Sharing the road with impaired drivers in old-time, and modern Phoenix


I've lived in Arizona for a long time, and I've shared the road with impaired drivers. You have too, and it's been that way for a very long time. Not only in Phoenix, of course, but that's what I'm thinking of today.
And I know what you're thinking when I say "impaired" - drunk. And that's true, but it's just part of the types of impairment that I've seen on the road in Phoenix, and I can name a few, and make educated guesses about what types of impairment was popular in Phoenix before I got there.

Yes, of course, there's alcohol. Back in 1977, when I first came to Phoenix, drunk driving was just beginning to be considered something that wasn't just laughed off. When I learned to drive in Minneapolis, in the mid-1970s, most of the people I knew just considered it a risk of being out on the road. If you got hit by a drunk driver, it was just bad luck, they said. I had no interest in getting hit by a drunk driver, or being a drunk driver, so I always separated my drinking from my driving. I'm no angel, but I always was happy to hand over my car keys. I had seen the movies they showed us in driver's ed class!

But while my driving has always been sober, I've always had a very serious impairment - I daydream. I've known some really great drivers and their concentration is always fierce. They're always looking at the road, and they're always thinking about their driving. My mind drifts, and I have always tended to be a sight-seer. A dreamy sight-seeing person like me has no business behind the wheel, it's a serious impairment. By the way, I hung up my car keys about three years ago. I've done my part to make Phoenix streets safer!

Another severe impairment that I've seen is Driving Under the Influence of Kids. I live near a couple of Elementary Schools and my heart goes out to the sleepy parents rushing to get their kids to school so they can rush to get to work on time. I give these vehicles plenty of leeway. I've never had to deal with kids in my car, but I used to be a kid, and my brothers and I were just a bunch of noisy animals. It must have been awful for our parents!

Going back to old-time Phoenix, I have to wonder how much impairment there was because of all of the new drivers. That is, when cars were new to Phoenix streets, and most people really had no idea what to do. The old rules of horse-drawn vehicles couldn't apply to something that went that fast. Horses trot along at about 5 miles per hour, the cars were going twice that, if not more. And of course cars required more from the driver than a buckboard - you had to look yourself, you didn't have a horse looking at the road. If a road dead-ended, a horse would stop.

I'm a little too young to do more than imagine the difficulty of driving cars with standard transmissions along with smoking. I'm not sure when automatic lighters started being put in cars, but it had to be quite a juggling act to light a cigarette and shift a car. There was a time when most people smoked, and most cars didn't have automatic transmissions. And even if you could light your cigarette, or cigar, with a match while driving and shifting, you had to see through the smoke that was right in front of you, obscuring your vision.

What can I say? Let's be careful out there!

Image at the top of this post: Looking west on Adams from Central Avenue in 1930, Phoenix, Arizona.
If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

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