Sunday Lessons continued... “Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?”

"Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads?" from Dial M Films on Vimeo.

LOVE & HATE Automobiles the future

if there is one thing I have learned in my life from the concept drawings that i saw in the magazines as a kid that seemed unimaginable at the time, they eventually come true!

These few, similarly to the Mercedes clip i posted last year, are even more insane than the dream cars of my child hood, but they will probably happen sooner than we expect . . .









That said I have not owned a car for over 20 years, thankfully.

Living in NYC allows me the luxury of walking everywhere or using a pretty good MTA.

GEF

Photos: Auto sketches from Detroit’s golden era you were never meant to see

from PBS NewsHour:

The upcoming documentary “American Dreaming,” features the designers who worked in the styling houses of Detroit’s automakers from 1946 to 1973. Watch the trailer for the film, which does not have a release date, above. Video by Jim Toscano and Danny Gianino of Freeage Productions.

Norbert Ostrowski began designing cars during the golden age of the American automobile. For 30 years, he worked in the styling departments of Detroit’s iconic brands: Chrysler, General Motors, AMC. But his sketches no longer exist. Like most of the early-stage artwork created by America’s auto designers, they’ve been destroyed.

Enter art collector Robert Edwards. The lifelong car enthusiast has curated the most comprehensive showing of those designs, spanning from 1946 to 1973. The exhibit, “American Dreaming: Detroit’s Golden Age of Automotive Design,” opened last week at Lawrence Technological University in suburban Detroit.

Featured in the collection is one of Ostrowski’s early sketches of an AMC Matador that Edwards found for sale in Ann Arbor. Ostrowski, now 77, recognized it immediately, Edwards said.

“His exact words were, ‘how the heck did that get out?’”

The designs were never meant to leave the studios. Automakers routinely destroyed early sketches for fear they would fall into the wrong hands.

But some of them made their way out of Ford, GM and Chrysler, as well as now defunct Studebaker, Packard and AMC. According to one designer, they were smuggled out in boxes with false bottoms. One employee famously hid his sketches inside the liner of his trench coat. “As an artist, you would hate to see your artwork destroyed,” Edwards said.

(click to enlarge all images)



Now they exist in attics and garages in the homes of the artists and their relatives. That’s where Edwards finds them. He’s been collecting these “bootleg” sketches for years, buying them from estate sales all over Michigan.

He calls the artwork the story of mid-century modern design in America.

“The car is such a part of the American psyche,” Edwards said. “It’s possibly the most important industrial object ever created. It has touched everyone’s life.”



Exhibit co-producer Greg Salustro said the designs harken back to a time when America thought anything was possible.

“This is the age that America thought they could overcome racism, land a man on the moon, win the Cold War,” he said. “This exhibit reflects this unbridled exuberance that took place at the time.”

Aside from the exhibit, the two auto enthusiasts are also co-producing a documentary called “American Dreaming.” It features interviews with the men and women who influenced mid-century American design and shaped the way we remember the golden era of the automobile.

It’s also a love letter to Detroit.

“This is a Detroit story,” said Salustro. “It’s about how Detroit inspired a nation.”

Just as the automakers jumped back into production in 1946 after its years supporting the Allied forces, today Detroit is determined to rebound after decades of decline and an unprecedented municipal bankruptcy, he said. “We want Detroit to be proud of its artistic heritage.”

See more photos of the innovative artwork that escaped the shredder:



CLICK TO ENLARGE ALL ABOVE IMAGES w/ Captions too!

Captions by Robert Edwards. Learn more about the upcoming documentary “American Dreaming”: Americandreamingfilm.com. Here you can also find out how to support the film, which is not yet complete and does not have a release date.

Technology Takes the Wheel

from The New York Times:
By AARON M. KESSLER


(these images did not run with the original article, but had always captured my imagination since i first saw this transportation vehicle back in 1973 driving Miles Monroe around in the future.)

DETROIT — Google’s driverless car may still be a work in progress, but the potential for semiautonomous vehicles on American roads is no longer the stuff of science fiction.

By the end of the decade, a growing number of automakers aim to offer some form of hands-off-the-wheel, feet-off-the-pedals highway driving where a driver can sit back and let the car take control.

The very nature of driving, experts say, will be radically reshaped — and the biggest players in the auto industry are now vying to capture a slice of the revolutionary market they see coming within a matter of years.

“This is the year we’ll look back on as the turning point,” said Scott Belcher, president of the nonprofit Intelligent Transportation Society of America, who has helped organize a global connected car expo for seven years. “We’re at the cusp now of this completely new generation of transportation, and it’s going to change things on a scale not seen since Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System.”

The potential goes beyond just the idea of a souped-up cruise control. The connected car of 2020 will zip down the highway, pass other vehicles and possibly even take the next off-ramp, all on its own.

It will warn drivers of daily dangers like pedestrians or bicyclists suddenly crossing traffic, and if drivers don’t react in time, the car could take over — hitting the brakes or steering away before it is too late.

It will monitor drivers’ eyes and how often they close, to jolt them awake if they fall asleep at the wheel. And parking? Forget about hunting around the parking garage at the mall: Cars will go off and find a spot, then return later, all on their own.

Vehicles available to most Americans will soon use a combination of sensors in the car and communication between cars to transform the traditional driving experience.

The pivot point is the buy-in from auto companies and their vast networks of suppliers, which now not only believe in the technology but also see it as a way to gain a competitive advantage.

“They now see it as real, and they want to get ahead of each other,” Mr. Belcher said.

A report released on Monday by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company projected that the revenue associated with connected-car technology will grow to more than $230 billion by the end of the decade, about a sixfold increase from current levels. Active safety features like emergency braking and other semiautonomous driving capabilities are expected to capture the largest share of that revenue.

But while the market for connected cars is set to grow substantially in the coming years, McKinsey also raised a caution flag to auto industry companies that may expect a complete windfall from the technologies.

It predicts that connectivity features will have a much larger share of the revenue pie by 2020 but that the total pie itself may be unlikely to significantly expand. In other words, the growth of smart cars could set off “significant redistribution of revenues” between automakers and other industry companies, according to the report.

Continue reading the main story
“The connected-car battle is emerging to be more about capturing shifting revenue and profit pools, rather than expanding and capturing new” ones, the report predicted.

G.M. made a splash last month by announcing that its Super Cruise technology — the company’s version of autonomous highway driving — will be available in two years on certain Cadillac models. Other automakers, including Honda, BMW and Volkswagen, are also planning hands-off-the-wheel offerings within the next five years.

And with roughly 33,000 traffic fatalities every year in the United States, the potential for saving many of those lives through technology is finally within grasp, automakers and safety regulators say.

Gerald J. Witt, with the auto supplier Delphi, said the company was working on sophisticated driver monitoring that by 2016 could be ready for production vehicles. The system would know if a driver was being distracted or falling asleep at the wheel. The goal is to eventually tap into other aspects of the connected car, like the Internet connection, not only to warn drivers but also to offer timely suggestions.

“If your eyelids are closing at a rate that shows you’re seriously fatigued, we could see the car say: ‘Hey, it looks like you’re tired; there’s a Starbucks up ahead in one mile. Want some coffee?’ ” Mr. Witt said.

Even relatively mundane activities like parking a car may soon be automated. While companies like Ford and Volkswagen offer vehicles that can steer themselves into a parking spot, the French supplier that makes those systems, Valeo, has even greater ambitions. It wants to eliminate hunting around the parking lot or garage for a space.



In a recent demonstration here in Detroit, Valeo showed what the parking lot of the future might look like: essentially, driverless valet parking.

Once the driver got out of an equipped sport utility vehicle, sensors communicated with systems that monitored each parking space. After the push of a button on a smartphone, the car drove away and headed to an available spot, parking itself.

Later on, when a driver is ready to depart, the car is called back with the smartphone: It starts, finds its way out of the parking spot and meets the driver at the entrance.

“When you think of all the time you spend looking for a place to park, this could free you up to get all that time back,” said Amine Taleb-Bendiab, project manager for Valeo’s Advanced Driving Assistance Systems.

Mr. Taleb-Bendiab said a surprising number of collisions happen within parking garages, and parking areas at places like the mall, airport or apartment buildings, when people sometimes let their guard down or become distracted. In theory, such automated systems could eliminate most if not all of those crashes.

On the opposite end of the miles-per-hour spectrum, Honda demonstrated a high-speed ride on Detroit’s public highways to highlight its advances in automated driving technology. The vehicle steered through the curves, merged into traffic and even took an exit off the highway — all while the test driver’s hands sat on his lap.

IAV Automotive Engineering, based in Germany, is aiming to offer a semidriverless system that can be added to any production car, regardless of the manufacturer. The company, partly owned by Volkswagen and the supplier Continental, demonstrated the capabilities on a VW test vehicle as it drove on its own, using a system of cameras, lasers and radar.

G.M.’s Super Cruise mode is anticipated to work in a similar manner. A G.M. spokesman, Daniel Flores, says that at this point the feature is designed to keep a vehicle at speed and in its lane but that the driver will have to take the wheel to change lanes.

Most semiautomated driving will initially be confined to the highway. That is because while the speeds are higher, the environment is much more predictable than city streets: All the vehicles are going in the same direction, and there is no cross traffic.

And while such driving may soon become much more about machine intelligence, the automated cars of 2020 will still need that human element to handle the unpredictable.

“The driver needs to stay engaged in case they need to take over; it’s not like you can fall asleep or go sit in the back seat,” Mr. Flores said. “But it will certainly allow for greater comfort and relaxation.”

RUSH HOUR

Directed by Fernando Livschitz - Black Sheep Films

Where the World's Unsold Cars Go To Die

update: Since I posted this story I have been sent links and opinions it may not be researched well and may be inaccurate, so keep this in mind if you decide to read any further, and please also do some of your own research. Thank you!

from Zero Hedge:

In the past several years, one of the topics covered in detail on these pages has been the surge in such gimmicks designed to disguise lack of demand and end customer sales, used extensively by US automotive manufacturers, better known as "channel stuffing", of which General Motors is particularly guilty and whose inventory at dealer lots just hit a new record high. But did you know that when it comes to flat or declining sales and stagnant end demand, channel stuffing is merely the beginning?

Presenting...

Where the World's Unsold Cars Go To Die (courtesy of Vincent Lewis' Unsold Cars)

Above is just a few of the thousands upon thousands of unsold cars at Sheerness, United Kingdom.  Please do see this on Google Maps....type in Sheerness, United Kingdom.  Look to the west coast, below River Thames next to River Medway. Left of A249, Brielle Way.

Timestamp: Friday, May 16th, 2014.

There are hundreds of places like this in the world today and they keep on piling up...

THE WORLDS UNSOLD CAR STOCKPILE

Houston...We have a problem!...Nobody is buying brand new cars anymore!  Well they are, but not on the scale they once were.  Millions of brand new unsold cars are just sitting redundant on runways and car parks around the world.  There, they stay, slowly deteriorating without being maintained.

Below is an image of a massive car park at Swindon, United Kingdom, with thousands upon thousands of unsold cars just sitting there with not a buyer in sight. The car manufacturers have to buy more and more land just to park their cars as they perpetually roll off the production line.

There is proof that the worlds recession is still biting and wont let go.  All around the world there are huge stockpiles of unsold cars and they are being added to every day.  They have run out of space to park all of these brand new unsold cars and are having to buy acres and acres of land to store them.

NOTE:

The images on this webpage showing all of these unsold cars are just a very small portion of those around the world.  There are literally thousands of these "car parks" rammed full of unsold cars in practically every country on the planet.  Just in case you were wondering, these images have not been Photoshopped, they are the real deal!

Its hard to believe that there are so many unsold cars in the world but its true.  The worse part is that the amount of unsold cars keeps on getting bigger every day.

It would be fair to say that it is becoming a mechanical epidemic of epic proportions.  If anybody from outer space is reading this webpage, we here on Earth have too many cars, why not come and buy a few hundred thousand of them for your own planet! (sorry but this is all I can think of)

Below is shown just a few of the 57,000 cars (and growing) that await delivery from their home in the Port of Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. With Google Maps look South of Broening Hwy in Dundalk for the massive expanse of space where all these cars are parked up.

The car industry would never sell these cars at massive reductions in their prices to get rid of them, no they still want every buck.  If they were to price these cars for a couple of thousand they would sell them.  However, nobody would then buy any expensive cars and then they  would end up being unsold.  Its quite a pickle we have gotten ourselves into.

Below is shown an image of the Nissan test track in Sunderland United Kingdom.  Only it is no longer being used, reason...there are too many unsold cars parked up on it!  The amount of cars keeps on piling up on it until its overflowing.  Nissan then acquires more land to park up the cars, as they continue to come off the production line.

UPDATE: Currently May 16th, 2014, all of these cars at the Nissan Sunderland test track have disappeared? Now I don't believe they have all suddenly been sold.  I would guess they may have been taken away and recycled to make room for the next vast production run.

Indeed next to that test track and adjacent to the Nissan factory, they are collating again as shown on the Google Maps image below.  So where did the last lot go? This is not an employees car park by the way.

None of the images on this webpage are of ordinary car parks at shopping malls, football matches etc.  Trust me, they are just mountains and mountains of brand spanking new unsold cars. There is no real reason why you should be driving an old clunker now is there?

The car industry cannot stop making new cars because they would have to close their factories and lay off tens of thousands of employees.  This would further add to the recession.  Also the domino effect would be catastrophic as steel manufactures would not sell their steel. All the tens of thousands of places where car components are made would also be effected, indeed the world could come to a grinding halt.

Below is shown just a small area of a gigantic car park  in Spain where tens of thousands of cars just sit and sunbathe all day.

They are also piling up at the port of Valencia in Spain as seen below.  They are either waiting to be exported to...nowhere or have been imported...to go nowhere.

Tens of thousands of cars are still being made every week but hardly any of them are being sold.  Nearly every household in developed countries already has a car or even two or three cars parked up on their driveway as it is.

Below is an image of thousands upon thousands of unsold cars parked up on a runway near St Petersburg in Russia.  They are all imported from Europe, they are all then parked up and they are all then left to rot. Consequently, the airport is now unusable for its original purpose.

The cycle of buying, using, buying using has been broken, it is now just a case of "using" with no buying. Below is an image of thousands of unsold cars parked up on an disused runway at Upper Heyford, Bicester, Oxfordshire. They are seriously running out of space to store these cars.

It is a sorry state of affairs and there is no answer to it, solutions don't exist.  So the cars just keep on being manufactured and keep on adding to the millions of unsold cars already sitting redundant around the world.

Below are parked tens of thousands of cars at Royal Portbury Docks, Avonmouth, near Bristol in the United Kingdom. If you look on Google Maps and scan around the area at say 200ft you will see nothing but parked up unsold cars. They are absolutley everywhere in that area practically every open space has unsold cars parked up on it.

Below is that same area in Avonmouth, UK, but zoomed out. Every gray space that you see is filled with unsold cars.  Anyone want to hazard a guess at how many are there...

As it is, there are more cars than there are people on the planet with an estimated 10 billion roadworthy cars in the world today.

We literally cannot make enough of them. Below are seen just a few of the thousands of Citroen's parked up at Corby, Northamptonshire in England. They are being added to daily, imported from France but with nowhere else to go once they arrive.

So there they sit, brand spanking new cars, all with a couple of miles on the clock that was consummate with them being driven to their car parks.  Below is the latest May 2014 Google Maps image of unsold cars in Corby, Northamptonshire.

Manufacturing more cars than can be sold is against all logic, logistics and economics but it continues day after day, week after week, month after month, year in year out.

Below is shown a recent (April 2014) screen grab from Google Maps of the Italian port of Civitavecchia.  All those little specks are a few thousand brand new unsold Peugeots.  Just collecting dust and maybe a bit of salty sea spray!

Below, all nice and shiny but with nowhere to go.  Red and white and black and silver, purple, pink and blue, all the colors of the rainbow and be they all brand new.  Indeed all the colors of the rainbow are down there on those cars, making pretty mosaics, montages of color and still life.  Maybe that is all they will now ever be, surreal urban art of the techno production age.  Magnificent metal boxes, wasting space and saving grace, all sitting still, because its business at mill.

All around the world these cars just keep on piling up, there is no end in sight.  The economy shouts out quite loud that nobody has the money anymore to spend on a new car. The reason being that they are making their "old" cars go on a lot longer.  But we cannot stop making them, soon we will run out of space to park them.  We are nearly running out of space to drive them that's for sure!

Below, more cars mount up in the port of Valencia in Spain. They will not be exported as there is nowhere for them to go, so they just sit and rot in their colorful droves.

Gone are the days when the family would have a new car every year, they are now keeping what they have got.  It may be fair to say that some  families still get a new car every year but its the majority that now do not.

The results are in these images, hundreds of thousands if not millions of cars around the world are driven from their factories, parked up and left.

Could we say that these cars have been left to rot!  Maybe, as these cars will certainly rot if they are not bought, driven and cared for.  It does not look like they will be sold any day soon, many of them have been standing for over 12 months or even longer and this is detrimental to the car.

Below, as far as the eye can see, right into the background, cars, cars and more cars. But what's beyond the horizon?  Have a guess...Yes that's right...even more cars!  All brand new but with no homes to go to.  Do you think they will ever start giving them away, that may be the only radical solution.  Who knows, you could soon be getting a free car with every packet of cornflakes.

When a car is left standing idle, all the oil sinks to the bottom of the sump, and then corrosion begins to set in on all the internal engine parts where the oil has drained away.

Cold corrosion is when condensation builds up in the cylinders and rust forms in the bores. The engines would then start to seize and would need to be professionally freed before they could be started.  Also the tires start to lose air and the batteries start to go flat, indeed the detrimental list goes on and on.

So the longer they sit there the worse it slowly becomes for them.  What is the answer to this?  Well they need to be sold and that just isn't happening.

The epidemic is not improving, it is getting worse.  Car manufactureres are constantly coming out with new models with the latest technology in them.  Hence prospective buyers of, for example, a new Citroen Xsara Picasso want the latest model, not last years model.  Hence all the unsold Citroen Xsara Picasso cars from the previous year will now have even lesser chance of being sold.

The problems then just keep on mounting up.  In the end, the unsold cars that are say 2 years old will have no alternative but to be either crushed up, dismantled and/or their parts recycled.

Some car manufacturers moved their production over to China, General Motors and Cadillac are examples of this.  They are then shipped over in containers and unloaded at ports.  However they are now being told to put a big halt in their import into the U.S.A. as they just can't sell them in the quantities they would desire.  Consequently Chinese car parks are now filling up with brand new American cars.  Well nobody in China can afford them on their meagre pittance wages, so there they will stay until our economy improves...which it might do in a few generations.

Crazy love/hate car porn from the UKfun viewing

Tom Vanderbilt: the counterintuitive science of traffic

from Boing Boing:

If I had a chauffeur, I'd want it to be Tom Vanderbilt. I have no idea if Tom is a good driver, but he has a wealth of compelling, curious, and provocative knowledge about the psychology and science of our lives behind the wheel. He's the author of the bestselling book "Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us" that has enlightened everyone from transportation policy groups to road safety consortiums to those of us who just insist that no matter what lane we're in, the other one is moving faster. Tom gave a fantastic talk at Boing Boing: Ingenuity, our theatrical experience on August 18, 2013 in San Francisco where he imparted wisdom on late merging, the demographics of honking, and highway hypnosis.

The Self-Driving, Ultra-Connected Car Of The Future

from Mashable.com

What will the car of the future look like? Will it drive itself and communicate with other vehicles in order to avoid traffic accidents? Will it be loaded with advanced sensors and have greatly reduced emissions compared to today's cars?

In the infographic below, the folks from InsuranceQuotes try to imagine the car of tomorrow, taking these and other likely possibilities into account. No matter which technologies are used, the car of the future is likely to be smarter, safer and more efficient. Check out how it compares to today's cars.

thanks, Presurfer

2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year: Tesla Model S (it's ELECTRIC motherfuckers!)

Shocking Winner: Proof Positive that America Can Still Make (Great) Things

The 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year is one of the quickest American four-doors ever built. It drives like a sports car, eager and agile and instantly responsive. But it's also as smoothly effortless as a Rolls-Royce, can carry almost as much stuff as a Chevy Equinox, and is more efficient than a Toyota Prius. Oh, and it'll sashay up to the valet at a luxury hotel like a supermodel working a Paris catwalk. By any measure, the Tesla Model S is a truly remarkable automobile, perhaps the most accomplished all-new luxury car since the original Lexus LS 400. That's why it's our 2013 Car of the Year.

Wait. No mention of the astonishing inflection point the Model S represents -- that this is the first COTY winner in the 64-year history of the award not powered by an internal combustion engine? Sure, the Tesla's electric powertrain delivers the driving characteristics and packaging solutions that make the Model S stand out against many of its internal combustion engine peers. But it's only a part of the story. At its core, the Tesla Model S is simply a damned good car you happen to plug in to refuel.

Engineering Excellence

Tesla claims it has 250 patents covering the Model S, and more pending. The body is light, thanks to its all-aluminum construction, yet strong and stiff. The front and rear suspension are also mostly aluminum. At the rear are extruded rear suspension links that provide the strength of forgings at much lower cost, while up front are hollow-cast front knuckles that weigh 25 percent less than a conventional knuckle of similar strength.

The electric motor sits between the rear wheels, contributing greatly to the 47/53-percent front/rear weight distribution. The motor is an AC-induction type, the basic principles of which were demonstrated in the 1880s by Nikola Tesla himself, and it doesn't need expensive rare earth metals. .

Tesla offers three lithium-ion battery packs for the Model S -- 40-kW-hr, 60-kW-hr, and 85-kW-hr -- that are claimed to provide ranges of 140, 200, and 265 miles, respectively. The base 85-kW-hr powertrain delivers a stout 362 hp and 325 lb-ft of torque, while the performance version makes 416 hp and 443 lb-ft.The battery packs are assembled at Tesla's plant in Fremont, California, using Panasonic cells with nickel-cobalt-aluminum cathodes. Situated under the floor, the battery pack is a stressed member that further improves torsional rigidity, and helps lower the car's center of gravity to just 17.5 inches, about the same as a Ford GT's.

SEE 55 Photos here >>>

Advancement in Design

Refreshingly, Tesla designer Franz von Holzhausen resisted the temptation to make the Model S look different for the sake of being different to call attention to the fact it has an electric motor. Former GM design boss Wayne Cherry, a consultant judge this year, summed up the exterior design theme of the Model S as "somewhat safe and conservative," but noted the beautifully executed design-enhancing proportions, the excellent stance and gesture, and the harmony and grace of its lines. His only criticism? "The front end is a missed opportunity to establish brand identity."

The Model S takes advantage of the packaging opportunities afforded by the compact EV powertrain. The cabin is roomy, though the raked roofline impinges on rear-seat headroom. With no engine up front, the "hood" covers a useful luggage space, and the rear hatch opens to a cavernous load area that gets even bigger when you fold the rear seats flat. Total load capacity is 63.4 cubic feet, not that far shy of the 63.7 cubic-feet in a Chevy Equinox, and despite its rakish looks, the Model S is the first hatchback in the world to offer third-row seating.

A number of the interior design solutions need more polish. However, all judges were impressed with the Tesla's unique user interface, courtesy of the giant touch screen in the center of the car that controls everything from the air-conditioning to the nav system to the sound system to the car's steering, suspension, and brake regeneration settings. The system means the Model S interior is virtually button-free, and the car has been effectively future-proofed: More functionality is only a software update away.

Efficiency

Whatever what you use -- gasoline, electricity, hamsters in a wheel -- making a vehicle move requires the consumption of energy. The laws of physics are immutable. The question is, how efficiently can it be done?

In the case of the Tesla Model S, the answer is very. The best energy consumption figure we've returned is 118 mpg-e for a 212-mile run from the eastern fringe of the Los Angeles sprawl to Las Vegas, Nevada. For the 313 miles of road loops during the COTY evaluation, where the car was driven at normal speeds by all the judges with the air-conditioning running, it averaged 74.5 mpg-e.

Impressive numbers, especially considering the 4766-pound Tesla Model S Signature Performance version will nail 60 mph in 4.0 seconds and the quarter in 12.4 seconds at 112.5 mph, with a top speed of 133 mph.

Read the rest here at MotorTrend.com

How "Jaywalking" Was Invented

from BoingBoing:

Sarah Goodyear relates the events that gave rise to the concept of "jaywalking," and describes what American life was like before the assumption that roads were primarily for cars became the norm, and when the streets were "vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses."

It wasn’t always like this. Browse through New York Times accounts of pedestrians dying after being struck by automobiles prior to 1930, and you’ll see that in nearly every case, the driver is charged with something like “technical manslaughter.” And it wasn’t just New York. Across the country, drivers were held criminally responsible when they killed or injured people with their vehicles...

“If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,” says Norton. “That’s practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.”

Streets back then were vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses. When the automobile first showed up, Norton says, it was seen as an intruder and a menace. Editorial cartoons regularly depicted the Grim Reaper behind the wheel. That image persisted well into the 1920s...

The industry lobbied to change the law, promoting the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of "jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.

The current configuration of the American street, and the rules that govern it, are not the result of some inevitable organic process. "It’s more like a brawl," says Norton. "Where the strongest brawler wins."

The Invention of Jaywalking

(via Making Light)

(Image: Jaywalking, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from acidxedz's photostream)

I'm a bigtime JayWalker to this day, always making the b-line..
Who's streets? Our streets!