Quote of the day

At an estate sale, I picked up a copy of the August 1936 issue of Fortune Magazine. I don't know if you've ever seen old issues of this publication from the 1930s and 1940s, into the 1950s. The issues were more like journals, with cover art rivalling the best New Yorker covers.

This issue has an amazing story about the failure of the U.S. highway system. The story, "Unfit for Modern Motor Traffic," said that with better design, 98% of accidents could be eliminated and all of the congestion.

This quote is still relevant today:

The cold fact is: traffic today is a combination of an eighty-mile-an-hour car in the hands of a twenty-mile-an-hour driver struggling to adjust itself to a thirty-mile-an-hour road. And it doesn't work out very well. (p.87)

although today I think the tables are turned to favor the automobile, as discussions of bicyclist fatalities in two different blog entries in Washcycle, "Insufficient Evidence," and "Bicycling Magazine's "Broken"," indicate.

All road environments have been built for the car at the expense of other users of the street-place environments. The principles of the limited access highway focus on enabling high speeds. High speed doesn't work very well when the driver isn't paying attention, and walkers and bicyclists get in the way.

Spread on ideal highway construction, Fortune Magazine, August 1936.