Greg Shill's recent piece at The Atlantic arguing for more traffic enforcement is making the rounds, and one more reason to be cautious about it is that it is an echo, even partial revival, of a pernicious reframing that happened 100 years ago.
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| Focus on recklessness - via Bluesky |
Some had argued in seeking to critique what Shill took as excessive focus on road design, it misunderstood central parts of Vision Zero.
- See from a couple days ago, "On Design Fundamentalism and Speed: Debate on Vision Zero Principles"
The focus on reckless driving and on individual malfeasance distinct from system problems with speed and road design has an historical origin. We can locate it! It was autoist propaganda sponsored by car interests and the car industry. And a key moment for it was Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover's conference in December of 1924 on traffic safety.
Last month historian Peter Norton highlighted the ways Hoover responded to autoist interests and revised his speech to the conference to focus on recklessness instead of speed.
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| Hoover's shift from speed to recklessness via Bluesky |
A month later, exactly 100 years ago today, in the Auto section the morning paper here published one of Walter Chrysler's columns, "Recklessness not speed the real menace." We can directly see how Hoover's speech was used and how the propaganda was pushed out to local influencers. It was coordinated!
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| January 18th, 1925 |
Chrysler wrote,
The tendency in American as abroad is to do away with laws limiting the speed of motor vehicles and substituting laws which punish severely for reckless driving.And in a separate column in the same paper on Hoover's conference, he wrote about pedestrian control.
That in cities pedestrians should be required to keep within the boundaries of designated safety zones and crossing places...pedestrians should not jay-walk.
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| January 18th, 1925 |
Shill is well intentioned, and he is right that we need more enforcement, but enforcement should not be the central feature of a safety program. If we have to rely on enforcement primarily, we don't have the right road design. The design is already too permissive and the focus on recklessness lets more banal forms of speeding and bending the rules remain too customary. Focus on recklessness also shifts attention away from legal driving and legal design that is harmful, or balanced too much in favor of drivers, and should be changed. Design fundamentalism gets at the systems inducing speed, both lawful and lawless, and works better to create new driving habits and customs. Design is fundamental.
Previously on this moment in history:
- "'The Deadly Auto': 1924 Editorial Compares Road and War Fatalities" (2024)
- "Hoover's Conference on Street and Highway Safety Marked a Pivot to our Autoism" (2024)
- "Hoover's Conference on Traffic Safety Established Link with Zoning" (2024)
- "Pedestrian Victim-blaming Playbook Halts new Stop Signs at Parrish in 1924" (2024)
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