Fighting traffic

In 1922, the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the U.S., dedicated a memorial to the 286 children killed in car crashes the previous year. More than 5,000 people attended the ceremony, which was inspired by a previous Safety Week in Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City’s Safety Week procession of 10,000 people, including 1,054 children marching to represent the 1,054 children killed in accidents—mostly traffic crashes—in 1921.

Campaigns like this were common all over the U.S. in the early 1900s. After four years of trench warfare in Europe capped by the staggering death toll of the 1918 influenza epidemic—a minimum of 21 million dead worldwide, with closer estimates being 50 to 100 million—an exhausted country found itself battling a rising number deaths and injuries on another front: those caused by the invasion of private automobiles on public roads, and the seeming unwillingness of drivers to take seriously the fact that they were driving deadly machines, an unwillingness that persists to this day.

We are often told that North America is dominated by highways and freeways, and our country roads and city streets ruled by car drivers, because this was a reality we chose. We wanted a world where not only we can get anywhere by car, but a world where there is often no other method of going places.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the early 20th century, resistance against automobile dominance—against speed in particular but even against cars using crowded public roads—was enormous. People, including children, died by the thousands every year due to car drivers’ negligence, and nobody at the time was blaming pedestrians, much less children playing in the public road as they had always done.

Our public streets and roads used to be exactly that: public. They did not belong to car drivers, who simply had equal access and use like everyone else, including children playing, nor did highways, freeways, or motorways—whose only purpose is to enable car drivers getting from one place to another as quickly as possible—exist. With all the flaws and oppressions of the Industrial Revolution, cities, towns, and roads were still largely designed for people, not cars.

While cars were initially tolerated, resistance against their presence, and particularly their speed, grew fierce in response to lives lost and other damage caused by drivers. For years, large American cities erected memorials to the dead and held massive protests against the recklessness of drivers.

A car-centric world was never desired. It was never even tolerated. From the beginning, it was fought.

The industry fought back. Throughout the 1920s, automobile executives and lobbyists built up marketing blitzes framed as safety campaigns; and created think tanks and government roles to further the needs of not people or communities, whose transportation requirements were served by public transit and a walkable world, but instead the narrow interests of the automobile industry.

By 1956, President Eisenhower had become an enthusiastic proponent of building an interstate highway system, using plans that had been in the works for years. While for the car industry the network meant faster speeds and less friction for traffic flow, translating into more sales of private automobiles; for communities it meant degraded air quality, constant noise and pollution, and, in city after city, neighborhoods—mostly in poor communities and communities of color—were demolished to make way for freeways. In writing about this destruction in my book A Walking Life, I focused on the St. Paul, Minnesota, community of Rondo, but there are countless others across the U.S., communities still trying to repair and rebuild decades after they were crushed or ripped apart in order to build highways meant to serve better-off, usually white, suburbs. The interstate highway system eventually cost well over $600 billion in today’s money to build, and in the process stole uncounted current and future billions of equity in homes and businesses—private property taken through the government’s power of eminent domain.

Nearly a hundred years from the peak of automobile resistance, during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, I came across an Instagram post responding to projected deaths from Our World in Data if measures weren’t taken to mitigate Covid’s viral spread. (That data and graph continue to be updated.)

I’m sure many of us remember that graph, the projected millions of deaths—what the authors termed “excess mortality”—that even temporary lockdowns and slapdash masking requirements prevented, not to mention how much more could have been done if we had leadership that cared more about human well-being than about the stock market.

Not everyone saw it that way. “40,000 Americans die every year in car accidents,” the writer of the post said, going on to make a point along the lines of we shouldn’t panic, much less invite the slightest discomfort or inconvenience into our lives. Potential Covid deaths, after all, compared favorably with deaths from car crashes. Meh.

I was still on Instagram at the time and reposted the comment immediately, with livid energy. That’s exactly the point, I wrote, my book having been published less than a year before and all the issues fresh in my mind. We shouldn’t accept all those deaths from car crashes as normal or acceptable. Those 40,000 lives should never be a price we as a society are willing to shrug off for the convenience of getting everywhere by car.

That 40,000 deaths (actually slightly under; the estimate was a little over 36,000 in 2019 and again in 2025, a slight decrease from over 39,000 in 2024) includes over 6,000 cyclists and pedestrians per year, people who weren’t even in a car. It does not include the astronomical numbers of people injured in car crashes, people often left with lifelong disabilities like paraplegia or traumatic brain injuries.

Nor does it count the incredible cost to human health a car-centric world inflicts on everyone, from removing the most accessible and least expensive exercise available—walking, including walking with assistive devices—to the magnetite particles and other heavy metals from car exhaust found in the brains of people who’ve died with diseases like Alzheimer’s, and the up to 20% reduced lung capacity of children who grow up near busy roads. Or the innumerable wildlife killed and habitats fragmented.

The stories that open this essay come from Peter Norton’s 2008 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. Norton is an historian of technology and associate professor at the University of Virginia whom I interviewed extensively for A Walking Life. Fighting Traffic is his meticulously researched and well-told history of how cars and highways came to dominate Americans’ lives, cities, and landscapes over the course of the 20th century.

Norton and I have stayed in touch over the years, and recently exchanged posts on LinkedIn about the ways in which industry rhetoric around LLMs and AI data center megaprojects parallel the tactics used by the automobile industry to take over American roads and communities.

As a friend said to me recently, at least when the highway system crushed neighborhoods—including the home of one of her close relatives—the car industry promised something in return: mobility, and a simulacrum of freedom.

With AI, the industry instead employs menacing warnings: use our product, even if it’s built by stealing your own labor and creativity, or get left behind. We’ll take your water, your electricity, your homes and your jobs, and might wipe out the human species while we’re at it, but you better get on the rocket ship or . . . what, exactly? You’ll become irrelevant, worthless, thrown on the toxic discard pile left by the illusion of progress?

It sounds like that’s the intention whether or not I willingly help the LLMs learn to do what I do for a living.

It reminds me of a cartoon I once saw, drawn in response to the U.S.’s draconian, standardized-test-bloated 2002 No Child Left Behind education act. The cartoon is by David Horsey and shows a classroom of miserable students diligently being brain-fed test prep material, while one student is standing at the window looking out at a vibrant world of arts, physical education, and nature, her teacher urging her back to her desk with “You don’t want to be a child left behind, do you?”

“Sounds good to me,” the student replies.

The tech industry messaging differs in its level of threat but I feel that student. Please, leave me so far behind that you forget I’m up at my stepfather’s off-grid cabin, wading in the creek and watching Marsh Hawks and Sandhill Cranes, a thunderstorm rolling all day along the John Long Mountains and the wood-fired cooking stove taking an hour to boil water. I’ll take that over even a few minutes spent in service of digital industry. But it’s not as if most people have that option.

The automobile industry was more subtle than today’s tech companies, and more patient in the face of resistance, anger, and budding local and state laws that threatened its bottom line. It took decades of dedicated lobbying and careful propaganda, and then, not only did cars take over what had once been public spaces for all to use equally while the highway system eviscerated neighborhoods, but the industry ensured its win by removing what people had left: choice.

Street cars, trams, and train lines used to dominate American cities, but they served rural America, too. It might have been overbuilt and underfunded, but at least the network provided communities with a service. One of the details in Willa Cather’s early 1900s novels I’ve always been fascinated by is how easily her characters got around the American midwest and west by train.

You can’t do that now. America barely has a minimal passenger train service, with limited routes and chronic underfunding. In cities across the country, the car industry bought many public tram and street car lines and closed them down. There’s an old blog post called Ghost Streets of Los Angeles showing overhead views of strange diagonal streets and triangle-cornered buildings throughout Los Angeles, both likely built along removed rail lines. Norton himself became interested in the history of this technology shift while sorting historical photographic negatives in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1988, and finding in those pictures a world that no longer existed outside his doors—one full of street cars and people walking.

When it comes to technology, the fundamental question beyond “Whom does this serve, and at whose cost?” is “Do you have a choice?”

Right now, I make the choice to never willingly use LLMs. Not in my writing, not in my editing, not in my photos, not in answering even the most boring emails or helping my kid look up the history of piroshki for a school project. Right now, I can make that choice.

By contrast, where I live, I have little choice but to drive a great number of places. What little public bus service we had mostly disappeared after Covid, and our conservative county commissioners would like to see even that little disappear completely. I love a road trip as much as anyone, especially around the American west, but enjoying a car drive is a very different thing from being forced to drive just about anywhere you need to go.

Most of North America is car dependent. It was designed that way not from the beginning but over time and in the interests of private, for-profit companies whose leadership wanted to make certain we had no other choices. And even the rail lines they displaced were themselves the product of theft of land, of property, and of choice.

The industries and technologies of 1926 and 2026 are different. But the tactics of industry are the same, and so is much of the initial resistance. The question is, will that resistance devote enough energy to making sure that, when it comes to using or being dependent on a technology, we protect the right to make a choice?

One of the most consistently demoralizing things about working or advocating in walkability is how universally even people who know climate change is real and would like, say, for their kids to be able to walk to school safely, see their cars not as a tool to use on occasion, but as an extension of themselves. Where they need to go, their car should also be accommodated. Little gets people more riled up than being unable to park a car where and when they wish.

Over years of advocating in my local community for sidewalks and safe routes to school, that has been the most immovable barrier to progress: people’s attachment to our (I’m not immune to this) convenience and comfort. Most people, I find, want change as long as it never means having to leave their Escalade or Forrester or F-150 behind, or, heaven forbid, take a public bus.

Change isn’t possible—or at least it’s limited—until we each change how we see ourselves and our place in the world. AI and AI-adjacent companies might force their vision on all of us, or they might fizzle out of sight into more niche and appropriately tailored uses in research and business, or they might take their circular bubble financing and crash the world economy. Maybe all of the above, maybe none. Nobody actually knows.

What determines their role in the future of 100 years on is how well our choices in the now are defended. With cars, they weren’t, though goodness knows people tried. Because we lost that choice, the world pays the price in air pollution and climate change—in the U.S., cars and trucks account for about 20% of all emissions, most of it from exhaust after burning fuel; the transportation industry as a whole accounts for almost 30% of the country’s global warming emissions. It pays in cities choked with traffic instead of life, vast landscapes eaten up for parking lots; human bodies evolved for walking and movement being made tired, bored, and often ill through forced sitting. It pays in the accumulation of microplastics in air and water—an estimated 78% of microplastics in the oceans comes from car tire erosion, with electric vehicles being worse on this front because they’re heavier. It pays in the degradation of social capital and neighborliness, and it pays in an estimated 1.16 million people killed each year. Globally, cars are the leading cause of death for people aged five to 29.

In Fighting Traffic, Norton writes of the many actors over the decades who strove to inflict car-centric infrastructure on America, among them Thomas MacDonald, former chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, quoted in a 1939 edition of the Saturday Evening Post:

“We must dream,” said MacDonald, “of gashing our way rather ruthlessly through built-up sections of overcrowded cities in order to create traffic ways capable of carrying traffic with safety, facility, and reasonable speed.”

I imagine you could eavesdrop on the battle planning strategies of Alexander the Great in 336 BCE, or discussions with John D. Rockefeller regarding the proposed breakup of Standard Oil in 1906, or the board meeting of any AI-affiliated corporation in the last week and hear similar rhetoric.

This is, in essence, the dreams of capital everywhere, and of power, and has been since long before capitalism itself became a formal economic system. It needs smoothness and efficiency not for our needs, but for its own desires. It needs to crush resistance and manufacture markets and turn every living being on the planet, including each of us, into fuel.

The technologies might change but the playbook doesn’t. The public answer requires something more than protest; it requires a demand that any technology deployed into the commons work not just for profit but, even more, for life and well-being.

All technology is born in some capacity from the public commons—from land, water, air; from the space we share and the life we’re entangled within; from humanity’s collective creativity and ingenuity. It comes from the incredible wealth we have all had a hand in creating, in partnership with this living planet, and we deserve to have a say in its future.

Peter Norton’s latest book, Autonorama, is about the false promises of self-driving cars.

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