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eview of Peter Norton's "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" This review of mine was just published in Isis, volume 100 (June, 2009), 426-7: Peter D. Norton. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. (Inside Technology.) xii + 396 pp., illus., figs., index. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2008. $35 (cloth). During the early 1960s, as the Golden Age of the automobile in America began to wane, several commentators, including Lewis Mumford, raised the critical question of whether the automobile existed for the modern city or the city for the automobile? How and when the automobile became central to urban life is deftly addressed in Peter Norton's Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. This study is certainly one of the most important monographs focusing on the place of the automobile in American society within a historical context to appear in recent times, and interestingly supplements David Blanke's Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900-1940 (University of Kansas Press, 2007). In the process of telling his story, Norton convincingly demonstrates that it was people acting within interest groups who decided how the automobile would be used; this is not a tale of a technology having an irrepressible effect on the marketplace. Norton, who teaches in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia, blends an empirical study of a battle for urban streets with a theoretical analysis based on social constructivist theory. His effort is well balanced, clearly articulated, and fundamentally successful, with little of the dense abstract analysis that tends to drive a good number of general readers away from this kind of scholarship. Above all, Fighting Traffic is an engaging story that pits a number of diverse constituencies in a struggle over who would control city streets. These groups included pedestrians, safety refo

The cost of auto orientation MONDAY, JANUARY 2, 2012 | CHARLES MAROHN In the United States we've proceeded for sixty years with reconfiguring our public spaces to accommodate the automobile. The built in assumption of this approach, especially when it comes to commercial property, is that the more cars driving by the better. What we've overlooked in our haste to "modernize" is the lower return on investment we get from this approach, even under ideal conditions. Today we need the humility to acknowledge that our ancestors -- who built in the traditional style -- may have known what they were doing after all. After a nice break, we want to welcome everyone back and wish you all a fantastic 2012. We're still dedicated to publishing this blog at least three days a week (typically Monday, Wednesday and Friday) as well as releasing a podcast every week or two. We've got one other channel here we'll be starting next week, so stay tuned. If you'd like to stay informed with what's going on with the Strong Towns movement, sign up for our newsletter. We don't share your address and we don't spam. We do bite though, at least rhetorically. Highway 210 runs east/west through downtown Brainerd. In the hierarchical road system, it is the top of the pyramid and would be classified in most places as a "major arterial". It is designed as a STROAD (a street/road hybrid), attempting to apply highway design standards to what otherwise would be an urban street. In doing so, it has dramatically transformed the land use pattern of the area. The picture below highlights two blocks that front the highway corridor. The one on the left, which we've labeled "old and blighted", is a block that has retained its traditional development pattern. To the right we have identified the "shiny and new" area, the block that has recently been transformed to an auto-oriented development style, to the glee of city officials and local economic development advocates. In between is a hybrid of the two; part