By way of All Things Considered on NPR:
Cast about North America and in just about any city you’ll find heated rhetoric about urban transportation.
In Toronto, the mayor pledged to end a so-called war on cars. In Seattle, the phrase has been aimed
at all kinds of city plans, including lower speed limits in residential areas. It’s also been used in Chicago to label bus lanes and a “congestion fee” at parking garages.
Best of all, quotes from Peter Norton (from whom I got the term ‘motordom’) on the real war on the car – back in the 1910s.
The “war on automobiles” is not just a 21st century phrase. It’s nearly as old as the car itself. In 1909, The New York Times reported that a Georgia town waged a “war on automobiles” by banning them.
Peter Norton, a technology historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, says America did eventually welcome the automobile. But it was not an instant love affair. In fact, he says, cars were initially greeted in cities with hostility and militaristic language.
You know if there really was an organized ‘war on cars’ the commanding Generals would have been sacked (or worse) for massive incompetence decades ago, as would have been their replacements and their replacements….
But as a propaganda weapon this rhetoric rarely fails to convince some poor souls that their lives will actually be worse if they were to (gasp!) walk a little more.