How did cars come to ‘own’ our streets?

By Ian Loader

Ian is Chair of Cyclox

How did we end up with our cities dominated by cars? With streets where pedestrians, residents, cyclists, children feel excluded and unsafe? With the idea that car owners have ‘rights’ to access, parking and speedy journeys?

Twentieth-century changes

It started in the 1920s when the car won the battle to control the use of urban streets. This was especially the case in the USA. The private car became the main means of urban transport and effectively took over the street.

There is no doubt that the motor car transformed travel. In 1927, when the success of her novel To The Lighthouse allowed Virginia Woolf to buy a car, she wrote: ‘the motor is turning out the joy of our lives…. Soon we shall look back on our pre-motor days as we do now at our days in the caves.’  

Mass injury and death were accepted as a price worth paying for this convenience and relative speed of car travel.

The second big step forward for car dominance came in the 1960s. Increased affluence and mass production made cars affordable for far more people and they became a consumer object. In response, urban planners decided that towns and cities had to be remade. Inner ring-roads, multi-storey car parks, petrol stations were all built to service car drivers. Car ownership represented freedom of travel and cities were planned to accommodate this.

These planning decisions of 60 years ago created the car-dominated environments we live in today. Cities became places in which cars were ‘owners’ – as urban planner Donald Appleyard described it.  Appleyard was the man who came up with the idea of ‘liveable streets’. He conducted research which showed the negative social impact of high levels of motor traffic on neighbourhoods.

Cars have come to dominate how urban space is used.

Cities owned by cars

What exactly does it mean to say we created cities owned by cars? First, it means that cars came to dominate how urban space is used. A great deal of land in the city was allocated to accommodating cars and their needs (roads, car parks, garages). At the same time car owners came to believe they had ‘rights’ which took priority over those of other people in the city. The rights of drivers were put before those of pedestrians, or cyclists, or residents of urban streets and neighbourhoods, and this stuck.

Second, it means that the rules of using public spaces – rules about speed of travel, who gives way on the road, who has priority of access – were set in favour of the car.

And third, it means that both entry into, and movement across, large swathes of city space, were restricted to cars. Streets came to be seen and used as distinct legal and social spaces, somehow cut off from the social organisation and life of the city.

The feel, atmosphere and rhythm of cities was established by and for the private car, both when it was moving, and when – which is 96% of the time – it was parked. It may be worse in, for example, US and Australian cities, where walking or cycling on many roads is impossible, but Oxford too is a city where the motor vehicle owns the streets.

My next blog will look at the way in which this ownership by cars impacts our daily lives.

Join us on 25 March to discuss ‘Car brain: what is it and can it be cured?’