At the dawn of the twentieth century, the American street was a living space. In New York, Philadelphia, or St. Louis, people walked in the middle of the road, where vendors sold bread from carts, children played games with chalk and wooden balls, and newsboys shouted the morning headlines. Horses pulled coal carts past electric streetcars that glided down iron tracks.

The street was a marketplace, a playground, and a public square. It belonged to everyone. Cities had been built this way for centuries because people had to walk. The average human pace of about three miles per hour dictated that neighborhoods, markets, churches, and workshops all sit within reach of one another.

Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston grew as dense, tight-knit grids where a butcher shop sat on the corner, a dentist worked above a hat maker, and apartments rose above storefronts. Nothing was separated. The streets served commerce, conversation, play, and ceremony. Then came the streetcar.

Perfected in the 1880s, the electric trolley let people travel ten miles across a city in under an hour for a few cents. Cities exploded outward along the tracks. Los Angeles built the largest streetcar network on Earth, the Pacific Electric Railway, whose red cars linked downtown to Pasadena, Long Beach, and Santa Monica. By the 1920s, one could cross the entire Los Angeles basin for a nickel.

Chicago had its Loop, New York was crisscrossed with elevated trains, and even small cities like Lincoln, Nebraska, ran trolley systems. By the early twentieth century, about 45,000 miles of streetcar track lay across the United States, and roughly ninety percent of urban trips were made on foot, by bicycle, or by streetcar. The automobile accounted for almost none of them. When cars did arrive in force between 1900 and 1920, Americans did not welcome them.

They saw them as a menace. The machines tore through streets at thirty or forty miles per hour and killed people, most of them pedestrians, and half of those killed in cities were children. In 1923 alone, between seventeen and eighteen thousand Americans died in automobile accidents. Cities responded with grief and fury.

Communities held mass funeral processions for the children killed by cars. Editorial cartoons depicted the automobile as the Grim Reaper. Newspapers called the crashes killings. In Cincinnati, a citizen group gathered over forty-two thousand signatures demanding mechanical governors that would cap cars at twenty-five miles per hour.

The measure nearly passed. The automobile industry realized it was facing regulation that could destroy it. It responded with a coordinated campaign to redefine what a street was for. The historian Peter Norton documented this campaign in his book Fighting Traffic.

The industry needed to shift blame from drivers to pedestrians. To do this, they popularized a word: jaywalker. In the 1920s, a “jay” was slang for a country bumpkin, someone from the sticks who did not know how to behave in a sophisticated city. Calling a pedestrian a jaywalker framed walking in the street as the act of an idiot who did not belong there.

The industry poured money into the campaign. It sponsored safety parades where actors dressed as clowns playing pedestrians were mocked. Boy Scouts handed out cards admonishing people for crossing the street. In Detroit, the industry’s safety committee sent newspapers pre-written articles blaming pedestrians for crashes.

The effect was swift. In 1923, newspapers overwhelmingly blamed drivers for pedestrian deaths. By late 1924, they blamed the pedestrians. Los Angeles passed one of the first strict anti-jaywalking ordinances in 1925, and other cities followed.

By the early 1930s, it was illegal in most American cities to cross the street anywhere other than a designated crosswalk during a designated signal. The ancient right to walk in the street had been legislated away. The purpose was not safety, but keeping the street clear so cars could move faster. The next phase was removing the alternative to the car entirely.

In 1936, General Motors, together with Standard Oil of California, Firestone Tire, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Truck, formed a holding company called National City Lines. Over the next fifteen years, it and its subsidiaries bought streetcar systems across the country, in Los Angeles, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and dozens of other cities. They tore up the tracks and scrapped the trolleys, sometimes burning them in public bonfires.

They replaced the systems with diesel buses built by General Motors, running on Standard Oil gasoline, rolling on Firestone tires. In 1949, the federal government convicted the companies of conspiring to monopolize transportation under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The verdict was damning, but the punishment was symbolic. General Motors paid a five-thousand-dollar fine.

The individual executives paid one dollar each. The streetcars were not killed by this conspiracy alone. Many lines were already dying, strangled by decades of mandated five-cent fares, by inflation, and by traffic congestion from cars. National City Lines directly dismantled only about ten percent of the nation’s streetcar systems.

But its outsized influence shaped how the rest fell, converting even profitable trolley lines in Los Angeles to buses. The final piece came in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair. General Motors unveiled a pavilion called Futurama, designed by the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. It was a seven-acre scale model of America twenty years in the future, viewed by visitors carried on a slow conveyor belt over a miniature landscape of fourteen-lane expressways, radiant suburbs, and gleaming modernist cities.

Model cars moved in orderly streams. There were no traffic jams, no pollution, no dead children. About five million people saw it, and at its peak nearly thirty thousand a day passed through. They left wearing pins that read, “I have seen the future.

” It was advertising, and it planted an image of a future where cars were essential, cities were spread out, and the government would pay for the highways to make it possible. World War II paused the vision, but after the war it returned with the full force of the federal government. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, authorizing nearly twenty-five billion dollars, close to three hundred billion in today’s money, for the interstate highway system. Officially for national defense, the highways were used to reshape American cities.

The federal government covered ninety percent of the cost on one condition: the states had to build the highways not just between cities, but straight through them, through the oldest, densest neighborhoods. By the 1960s, federal highway construction was leveling about thirty-seven thousand urban housing units every year. The neighborhoods chosen were overwhelmingly black and poor, often routed through communities already redlined by federal housing agencies. The Rondo neighborhood in St.

Paul, a vibrant middle-class black community, was destroyed for Interstate 94. Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were bulldozed for Interstate 375. The Fillmore District in San Francisco, Overtown in Miami, and Tremé in New Orleans met the same fate. Nowhere was the destruction more aggressive than in New York City, where one unelected official, Robert Moses, shaped the metropolis for over four decades.

He was never elected to office, but as parks commissioner and chairman of various authorities, he built nearly every major piece of infrastructure in the region, displacing about 250,000 people, according to his biographer Robert Caro. His most notorious project was the Cross Bronx Expressway. Announced in 1948, the route cut straight through a dense working-class neighborhood called East Tremont, home to tens of thousands of mostly Jewish families along with Italian, Irish, and black residents. The community proposed alternate routes, and engineers verified they were feasible.

Residents organized, hired lawyers, and pleaded their case for years. Moses refused to budge, comparing highway construction to surgery: you had to cut through what was in your way. Between 1953 and 1972, sixty thousand people lost their homes. The surrounding neighborhoods, severed from the rest of the Bronx, descended into decades of abandonment and arson.

While highways tore apart city centers, the suburbs were born. In 1947, developer William Levitt bought over four thousand acres of potato fields on Long Island and mass-produced housing on an assembly line. By 1951, Levittown had seventeen thousand homes and about eighty thousand residents. It had no sidewalks on most streets, no shops within walking distance, no trolley system, no central train station.

You needed a car to live there. The development was also explicitly whites-only. Levitt put a clause in every deed prohibiting sale or rental to anyone not of the Caucasian race, and after the Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable in 1948, his agents simply refused to show homes to black applicants. This pattern repeated across the country: white families, aided by federal loans denied to black families, left the cities.

Black families stayed in inner cities being gutted by highways. Another quiet revolution came through zoning. In 1926, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the village of Euclid, Ohio, to divide its land into separate districts for houses, factories, and apartments. Modern American zoning was born, separating homes from jobs and shops, forcing travel between them, and requiring a car.

Then in 1923, Columbus, Ohio passed the first minimum parking requirement, forcing builders to include a certain number of parking spaces. By the 1950s and sixties, nearly every city required parking for restaurants, offices, churches, hospitals, and apartments. Land once used for buildings and public squares was converted to asphalt. In a typical modern American city, between a quarter and half of all land is now dedicated to the automobile: roads, parking lots, driveways, dealerships, highways.

The results are visible today. Only about five percent of American workers use public transit. Drivers struck and killed roughly 7,148 pedestrians in 2024, nearly twenty people every day for the crime of walking. Between 2009 and 2023, pedestrian deaths rose about eighty percent.

More than two-thirds of these deaths happen in places with no sidewalk. People in low-income neighborhoods die as pedestrians at roughly four times the rate of those in wealthy ones. Black and indigenous Americans die at higher rates than white Americans, as do the elderly and the poor. The American Lung Association estimates over 119 million Americans live with unhealthy air quality, largely from car exhaust.

The street as a public space, the easy walk to a corner store, the chance to let children play outside, all are gone. Not everything about the automobile was bad. Cars gave Americans unprecedented freedom of movement, created millions of jobs, and enabled industries and lifestyles that could not have existed before. The question was never whether cars were good or bad.

The question was whether Americans had to redesign their entire civilization around them. Other countries facing the same pressures chose differently. The Netherlands, after a wave of child traffic deaths in the 1970s, reorganized its cities around bikes and pedestrians. Japan built dense, transit-oriented cities.

Even war-devastated European cities maintained their walkable cores. The American path was a choice, made not by most Americans, but by a handful of industries, politicians, and planners, often against loud public objection, and usually for reasons that had little to do with ordinary people. The automobile industry won. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler became some of the largest corporations in history.

Standard Oil of California grew into Chevron; Standard Oil of New Jersey became Exxon. The tire industry won, the construction industry won, the developers won. And the cities lost. The streetcars lost.

The pedestrians lost. The poor, the elderly, and especially the children lost. Entire black communities were wiped off the map so that others could drive through what had been their homes. In recent years, that has begun to change.

Surveys show about sixty percent of Americans would prefer a walkable neighborhood over a car-dependent suburb. Cities like Minneapolis, Portland, Buffalo, and Austin have eliminated minimum parking requirements. Oregon and California have limited single-family-only zoning. The federal government launched a program to spend roughly a billion dollars reconnecting neighborhoods severed by highways, like Rondo in St.

Paul and Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati. Streetcar lines are returning in Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Detroit. Highways through downtowns in San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Seattle have been torn down, replaced by boulevards, and the surrounding neighborhoods have come back to life. The movement is slow and uneven, but it is happening because people are starting to remember something deliberately forgotten for generations.

The streets never belonged to cars. They were taken in less than fifty years through lobbying, propaganda, legislation, and raw political power. And just as they were taken, they can be reclaimed.