mostly a flag: It's a symbol that the City aspires to be known for bike-friendliness, but in reality it is less substantial than it might appear. It's more PR than anything. It's not useless, it is important to say, and for the confident cyclists willing to take the lane downtown it is definitely an incremental improvement. But the City is hyping it more than is warranted.