Modern folks tend to think that streets serve largely mobile purposes—getting cars from one place to another in swift, orderly fashion. But “prior to the automobile, streets had a ton of stationary functions,” Marcel Moran, a faculty fellow at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, told me. Streets were where people sold wares and socialized. And particularly after the United States and Europe began to industrialize, streets were the primary location for the rising number of urban-dwelling children to play, according to Jon Winder, a historian and the author of Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010. This remained the case in the U.K. and the U.S. even after playgrounds became widespread in the early 20th century. Only when cars hit the streets in larger numbers did things begin to change. Society, Winder told me, began prioritizing “the movement and storage of motor vehicles over children and their playful behavior.”
In the U.S., the ousting of children from the street was initially met with fierce resistance, Peter Norton, an associate history professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, told me. In the 1920s, as pedestrian death tolls mounted, a number of American cities erected monuments to children killed in traffic, acknowledging their deaths as public losses the way we memorialize fallen soldiers. When cases involving these tragedies made their way to court, Norton said, judges routinely ruled that “a child has an absolute right to use the street, that it’s the responsibility of everyone else to watch out for the child. The parent does not have to be there.” He added that motorists who argued that they were not at fault, because the child had rushed out in front of them, were told, “That’s no excuse. You chose to operate a dangerous machine that gave you, the driver, the responsibility.”
Over time, however, deliberate efforts within the auto industry shifted the blame for traffic deaths to children and their parents. In the 1920s, the American Automobile Association dispensed free school-safety education materials aimed at teaching children that the road was not for them. Among other things, these curricula redefined the school-safety patrols run by older children tasked with escorting younger kids safely through the streets. Instead of walking into the street to stop traffic, kids were instructed to wait until there were no cars, then to cross. The message was that “if a child’s going to use the street at all, it’s only when there’s no cars,” Norton said. “This immediately became the excuse for raising speed limits.” By the 1940s, these curricula—still produced by AAA—cautioned children against even attempting to use streets at all. And it was hard to argue otherwise, Norton said, because the higher speed limits had in fact made roads quite dangerous.