In 1905, when there were still only about 15,000 motor vehicles in the entire UK, their impact was sufficient to leave a deep impression on Evelyn Everett-Green, a prolific, hugely popular author of improving books for children, with titles such as Tom Tempest’s Victory.
“All the plants under glass were spoiled, all the flowers were spoiled, all the strawberries and grapes were spoiled,” she lamented. “I had an inflamed throat all the summer and my eyes were very troublesome. I had got new typewriters in 1902 and I had to change them again this year, they got so gritty.”
What was this blight? It was dust – thrown up by cars driving for pleasure through Everett-Green’s home village of Albury, Surrey. Her heartfelt testimony was made to a royal commission set up by the government following serious public worry about cars, which at the time were not only new but increasingly unpopular.
While now all but forgotten, this inquiry was an early but arguably pivotal skirmish in an argument that has raged ever since: how much should we redraw the world around the needs of cars? To put it more simply, is there a war on the motorist, or has, in fact, the motor vehicle been waging a war against everyone else?
If you were to ask many modern drivers, or read certain newspapers, the verdict would be clear. Motorists are overtaxed and forever being burdened with unfair new rules and restrictions, or, even worse, marginalised in favour of cyclists. More fervent advocates argue that a crackdown on driving is part of a global plot to trap people within so-called 15-minute cities.
It is within this 21st-century context that the early history of the car is so telling. While driving has, for obvious reasons, always faced at least some official limitations, time and time again the motor industry has proved itself ingeniously good at successfully arguing against meaningful restrictions, or at least minimising them.
And so it was in 1905, a time when cars were perhaps as disliked as they have ever been. As well as the small but rising toll of death and injury among pedestrians, a not-unconnected complaint was the tendency of many drivers to travel well above the national speed limit of 20mph. To the delight of popular newspapers, this behaviour saw a string of famous and well-connected men brought before the courts.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was fined twice in the summer of 1905. On a single day that same summer, one magistrates’ court in rural Hampshire extracted speeding fines equivalent to around £15,000 in modern money from notables including local MP Sir William Palmer, John Wallop – better known as the 7th Earl of Portsmouth – and Sir Thomas Lipton, millionaire founder of the eponymous tea company.
But even more annoying was the impact cars had on roads, which at the start of the 20th century were wholly unsuited to these weighty and comparatively rapid new arrivals. It is largely forgotten now, but in the decades before motor transport appeared, the UK’s rural roads were arguably as peaceful as they had ever been. Railways had removed almost all longer-distance passenger and freight transport, and in the process rendered obsolete the once ubiquitous turnpike trusts that maintained and improved the surfaces, charging tolls in return.
Almost all remaining traffic was now local, meaning there were barely any signposts. Dogs and chickens slept on the dilapidated highways. The only recent interruption had come from cyclists, who, while not always popular, were at least a human-sized annoyance.
Then came the cars, which in dry weather threw up such enormous clouds of dust. This was liberally contaminated with horse dung and urine, a common cause of illness, perhaps causing Everett-Green’s chronically inflamed throat. When it was wet, the roads became mudbaths.
Such was the fury that the government ordered a royal commission to look into it. The still-nascent motor industry sprung into action with a vigorous and highly effective campaign of lobbying. The new Automobile Club of Great Britain, two years away from being granted the prefix “royal”, insisted that motor vehicles were vital for trade and easily available to “men of moderate means”, both of which were obviously untrue at the time.
The committee of ageing grandees appointed to find solutions, led by William Gully, a Liberal politician born in 1835, was entirely unequal to the challenge. Appearing credulously impressed by the club’s evidence, Gully’s best offering to Everett-Green and her fellow complainants was to tentatively enquire whether it might be possible to invent “dustless cars”. On finding out it was not, another idea began to very slowly emerge: improve the roads for the cars’ benefit.
Everett-Green took matters into her own hands, moving in 1909 to a quieter life on the almost entirely undeveloped Portuguese island of Madeira. That same year, the chancellor, David Lloyd George, announced a new roads fund to pay for resurfacing work.
This is not to say that motorists were the sole cause – cycling groups had long been campaigning for better roads – or that they got everything they wanted. The fund was financed using taxes based on the horsepower of cars and on imported oil, despite pleas that this would ruin the car industry. But a precedent had been set.
The Royal Automobile Club’s argument – curbing car use would be an attack on “the common man” – remains a central plank of modern “war on motorists” narratives. It is thus worth remembering that in 1905 at least, the exact opposite was true.
Take the example of the UK’s other main motoring organisation, the AA, formed in 1905 with the specific goal of helping drivers dodge the law, using bicycle-riding “scouts” who would warn about speed traps. This was, understandably, a considerable annoyance to the police, and in 1909 the exasperated chief constable of Sussex police wrote to the Home Office to demand action. A civil servant had to tell him that the AA’s fast-growing membership included five members of the government, two archbishops, the leader of the opposition and several other chief constables. The complaint was quietly dropped.
The AA in particular, described by one historian as continually growing “both in size and intransigence”, helped keep the government out of drivers’ lives for decades to come. Mandatory insurance was fought off until 1930, while the driving test only began in 1935, by which time one person in 200 of the entire UK population was hurt on the roads in a single year – 7,300 deaths and more than 230,000 injuries.
Britain was not an outlier. In the US, a collection of carmakers and dealers, plus associated companies from the petrol and rubber industries, formed an alliance known as “motordom”, often alongside the American Automobile Association (AAA), founded in 1902.
Among motordom’s coups was using shell companies to buy up successful and popular urban streetcar companies and deliberately run down their services to eliminate competition. This strategy, in an unlikely sounding future twist, formed the plot for the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
More insidious still was the way the alliance sought to shift culpability for mass pedestrian deaths away from drivers, blaming them instead on the very people being mown down.
The term “jaywalking”, meaning a pedestrian crossing a street at an unofficial point, originated as an insult by car drivers, a “jay” being a country-dweller who did not know how to cope in a city. These were, the Washington Post opined in 1913, “men so accustomed to cutting across fields and village lots that they zigzag across city streets, scorning to keep to the crossings, ignoring their own safety”.
Efforts to make such actions illegal initially foundered, given the ingrained dislike of criminalising the way people had used the streets for centuries. But after Cincinnati, Ohio, very nearly passed a law in the early 1920s which would have forced all cars in the city to be mechanically limited to 25mph, the auto industry redoubled its efforts. Driving groups employed boy scouts to hand out admonishing cards to people who crossed roads unofficially, with campaign material portraying such people as “country cousins”.
Auto groups and the AAA became heavily involved in school road safety education, pushing the message that it was up to children to not play in the street. By the late 1920s, the first laws criminalising jaywalking were passed. Within a few years, they were ubiquitous across the US.
A century on from Cincinnati’s near-brush with safer roads, where are we? In one sense, things are very different in that the car’s takeover is so complete that it is barely remarked on. In the UK, two-thirds of even short journeys – less than five miles – are made by private motor vehicle. While deaths are a quarter of their 1934 total, more than 80 people a day on average are killed or seriously injured on the roads, a toll that would prompt national outrage in any other part of life.
But there is a sense that we could be approaching another 1905-type moment, where the motor vehicle’s role is at a crossroads. The advent of electric cars means governments have to devise ways other than fuel duty to raise tax revenue, while self-driving vehicles – admittedly a technology which seems forever a few years from useability – could disrupt the status quo even more.
Additionally, cities around the world are building cycle lanes, imposing 20mph speed limits and restricting the flow of cars on smaller streets through low traffic neighbourhoods and the like. This has prompted a reaction in turn from driving groups, one happily endorsed by Rishi Sunak’s government, which has promised to reverse “anti-motorist” ideas, including his recent roll-back on green policies, such as dates for the phasing out of new petrol and diesel vehicles.
Is there really a war on the driver in 2023? As ever, it depends who you ask and what evidence you consider. Someone filling a large SUV with diesel can easily pay £50 in fuel duty for a single tank. But, at the same time, academic studies suggest that if you factor in all the societal costs of driving, everything from danger to pollution and the impact on the climate, then drivers are in fact heavily subsidised.
Similarly, while taxes on car use are particularly burdensome for poorer people, the richest households drive on average three times further a year than the most deprived, meaning cuts to car-based levies such as fuel duties are deeply regressive.
Howard Cox is someone who believes there is a war on the driver, even if his own history perhaps tells a different story. As the head of Fair Fuel UK, he has a case for being the most successful political lobbyist in the country’s history, leading the charge for a decade-plus freeze on fuel duty which, according to one estimate, has cost the Treasury £65bn and counting.
He is now standing for London mayor under the banner of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, on a platform that includes scrapping London’s entire ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ), not just its recent expansion, as well as abolishing low-traffic neighbourhoods and 20mph speed limits.
Cox insists he is not the car absolutist of some stereotypes – he drives a hybrid and used to cycle regularly before a hip replacement – but he does very much believe drivers are maligned and exploited.
“We have 37 million people who can drive, and what we do is make policy around urban areas rather than the whole of the country,” he says. “Drivers have always been easy cash cows. I’ve met several exchequer secretaries, and they always say that the first thing they do is sit down and say, ‘So how much more can we get out of drivers?’
“There are LTNs [low-traffic neighbourhoods], 20mph speed limits, speed bumps, pinch points, floating bus lanes, taxes. All those things add up and they do, unfortunately, multiply into frustration. And some people manifest it in anger.”
Such arguments are treated with scepticism by Doug Gordon, a New York-based advocate for cycling and walking who is co-host of a popular podcast called The War on Cars, which examines the ways urban life is dominated by the motor vehicle.
Drivers, Gordon argues, are missing the point about even tentative moves to build bike lanes or limit car access. “It’s the idea that when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” he says. “Drivers have been used to being at the top of the food chain for so long, no one alive today knows a world where that wasn’t true. So, when these insurgents like bike advocates, or pedestrian and low-traffic neighbourhood proponents nip at the heels of motordom it can feel like a big threat. You see that in every sort of social movement. When women start gaining a little more equality in the workplace it’s not about a rebalancing of the scales, it’s the war on men.”
A longtime observer of this pushback, Gordon says he can nonetheless understand why it happens: “I think part of it is that driving is terrible in cities. As much as cars dominate, and are given so much space and so much money, and so many subsidies, driving sucks.
“If you’ve dedicated your whole life, whether by choice or circumstance, to transporting yourself in a giant metal box that you have to find a place to store and move it through a crowded space, it can feel awful when someone comes along and says, ‘Yeah, we’re just going to make it a little harder for you.’ I almost have sympathy for them.”
