The Resistance to the Car

29th October 2024:

Today the car is billed as the darling child of modernity, representing all that modern life and convenience has to offer. There seems to be very little written about the resistance to cars that was put up by urban populations, and if you do an internet search you’ll struggle to find anything of interest. In fact you’d think that cars were welcomed with open arms by the people who lived before cars.

Yet the fact is, in America at least, cars were far from welcomed, and some parts of the the urban population seem to have spontaneously risen up against them, decrying them as ‘reckless invaders of public space’, or as machines designed for killing men, women and children, and as products of Satan that were driven by ‘self-centred and inconsiderate louts’.

I mean, I just love that depiction of car drivers, a depiction which in my mind still holds true. You do have to be self-centred to drive a car, and it is 100% inconsiderate not only to the wider community, but to life on earth. Perhaps calling all car drivers louts is a bit much, but it does seem to bring out the worst in people, so I think there is some truth to it. Just look at how car drivers use their horn – so rudely and loutish, something a pedestrian would never do. And the aggression and speed with which cars are driven is also a very loutish trait. And of course it is worth noting that these are all traits that are depicted as Satanic historically, so the description fits: cars are Satanic, in that you are cultivating or expressing Satanic traits by driving one.

I don’t know what the reaction to cars was elsewhere in the world, such as Europe, but I feel like there is an untold history of resistance here in the early car era, one that was soon wiped out within a decade or two as the capitalist-materialist onslaught crushed all before it and brought the car to dominance, much to the detriment of all. So I want to take a bit of time out to learn a bit about this myself, and also at the same time to write a blog about it, as I think this is a story that needs to be more widely told and shared.

I mean first off, check out the pics below of this epic cycling protest that took place in San Fransisco in 1896 (The Great Bicycle Protest) Yup, 1896!! I mean, I had no idea that these kind of critical mass bike rides (ostensibly dating from the 1990s in San Francisco) stretched back over 120 years into the past. Some 5,000 riders took to the streets and around 100,000 spectators came out to watch the protest and to hail the bicycle and paved roads as the definitive symbol of progress (part of the ‘Good Roads’ movement).

It sounds truly amazing, and speaks of a seriously well organised and popular support for bicycles, not cars, a history and a struggle that seems to have been buried under the capitalist mantra of cars as progress. Many people seem to have resisted the introduction of cars – they were not welcomed. I would love to know what happened elsewhere in the world.

To give some sense of scale for how fast the capitalist industries forcibly altered society for their own profit and without any democratic mandate, consider the following statistics for the USA:

• In 1895, a year before the above protest, there were only 4 cars registered (I’m guessing there were more cars than that but that they weren’t registered).
• By 1905 there were over 77,000 cars registered.
• By 1915 the total had risen to 2.3 million.
• And by 1925 there were 17.5 million cars registered.

Crazy! There is no way that people were given any democratic say over the introduction of cars or the effect that this would have on urban life. This is just a rush for profit by capitalist industries – an aggressive mass manufacturing and marketing of cars, the deliberate repression of all opposing views, and aggressive lobbying of politicians. An approach that we have all come to see repeated time and again ever since across capitalist industry, and that has come to typify the aggressive and domineering style of American capitalism that has spread across the globe.

The main objections to the introduction of the car seemed to be the danger they represented to pedestrians, and especially children, in terms of accidents, and the way that they totally dominated the urban streets and pushed all other users aside. The latter needs some consideration, as today we take it as a given that cars take priority over everything else, but this was not always the case. In fact the early attempt of the car industry to dominate urban streets and remove everyone but cars from the main thoroughfares to the pavement was widely resisted and commentated upon.

It needs to be born in mind that back then there was no driver’s test to pass, no stop signs or any street sings, no traffic lights or pedestrian crossings, no traffic police, no lane markings or any markings on the highway, no street lighting, no brake lights, no speed limits. It’s hard to imagine the kind of dangerous conditions pedestrians and other users of the highway faced from car drivers. In two months during the summer of 1908 in Detroit, for example, 31 people were killed and so many injured that the statistics went unrecorded.

So there must have been a lot of resistance to the cars for this reason alone. The following is a quote from New York police magistrate Bruce Cobb in 1919, defending the legal right to the highway of the pedestrian:

“if pedestrians were confined to street corners or certain designated crossings, it might tend to give selfish drivers too great a sense of proprietorship in the highway.”

He assigned the responsibility for the safety of the pedestrian—even one who ‘darts obliquely across a crowded thoroughfare’—to drivers. There seems to have been widespread attempts, even up to the 1920s, to control cars, slow them down, and subordinate them to other uses.

To get another perspective on the early view of cars, the state of Georgia’s Court of Appeals wrote: 

“Automobiles are to be classed with ferocious animals and … the law relating to the duty of owners of such animals is to be applied.”

Another wave of anti-car protest swept America in the 1950s and 60s, this time spearheaded by women, and dubbed ‘safety parades’. The main concern of this movement was safe streets that children could play on, slower speeds, stop signs, pedestrian over and under passes, with many demonstrations being triggered by the death of a child. The demonstrations were non-violent, but testy, and often included full on blockades of roads.

Like I said before, I don’t know what the situation was like in other countries, except for the Netherlands in the 1970s and early 80s, which is the only other instance of mass opposition to the car that I know of. These were pretty amazing protests that involved large numbers of cyclists occupying public spaces and the highway to protest for better cycling provision and for safer roads.

Some of the mass cycling rides were truly on an epic scale, with up to 15,000 cyclists taking part, and of course the result of this decade long protest is there for all to see today, as the Dutch have arguably the best cycling provision of any country in the world.

There was a resurgence of ‘car free cities’ movements in the USA and Europe in the 1990s and early noughties with things like the critical mass bike rides or World Naked Bike Ride, and these have certainly had a powerful effect and have brought the issue of car free cities and better cycling provision to the top of the agenda for most of the world’s big cities, certainly so in the west, and this is something that is still playing out today. This relatively contemporary movement also resulted in lots of interesting groups and movements sprouting up, such as the Carbusters zine available on this site.

So overall this is a pretty patchy history of resistance to the car and the grassroots promotion of the bicycle as the symbol of freedom and progress. I’m sure there is a much better history of this topic written somewhere but I’ve not been able to find it, and I felt that writing what I know is at least a start, and may help to inform a few other people or lead others to embark on more detailed research.

I guess the real question is whether there will be a new grassroots movement to oppose cars and demand better cycling provision. At present it feels like the effects of the movements of the 90s and early noughties are still playing out, as they have led to quite a radical change in how urban transport is perceived at policy levels, a much higher awareness of the benefits of going car free and the detrimental effects of cars, and also a proliferation of cycling groups and sustainable transport NGOs. So while this change in perspective and policy is ongoing I don’t expect any new movements to spring up, and what with the major shift taking place at the moment as the world switches from petrol cars to electric, it seems to me that there isn’t going to be any space for any new grassroots resistance to cars to emerge for some time to come. Of course, there will always be isolated groups, such as Tyre Extinguishers, but I think the world is not going to see any new grassroots movement against cars or for bicycles probably until the 2040s and beyond.

Of course, I hope I’m wrong, I’d love to see a mass movement demanding car free cities, and that is why I remain devoted to this site, in the hope that it may at least play some small part in helping that come about.