Three matched newspaper snapshots show traffic death moving from speed mania and bad luck toward policing—without fully becoming an infrastructure story.
The automobile’s danger became ordinary before it became structural. Accident-inevitability framing fell from 39.8 in 1910 to 31.4 in 1930, while enforcement rose from 17.1 to 26.3. Yet infrastructure responsibility stayed low and declined, from 6.9 to 4.7.
In 1910, speed was the clearest named mechanism of danger, scoring 25.7. By 1930 it had fallen to 9.1. Technological-progress language also declined, suggesting that the automobile no longer needed to be explained as a novelty even when it killed.
Driver blame remained remarkably stable near 23 points in all three periods. Pedestrian blame was consistently low and declined. The larger shift was institutional response: traffic rules and punishment became more available ways to narrate harm.
Relevant automobile-risk coverage rose from 0.14% of detected articles in 1910 to 0.33% in 1930. That increase is descriptive: the 1930 slice contains only 30 relevant newspapers, so it cannot by itself establish a national trend.
American Stories revision 77e27fa69c4788dfaad1c9efd8a226d5a32d3e9a. Identical September–October retrieval designs retained 2,200 relevant articles in 1910, 2,419 in 1920, and 727 in 1930. Eleven constructs were scored with GPT-4o mini and reprint-cluster weighted.
The late archive is thin: 1930 contains 30 relevant newspapers and 295 articles with unresolved geography. Comparisons are descriptive and not causal. All construct rows are complete and within range.
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