The Streets of San Francisco, 1906

And the Invention of Jaywalking

What was it like to walk, cycle, drive or ride a streetcar 115 years ago in the United States?  This video, taken aboard a streetcar on Market Street, days before the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, is a fascinating glimpse into how people navigated space in those days.

Cars were relatively new on the scene in 1906; it had only been 20 years since Carl Benz patented his gas engine automobile. Cars sold by Ford in 1906 had a top speed ranging from 35-50 mph, and they lacked windshields and many modern safety features; yet they caused less violence than they do today.

One of the most striking aspects of this video is the chaotic atmosphere, which somehow simultaneously manages to feel more calm than today’s more “orderly” traffic. This feeling of calm is largely due to the speed; most of the vehicles are probably going about 10-15mph. And notice the lack of road rage! Cars were just one of many modes; they had not yet become the dominant force that they are today. But that would soon change, as the campaign to limit pedestrian access to streets had already begun.

The Invention of Jaywalking

The term “jaywalking” had not yet been introduced in 1906 - although you can clearly see plenty of jaywalkers, and jay drivers.  The term “jay drivers” originated slightly before “jay walkers” did, in 1905. A '“jay” was a pejorative, referring to an unsophisticated country bumpkin, someone unversed in modern sidewalk and street etiquette, such as keeping to the right to avoid bumping into people.

The strategy of ridicule of people walking “incorrectly” was used by the nascent auto industry, and was powerful in promoting adoption of pro-car and anti-pedestrian attitudes. 

In 1913, this newspaper article, entitled “Jay Walkers are Doomed,” appeared in the Rogue River Courier, in Tacoma Washington:

A campaign of ridicule directed toward the extermination of the "Jay Walker Family" was inaugurated [in Tacoma WA] today by the local automobile club. The "Jay Walker Family" …is composed of those pedestrians who cross congested streets without first looking to see if it is safe to do so. The local automobile club today adopted resolutions suggesting propaganda to be distributed all over the country to "kill off the Jay Walker Family." Automobile clubs all over the country ... will be asked to aid in exterminating "Mr. and Mrs. Jay Walker and all the little Walkers.”

Prior to the spread of jaywalking propaganda, it was generally understood that road users had equal access to the road, and each person was responsible for keeping other road users from harm.  The anti-pedestrian propaganda changed public perception that it was pedestrians’ own carelessness, not cars, that were killing people - despite the differential in power between cars and people.

There was plenty of pushback against this nationwide campaign.  From Peter D. Norton’s Fighting Traffic:

A St. Louisan, defending pedestrians’ traditional rights to the street, tried to turn the ‘jaywalking’ label against those who promoted it. ‘We hear the shameful complaint of jay walkers, to console jay drivers,’ he wrote. ‘It is the self-conceited individual who thinks people are cattle and run upon them tooting a horn.’ ‘Make every machine stop and wait,’ he demanded, ‘until the road is clear, and give precedent to people who are walking. The streets belong to the people and not to any one class, and we have an equal right, in fact more right than the automobile.’ 

Pedestrians continued to be pushed to the margins, but for decades, people pushed back against cars, and considered cars to be a violent intrusion into public space. An epidemic of children being killed by cars spurned memorials and demonstrations.

[In] 1922, the city of Baltimore formally honored local children who had been killed by motorists. Ahead of the ceremony, in the downtown Courthouse Plaza, organizers of the city’s “No Accident Week” erected a 25-foot-tall wood-and-plaster obelisk, designed by an architect and painted to resemble a monument of white marble. Inscribed on its face were these words: “Erected by the Citizens of Baltimore in Memory of the 130 Children Whose Lives Were Sacrificed by Accident during the year 1921.” source

One hundred years after this “No Accident Week” took place, we still have organizations like Vision Zero striving, often with little success, to stop road deaths.

Humor has been a necessary way to cope with the onslaught. Here’s a quote from Will Rogers, a popular humorist in the 1920’s:

And here’s a really great video about the early 20th century resistance against car dominance:

The Invention of Playgrounds

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash

Playgrounds did not exist before cars began to take over the streets where children commonly played. As the conflict between children’s play-space and the violence of cars became more and more deadly, playgrounds proliferated as a way to protect children, and also to clear the way for cars to further dominate.

Streets that are too dangerous for children are a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. Cars and car centric culture are the experimental anomaly, not pedestrian culture. 

Why Were Cars Less Deadly?

Despite the complexity of the streets, not a single bicyclist was killed by an automobile in San Francisco in 1906.  Actually, the most dangerous mode of transport at the time was the streetcar, which resulted in 61 deaths that year (one cyclist was hit by a streetcar and killed, and lots of pedestrians died from being hit by streetcars, as well as getting on and off them, and falling off of overcrowded streetcars). That same year, 7 people were killed by motor vehicles, 7 by trains, and 20 by horse-drawn carriages.  Compare that to today, with the population having approximately doubled since 1906: 0 people killed by streetcars, trains or horses, and average of 3 cyclists, 9 car passengers/drivers and 16 pedestrians, or 28 per year from 2014-2021. We’ve been able to virtually eliminate streetcar deaths, but car-related deaths have risen significantly, despite all our modern safety efforts—and, the fact that people literally didn’t know how to drive in 1906 (drivers license exams weren’t required until 1927).

So, given the free-for-all environment and lack of experienced drivers, and at a time when there were millions of cyclists in the States, how were no cyclists killed by cars in San Francisco that year?  

My educated guess takes a few factors into consideration.  

First, speeds were slow.  Although top achievable speeds were 35-50 mph, I didn’t see anyone on Market Street going over 20 mph.  Slow speeds have several benefits: they reduce the risk of severe injury and death on impact, they allow the driver to survey the street, they give more time to react, they decrease braking time, and it’s easier for pedestrians, especially children, to judge oncoming traffic speed.

Second, vehicles were much less heavy; typically cars weighed 1000 pounds while the current average SUV weighs over 5000 pounds.  Heavier vehicles are more deadly to those pedestrians and cyclists who are outside of them, although they can be safer for the passengers themselves.

Third, the lively, unpredictable nature of shared streets required that drivers be mentally engaged in the task of driving.  The simplified design of streets today encourages drivers to go on autopilot mentally and rely on street markings, signs and lights to guide them, rather than being aware of their full environment, i.e. people and cyclists.  You can also see the lack of windshields, which allowed a more complete field of vision, and it improved the driver’s ability to hear street sounds as well.

The relatively low number of deaths caused by cars would rapidly escalate in the coming years.

Returning to Shared Streets

Street culture was strikingly different 115 years ago.  Cars were proliferating, but it was still expected that cars would share the streets along with pedestrians, cyclists, streetcars, and horse-drawn carriages.  Drivers knew that they needed to slow down to match the pace of the other modes, especially in busy areas.

Clearly, we’re not going to go back in time.  But, is it possible for our culture to shift back towards a more egalitarian model?  I think it is.  We could learn a lot from the jaywalking campaign that demonized pedestrians and took away their rights to the streets.  The auto industry had a simple, unified message that was repeated ad nauseum until it was just accepted.  What could our new message be?  How about “cars kill”? Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas for how we could shift our culture towards people-focused streets.

As a treat for getting through this article, here is a mashup of a 1960’s anti-jaywalking song with images of people crossing the street in the Netherlands, where the concept of jaywalking is not a thing.