The cartoon stopped me first. Given the amount of space dedicated to cars in every day’s newspaper, it seems fitting to keep coming back to it…
"Over Sunday Tourists" cartoon by Quinn Hall, King Features Syndicate, Kenosha News, July 17, 1926
The cartoon speaks for itself. This guy was born out of the 1926 car boom, and that same guy is also very much still out there today.
In a hurry to wait.
He’ll speed past you just to stop right in front of you at the next stop light anyway.
Cars had only been widely affordable for ordinary Americans since about 1920. The roads were genuinely new. Speed limits were new. Safety laws were almost nonexistent. In the 1920s, with more drivers, increasingly powerful engines, and almost no regulatory framework, traffic deaths were climbing sharply. And already, six years into the age of mass car ownership, newspapers were drawing cartoons about the guy who treats every drive like a race and arrives at his destination having experienced none of the trip.
I did a whole video on this exact moment in time:
Today, speeding is still a factor in nearly 30 percent of all traffic deaths in America. The cartoon is 100 years old. The driver is definitely still out there.