Inalienable Right to the Street

Excerpted from the article "When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders" by Peter Norton, published in The MIT Press Reader:

City people saw the car not just as a menace to life and limb, but also as an aggressor upon their time-honored rights to city streets. “The pedestrian,” explained a Brooklyn man, “as an American citizen, naturally resents any intrusion upon his prior constitutional rights.”  Custom and the Anglo-American legal tradition confirmed pedestrians’ inalienable right to the street. In Chicago in 1926, as in most cities, “nothing” in the law “prohibits a pedestrian from using any part of the roadway of any street or highway, at any time or at any place as he may desire.” So noted the author of a traffic survey commissioned by the Chicago Association of Commerce.  According to Connecticut’s first Motor Vehicle Commissioner, Robbins Stoeckel, the most restrictive interpretation of pedestrians’ rights was that “All travelers have equal rights on the highway.” 

It's hard to imagine a time when streets were for people, not machines, and the right to use those streets for human activities was considered a constitutional right. 

I'd love to find a way to put that genie back in the bottle, at least a little bit.

You can read the full article HERE.