The changing attitude towards death and destruction on Phoenix streets


In my lifetime I've seen some dramatic changes in the attitudes of the death and destruction on the streets of Phoenix. It's changed so much in just a few decades that nowadays a lot of people really can't imagine how dangerous it was, and how that danger was just taken for granted.

And I'm not talking about exciting danger. I'm talking about pain and misery. Sometimes I talk to Phoenix Old-Timers who remember the days of east Bell Road being more like a demolition derby than a road that someone could actually drive safely on. For whatever reason, in my younger days I preferred not to risk my life, and especially my car, just to drive on the streets of Phoenix. I even wore a seat belt before it became part of the law. Yes, I was an embarrassment to most people, who considered it part of the thrill of life to survive several close calls, and occasional wrecks, in order to go to the Circle K for a package of gum. I disagreed, and I still do.
Support Arizona history by becoming a patron on Patreon

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring blog posts are shared there daily, also there's "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, and super high-resolution photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona
When I bought the house that I am in now, twenty years ago, I was very impressed by the safe engineering of the new roads in Glendale. They had medians, and turn lanes. Nowadays, of course, most of the major streets in the Phoenix area have them, but before those types of "traffic calming" devices became popular, and accepted, many streets of Phoenix were just high-speed free-for alls, as if freeways had been built with cars going in just about every direction, criss-crossing, going fast and slow. It was a recipe for disaster, and a lot of people suffered.

Of course, those dangerous streets that I remember were designed for very little traffic. It wasn't the fault of the street engineers that they became overwhelmed. The image above, of 48th Street looking north in the 1960s, is how the roads were used for many, many years. But by the time I got to Phoenix, these old roads were becoming overwhelmed with traffic, and carnage.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more