the good old days

Let’s say it’s 1956, you’re Ford, and you want to sell cars. How the hell do you do that when everybody already has a car? Sure, you’re selling replacement cars, but it takes years for the damn things to wear out…

The solution is easy! Sell them all second cars.

After all, walking is unthinkable…

It’s amazing how thoroughly that idea has permeated modern society. If you’re shopping at the grocery store and need to go to the pizza place next door, obviously you drive there and park again rather than just walk over and back. It’s simpler to sit in the drive-through lane (engine running, of course) for fifteen minutes at lunch-rush-hour than park and walk in. If I walk a mile to the library, people look at me like I’m bat-shit insane.

ANYWAY. This post is supposed to be about safety!

I like the sound of Lifeguard Design — y’know, like the car will jump in the pool to save you from drowning — but it’s actually just dull safety features

Spurred by Robert McNamara, the University of Cornell crash research program and the first year of Ford own crash testing (1955) the Lifeguard package included:

• Two standard features:
  • A safety “deep-center” steering wheel.
  • Safety “double-grip” door latches to prevent occupant ejection in case of a crash.
• Three optional features:
  • Front and rear lap only seat belts (first offered by Ford in 1955).
  • Padded dashboard and sun visors. The instruments were recessed to minimize injury potential.
  • Safety rearview mirror to reduce broken glass if shattered.

The buying public was unresponsive to the Lifeguard package…

I think all of these are now NHTSA regulated to some extent, although I’m not sure exactly what “deep-center” steering wheel even means. Probably something along the lines of “it won’t jam a steel shaft through your chest if you impact it during a crash”…

Image Source: McLellan’s Automotive

The ever-interesting blog Modern Mechanix recently transcribed the 1932 article How Much Longer Will Our Big Cities Last?

One part I found amusing was the idea that cities would have lots of small planes flying its workers in and out every day. Instead of lots of commuter planes, America instead turned to even more plentiful (and probably more sensible!) commuter automobiles. Turned with quite a vengeance — the next time you’re on a ten-lane highway around a large (or even medium) city, stuck in a traffic jam during rush hour, do a little bit of math to try and guess just how many cars are in gridlock with you. Then, imagine they’re all airplanes. Then, picture “air rage.”

But the most interesting part of the Modern Mechanix article was the doom-filled predictions which completely failed to come true. There’s plenty of infrastructure problems which continue to plague cities. This morning I was listening to the woes of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board as they struggle to maintain a century-old system which is regularly rusting and breaking (but manages to outperform FEMA’s expectations nonetheless). They’re apparently half a billion dollars in debt, and since they’re not selling as much water as they used to (less residents in the city), the number is not likely to get better soon. When I lived in Boston, tales of more than two hundred year old lead pipes and wood pipes was easily enough to make me buy a water filter (and pray a lot).

Every day the city dweller reads headlines of minor disasters resulting from defects in the complex supply system…. Gas mains explode, blotting out lives and sometimes asphyxiating hundreds. Water pipes burst and flood whole blocks, effecting a serious interruption of traffic….

However gloomy a picture these catastrophes may present, engineers believe that the scene will be far more dismal twenty or thirty years from now. The network of gas and water pipes, power supply and telephone lines, and the subway tunnels and vaults … are still comparatively young and substantial. When they begin to age and weaken from fatigue, however, disasters will be blazed across the headlines far more frequently than they are at present.

Sub-standard water infrastructure is just one example of cities crumbling around their residents. The recent I-35 bridge collapse is a far more serious one. But if all this didn’t make people emigrate from urban areas in 1930, why should it do so now? Cities have been around since just after the dawn of civilization, and they’ll be around until it ends. Stuart Chase (the author on whose theories the article is apparently based) was just yet another doom-sayer whose prophecies of widespread death and destruction never came to pass.