“The Story of Anyburg, USA”

The American relationship with the automobile is a complicated one. I have managed to be an adult in a place with bad public transportation without one, but it’s hard to do, and many places in the US have bad public transportation. And let us note that “bus” and “tram” are things that no one in this short ever says. It is, as I keep pointing out, not really possible to have buses come closer to my house than they do, because the main road they’d travel on goes under a trestle close enough to where I sit for me to hear trucks smash into it when they realize that twelve feet really does mean twelve feet. And I’m pretty sure the city buses here are taller than twelve feet. But I’m an outlier, and in most cases the lack of transportation is deliberate.

“Anyburg, USA” is determined to eliminate cars because of the number of car accidents. Cars are put on trial. The prosecutor (Hans Conried) rails at the cars in verse. Humans who build the cars and create safety features are praised. The person who designed the roads (Thurl Ravenscroft), incidentally by doing things such as leveling hills, weeps at how much destruction is done on his perfect roads by those darned cars. The defense attorney (Bill Thompson) quite sensibly points out that the cards aren’t doing all this on her own, and you have to blame the drivers, not the cars.

On its own, this isn’t entirely wrong. It’s ludicrous that he equates speeding with throwing bombs around; it’s entirely possible to go safely over the speed limit depending on the road and traffic conditions. (Though I go well under the speed limit in the development near my house, because it’s full of kids.) But you can’t blame a car if its driver is drunk. You can’t blame a car if it’s driven recklessly. You can’t blame a car if its owner doesn’t take proper care of it and it’s not road-safe. In these cases, the issues are with the driver, and no one sensible would claim otherwise.

However, since this is a Year of the Month entry, this is obviously from 1957. You will note that no one mentions seat belts. This is because, while they were standard equipment in airplanes, it was only a few years after C. Hunter Shelden, a neurologist working at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, CA, the hospital where many of my childhood friends were born, initially suggested that cars would be safer if they had seat belts. The first patent on an automotive seat belt was granted in 1955, and it wasn’t until 1958 that Saab was the first manufacturer to make them standard equipment. Cars weren’t required to have them until ‘66.

The whole of the short does have the “cars don’t kill people; people kill people” vibe. But also they talk about how cars are being made safer. There’s no mention of legal consequences for people who, say, drive drunk; most states by this point had DUI laws, but they weren’t necessarily enforced, and of course there weren’t roadside BAL tests. If you could convince the cop that you were sober, good enough! There’s no consequences mentioned for the unsafe car, no discussion of licensing and so forth. People do kill people. But there are laws to make it happen less often and safety standards for cars that would be put in place in the decades following this short.