Herbert Hoover was a great engineer and an even greater humanitarian, but he ran out of luck when he took office as president of the United States in March 1929, seven months before Wall Street’s Black Friday ushered in the seemingly endless Great Depression.

Herbert Hoover was born in West Branch, Iowa, precariously perched on the edge of the Great American Desert. Orphaned as a child, he was raised by an uncle in Oregon. He worked his way through college, graduating as an eager if not particularly distinguished member of Stanford’s inaugural class of 1895.

Hoover began his career as a mining engineer with one success after another, including lucrative stints in Western Australia and Northern China. He helped defend Euro-American settlements against the worst excesses of the Boxer Rebellion in 1902. He subsequently established himself as a savvy speculator and entrepreneur in London, buying and selling distressed mining properties with great gusto and even greater profits.

Hoover transitioned from Great Engineer to Great Humanitarian seamlessly during the Great War (World War I), organizing massive food relief efforts for millions of hungry children in German-occupied Belgium. He subsequently spearheaded efforts to feed starving Russians during the Civil War that followed WW I, starving Poles at the beginning of WW II, and starving Germans after WW II ended in defeat for the Third Reich. He incidentally served as Food Czar in Woodrow Wilson’s wartime cabinet (1917-19), his first but far from last sally into the overtly political realm.

Widely admired, both Democrats and Republicans encouraged Hoover to run for president in 1920. He tried for the Republican nomination, but failed miserably. After helping Harding win the election, Hoover served eight years as Secretary of Commerce, a sleepy cabinet post he managed to turn into something more based on timely support for state and local policy innovations in city planning, land use regulation, and transportation system development.

As Secretary of Commerce between 1921 and 1928, Hoover chaired well-publicized national conferences on unemployment, planning and zoning, and highway and traffic safety. Zoning became the local planning instrument of choice in the U.S. largely due to Hoover’s leadership and direction, with separation of land uses a key ingredient in Hoover’s personal vision of neighborhoods where children could play outside in safety and security. One in five traffic accidents in the Roaring Twenties involved pedestrians. Two-thirds of personal injuries and fatalities associated with motor vehicle accidents involved pedestrian conflicts. A majority of pedestrian fatalities were children, juveniles, or young adults.

One member of Hoover’s 1924 National Conference on Street and Highway Safety was a Connecticut businessman named William Phelps Eno. Three years earlier, Eno had established “The Eno Foundation for Highway Traffic Regulation” to create traffic regulations, assist traffic police and make recommendations about road infrastructure. After several name changes, the organization is now known as the Eno Center for Transportation.

The National Conference on Street and Highway Safety published a comprehensive set of uniform vehicle codes in 1930, under the benign influence of newly elected President Hoover. These included a) a uniform motor vehicle registration act, b) a uniform motor vehicle anti-theft act, c) a uniform motor vehicle operators’ and chauffeurs’ licensing act, and d) a uniform act regulating traffic on highways.

Modern state departments of motor vehicles are a direct outgrowth of this achievement. Traffic regulation included comprehensive treatment of many diverse topics, including a) obedience to regulations and police officers, b) traffic signs, signals, and markings, c) accidents, d) driving under the influence, e) speed limits, f) driving on the right side of the road, g) turns and signals, h) right of way, i) pedestrians, j) street cars, k) railways, l) stopping, standing, and parking, m) equipment, and n) penalties for non-compliance. The Roaring Twenties is the time when the dominant role of the motor vehicle in urban and suburban transportation was first felt on a national scale. No other nation on Earth was dominated by the private automobile as early or to the same extent as the United States.

Hoover was active in promoting inland waterways, airport development, and private air mail services during his combined tenure as Secretary of Commerce and President. Construction of the Hoover Dam began during his presidency, though it was not completed until after he left office. The Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego was promoted heavily during his administration, though it remains incomplete to this day, thanks to the Darien Gap, which separates Panama from Colombia. Pan American Airlines, at one time the largest internation passenger air carrier in the world, modestly began operations between Miami and Havana during Hoover’s seamless transition from commerce secretary to president.

Hoover won the Republican nomination and the general election in 1928 based on a well-organized grassroots campaign and stirring front page endorsements from two-thirds of America’s 4,000 independent newspapers. In other words, he bypassed the conservative national leadership of the Republican Party to gain entry to the White House. This did not bode well for his administration, which faced significant opposition from jilted Democrats and the leaders of his own preferred political party.

Hoover lost his reelection bid to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide: 472 electoral votes to 59. When Hoover was sworn in, the nation’s unemployment was less than 4 percent. By the time he was seeking reelection, it had soared to nearly 24 percent during his term. His highly principled, yet politically ill-advised opposition to repealing Prohibition, was another contributing factor to his loss. Roosevelt’s campaign song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” would become the standard anthem at political rallies for the Democratic Party for fifty plus years.

After Hoover left the White House in 1933, he began a personal crusade against Roosevelt and the New Deal. He wrote and published dozens of books in support of a return to normalcy which even today has not quite adhered.

After Roosevelt’s untimely demise three short weeks before Germany’s surrender in 1945, Hoover’s political reputation rebounded. He was asked to chair blue ribbon committees tasked with nothing less than the complete reorganization and modernization of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government by Harry Truman (1947-49) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953-55).

Hoover died in the New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel room he called home for decades in 1964. He outlived his own presidency by more than three decades, a seemingly unbreakable record at the time. Jimmy Carter, nonetheless, passed him by to establish the current record in 2012.

The Great Engineer and possibly even greater humanitarian may not have been America’s greatest president, but he certainly left his indelible automotive mark on America’s transportation infrastructure during a multifaceted if somewhat checkered political career.

The policies and programs necessary to facilitate modern automobile-oriented American life may be said to begin with the epic if long-forgotten Depression Era “Hoover Conference” of 1930.

Erik Ferguson is Principal of ETF Associates, a Southern Nevada transportation planning consultancy specializing in the development and implementation of sustainable transportation policies, transportation system performance monitoring, evaluation and modeling.