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4 - Death by Blunt Instrument

Largo da Misericórdia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2018

Shawn William Miller
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University, Utah
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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.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Street Is Ours
Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro
, pp. 149 - 190
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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