Yes, there was a time when there was a war in the car. More quotes from my InRoads article:
… it’s easy to see that the streetcar would literally lose ground to the automobile. Coincidentally, the first practical cars appeared in 1886, the same year as Vancouver’s incorporation. The automobile, in addition to offering power and prestige, opened up even more cheap land – wherever the roads and water lines went, and not just along the streetcar corridors.
(But) cars killed people, children in particular. In 1917, Cleveland lost 12 school children in two weeks to street accidents. Mothers began to mobilize against the motor vehicle. Judges ruled that no one was entitled to drive their own vehicle.
If there was ever a “war on the car,” it was then, when the automobile was first competing for the limited road space available. In his book Fighting Traffic, historian of technology Peter Norton explains how “Motordom” – the alliance of car users, dealers and manufacturers – responded, most effectively with public safety programs that “socially reconstructed the purpose of the street.” …
This was a war that the Motordom alliance won:
By the end of the 1920s, even the engineers, initially sceptical, realized the city would have to be scaled for the car. Parking would be provided; pedestrians would be kept to the sidewalks; roads would be designed for increasing speeds.
Not that some contemporary politicians haven’t revived the meme: The fictitious war on cars.
In surfing old Vancouver Suns, I was struck by how early that paper in particular aggressively promoted cars. As far back as 1914, an entire multi-page section of the paper was often devoted to the automobile.