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From the very first, automobiles have attracted each other like
magnets, even when there were only two in the same town. The first
incident (or accident) occurred when horse met car. The car-haters
over-dramatized the runaways and foretold all sorts of catastrophes
for the future. On the other hand, the motorists blamed it on the
horses and predicted a great new day of personal transportation. Each
side had an element of truth. There was no question that the
automobile was a boon to mankind, but it was also to prove to be a
killer of people, a destroyer of property, and the accomplice of
criminals.
Even in the beginning of the automobile age, when numbers were few
and bad roads limited the amount of traffic, deaths due to accidents
in automobiles began to mount. Before the U.S. entered WWI, auto
accidents had killed more than 36,000 Americans. By comparison, only
22,424 had lost their lives in the Revolutionary War, the War of
1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined. This
trend to kill more people with cars than with weapons worsened as the
years rolled by.
Before the turn of the century, anti-horseless carriage sentiments
began to express themselves in restrictive regulations. In the late
1890s, Louis Greenough and Harry Adams of Pierre, South Dakota, built
a homemade car out of an Elkhart wagon and a two-cylinder Wolverine
gas motor, hoping to haul passengers at the county fair. They were
not only denied permission to haul passengers, the authorities would
not even let them bring their contraption inside the city limits.
Automobiles were banned in the streets of many cities: Boston,
Chicago and Bar Harbor, Maine, to name a few. In Massachusetts, an
act to require that all cars be equipped with a bell which would ring
with each wheel revolution was voted down, as was one for shooting
off roman candles to warn of the vehicle's approach. There were laws
that required motorists to stop completely while buggies, surreys and
freight wagons dragged by. Speed limits as low as two and three mile
per hour were imposed by a few cities and towns. In some, night-time
driving was prohibited. In 1907, Glencoe, Illinois, built humps in
the streets to discourage speeding. Three years earlier, they had
stretched a steel cable across the road to stop the "devil wagons."
Most of this was antagonism rather than an attempt to accomplish
constructive regulations.
While the jumble of confusing ordinances continued to plague pioneer
motorists, a new wrinkle was added: the "speed trap." In smaller
towns, particularly, marshals and other law officials lay in wait for
unsuspecting drivers, timing them by stop-watch or "by guess and by
gosh." Some lawmen were authorized to shoot at tires or to stretch
chains or wire across the road. Until the motorcycle became a police
vehicle, the local sheriff's office was somewhat limited in their
pursuit of fleeing cars, since they were either on foot or on
bicycles.
Motorists tried to find ways to defend themselves. One way was by
organization, and in 1902, the American Automobile Association was
formed in Chicago to take up the pennant for the motor car operator.
That same year, the city passed an ordinance prohibiting the driver
of a car to wear "pince-nez" glasses. The A.A.A. proved to be a good
watchdog for its members as it fostered realistic regulations and
fought against abusive police action, especially the common practice
of arresting owners of expensive cars on the premise that such people
could afford to pay a stiffer fine.
In the middle of this confusion, there seemed to be no stemming the
growing tide of accidents. It was a case of simple arithmetic; more
cars meant more collisions. With each year, too, the autos were made
faster and more powerful. Narrow roads with no shoulders and sharp,
unbanked curves simply couldn't accommodate speed runs, and from the
beginning, auto owners have had the desire to "see how fast she'll
go." Gradually, the automobile was accepted as a permanent fixture,
and traffic regulations shifted from anti-car priority to that of
anti-accident.
On October 13, 1913, The National Council for Industrial Safety
opened a three-room headquarters in Chicago. The original emphasis
had been on the "industrial," but in that year, the Public Safety
Commission of Chicago and Cook County reported that in July, twenty
people had been killed by automobiles, eighteen of them children.
The commission launched an education program - with leaflets and
slides - in the schools and parks, and the new NCIS realized that the
motor car would have to be the subject of its most intense study. In
1914, the organization's name was changed to The National Safety
Council, and it began to the compile statistics on automobile
accidents. From 1913, when the death toll was 4,000, or 4.4%% of a
100,000 population, it rose, in 1930, to 32,900, or 26.7%%.
The desire to "do something about it" was growing among Americans
everywhere; but the urge to find unfettered freedom in a fast car was
even stronger. In 1914, Detroit installed a manually-operated
stop-and-go sign. In August that year an electrical traffic signal
was put in operation at 105th and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.
The Ford Motor Company gave each car purchaser a card reminding him
to "Stop, Look, and Listen," at all railroad crossings. Magazines and
newspaper articles carried "don't drink and drive" cartoons; this
cooled off during the prohibition when "nobody" was drinking. But
bootleggers, in their big touring cars, and the bathtub gin guzzlers,
in their sporty rumble seat models, continued to add to the highway
toll.
In 1924, the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, whose
chairman was the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, authorized a
committee to draft a uniform motor vehicle code for all forty-eight
states. Two years later, the laws were presented and adopted by the
second conference. The individual states didn't move so quickly, and
some adopted the package in their own time, but a standardized code
of laws was a major achievement of effective nation-wide traffic
regulations.
Die-hard horse-lovers saw the entire development with an "I told you
so" attitude. They knew that the nation was going to suffer for its
folly in permitting roads to be over-run with those mechanical
contraptions. They were snickering in the wilderness, however. The
automobile had a solid footing in America, and no amount of finger
pointing could make it go away. Men began to feel that buying a car
was like taking a bride, you just have to take what you get, for
better or for worse.
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