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17212 results in Latin American government, politics and policy

Page 332 of 861

  • 4 - Death by Blunt Instrument

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 149-190

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the scale of automotive accidents, injuries, and death and the role automotive violence played in enforcing change in street utilities, many of which became too dangerous to sustain. Automotive accidents replaced epidemic diseases as the most common cause of death and injury, particularly among the young and children. The car was described as Bacillus automobilis and with its speed, size, shape, and growing numbers, formed a weapon that was referred to in coroner’s reports as a blunt instrument. Velocity replaced gravity as the most common factor in the city’s accidents. Statistics for the catastrophe are scarce and inaccurate, and police and municipal authorities were accused of obfuscate the car’s deadliness, but using various sources, particularly the daily papers, the chapter estimates the scale and scope of the car’s violence and name its victims. Chauffeurs, working-class employees driving the car’s of the elite, took most of the initial blame for the street’s increasing mortalities. However, once owners began to do their own driving, the push to blame pedestrians for their own tragedies, a process begun by Rio’s chauffeurs’ union in the late 1920s, succeeded. By the 1940s, however, blame was increasingly placed on deficient street engineering, insufficient laws, and inconsistent enforcement.

  • Conclusion - Revolutions at the End of the Street

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 308-326

  • Summary

    In conclusion, we compare Rio’s streets with those created in Brasilia to solve, through planning, the automobile’s chaos. Modernism sought to essentially eliminate the traditional, multi-use street, to divide traffic from all the other uses of public space, but with mixed results of its own. We take Rio’s streets up to the present by examining contemporary trends. First, we look at formal and informal cases in which residents have recaptured the city streets, banning automobiles either permanently or periodically, to enjoy the streets again for recreation, celebration, and shopping. Pedestrian districts have expanded, and street carnival is making a pronounced comeback. In a countervailing trend, Brazil’s upper classes have built gated communities, sprawling, walled neighborhoods in which the streets have all been privatized, a final enclosure and end of urban public commons. We ask what lessons history holds for the ongoing conflicts over public spaces and how they might best be used to build contemporary communities.

  • 5 - Law and the Promises of Safety

  • Shawn William Miller, Brigham Young University, Utah
  • Book:
    The Street Is Ours
    Published online:
    30 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018, pp 191-228

  • Summary

    Officials promoted the car’s presence on city streets. However, its costs in deaths and injuries could not long be denied. Chapter 5 examines official attempts to solve the problem of the car’s violence. At first, they tried palliatives, such as the world’s first free ambulance and emergency medical services, founded in 1907. But with the posited causes of automotive accidents multiplying, legislators began to pass automotive laws and cities reformed and enlarged their traffic police forces. We examine the particulars of the law, two major phases of codification in 1941 and 1966, motorist resistance and impunity, and the impotence of police, working men on foot patrolling wealthy men in large machines. Penalties for dangerous automotive behavior, such as speeding, declined in severity over time to become almost meaningless in some decades. The city also underinvested in traffic engineering, signalization, driver education. We conclude that much that was implemented served not to solve the problem of the car but rather to consistently appease the city’s residents by promising that a solution was close at hand. City officials promised first-world automotive mortality rates but were unable to concede that such rates, while reportedly lower than Rio’s, were still catastrophic.

Page 332 of 861