Peter Norton, historian and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, posted this today:
100 years ago tomorrow. New York Times, November 23, 1924:
“The automobile looms up as a far more destructive piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death than the artilleryman. … Immediate action [is necessary] to halt the homicidal orgy of the automobile.”
Michael Tae Sweeney reposted Norton with this:
There have been about 4 million motor vehicle fatalities in the United States since then (about 3x more than all United States military deaths in all wars in the nation's history combined)
In this country, it's hard for most people to pull their minds out of the normalization of these deaths because the car = mobility = freedom.
Stats like Sweeney's comparison to war deaths help.
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