Interesting article on Vox.. thought I'd share
The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking" - Vox

Great street scene before the age of cars.


It's amazing how peds have been villan-ized since that time... how streets now has so much less life... how cyclists too are labeled "scofflaws" (although most cars go over the speed limit.)

Good article.

I read this story in Fighting Traffic years ago. We're all paying dearly as someone pointed out in a chart, since 1899, over 2 million were killed in motor transport. I think we're now going in the opposite direction but it will take another 100 years before we start to see pedestrian streets the norm. Unfortunately, we won't be around to see this.

I don't think it will take that long, Steve. We've taken several important streets back from the cars here in Seville, and I know that other European cities have done the same thing. Once people get a taste of car-free streets and they experience being able to walk around with their families without the constant fear of being run over, there will be no going back.

Pedestrian streets are the norm in Detroit now. People stroll across roads through traffic.

The Baseball team in LA was named the 'trolley Dodgers' when they were still in Old New York . before Bought and Moved West.

A cool article about reserving the roads for cars.

How automakers invented the crime of jaywalking

They not only made walking n public roadways a crime, they made it seem like it was perfectly sane and reasonable to make it a crime. The average person would never question the twisted logic that puts 150 pound people moving at 3 mph in control of confrontations with 3000 pound machines that can go more than 100 mph. This insane myth of car superiority is so embeddded in our cultural mythos that it is beyond questioning.

Yup.

It almost seems natural now.

As far as I can tell, Jaywalking is not illegal here, but one must cross a street in a safe manner.

And that is the goal of all the cross walks. Make safe street crossing for pedestrians. By the 1920's vehicle speeds were increasing, and no doubt there were more vehicle/pedestrian incidents. And thus the birth of crosswalks and jaywalking regulations.

Wrong. The goal was to make travel faster and more convenient for motorists. Make the pedestrians and cyclists stay away from the cars so that motorists don't have to slow down and go around them. And especially, remove the legal liability for collisions from the motorists and pin legal blame on peds and cyclists.

Evidence is that these jay-walk laws were promoted and lobbied by motoring organizations like AAA, not by pedestrian and bicycling organizations.

By the early 1920s tens of thousands of people were being killed by motorists. The victims were disproportionately children and the elderly. There were competing ideas regarding what to do about this. The general public wanted drivers to rein in their behavior. The auto industry knew that forcing cars to stay at pedestrian-friendly speeds would severely limit their market. The auto industry used every means it had to change public perception. They threatened to pull valuable advertising from newspapers that didn't have pro-auto editorial policy. They created media campaigns to promote the new idea of "jaywalking" and enlisted Boy Scouts and others to help "inform" people on the street. They lobbied endlessly to change laws, change infrastructure (e.g., install crosswalks), and get politicians behind their vision of roads as an unimpeded high-speed medium for travel. It was a concerted, tireless effort, backed by huge money. And it worked. Roads were successfully redefined in the form we know them today.

The legacy is that virtually no one alive would even remember a time when roads were different. People think that roads are the way they are because that's the natural state of things, rather than the inertial product of cultural and economic forces in play 90 years ago. It means that we don't have to think of streets the way we have for almost a century, but that most people take the current definition as so axiomatic that it is beyond questioning. There are other viable models, but the real work is promoting the very idea that an alternative, any alternative, could exist. It's like the old "do fish know they're wet?" question.

An A&S thread had many posts on this subject and similar reports of alleged motoring organization conspiracies as well as questionable factoids, myths, and archaic tidbits that some posters believe are convincing and relevant. See: https://www.bikeforums.net/advocacy-s...uilt-cars.html

Not quite right. (Although since we have no enforcement of any of the vehicle code, it doesn't matter much.)

Unless it's changed since I last read it, it is illegal to cross the street mid-block in Oregon if both of the nearest intersections are signalized. (I'm not sure what is made of alleys.). While legal to cross mid-block if one of the adjacent intersections isn't signalized, one has no right of way. In most states, not having the right of way isn't that big of a deal since motorists are generally required to take action to avoid a collision. However, Oregon removed that little feature from the vehicle code some years ago. Currently, a motorist with the right of way is permitted to mow down a jay walking pedestrian and needn't even claim to have not seen him/her.

In California, I am aware of a judge who determined that it is always legal to cross mid-block as long as one does not interfere with any traffic. I don't know if he was relying on statute, case law or making new case law. However, it was entertaining to chat with the cop who had issued the citation; the judge ripped him a new one in court for having issued the ticket.

Dredging up the historic actions of special interest groups, cycling, or motor vehicle is rather disingenuous as it doesn't accurately illustrate how and why transportation has evolved. The early efforts of cycling interests didn't lead to todays road networks, and the early efforts of motoring interests didn't lead to the predominance of the motor vehicle.

Then what did?

Thanks to the OP for posting this.This is an interesting article.

It's a plausible story backed up by facts. If this story is wrong, why don't you explain why.

https://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com...ome-crime.html

An A&S thread had many posts on this subject to include several explanations of the errors in the conclusions drawn in the article as well as seen on this thread. See: https://www.bikeforums.net/advocacy-s...uilt-cars.html

Thank you for posting this fascinating and historically accurate article. The struggle to make our streets safe again--even for children and the elderly--continues to this day. Cities like Paris are moving to limit speeds on city streets to 30 kph. This is a giant step in the right direction.

https://worldstreets.wordpress.com/2...r-entire-city/

I thought it was a very good article as well. There are at least 2 other threads discussing this article on BF and, I know this will be a complete surprise, posters disagreed on this article.

Merged. However, being that I had to read through it all to make sure it made sense, I also had to endure the annoying ankle-biting. I've gone through and cleaned that up. C'mon people. Be nice.

If you're in DC, Carlton Reid, author of Roads Were Not Built for Cars, will be speaking tomorrow evening.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/carlton...ts-16535274451

What's weird about this thread is that almost all the arguments are about straw men. The article does not allege some conspiracy but rather talks about politics and how different interest groups pursue their economic self interest. It makes sense that roads were open to pedestrians before cars dominated roads. People got around by walking or on horseback or, a bit later, perhaps on what were for that time expensive bikes. These were public spaces. Cars obviously need roads. It is not a conspiracy theory to point out that car manufacturers said what was in their economic self interest was also in the public good and that they convinced state and local authorities around the nation to change the laws.

This article is based on a book written by an historian who has a lot of sources for his inferences and conclusions. I haven't seen anything as close to high a quality source on the other side of this debate.

Good points. Coalition is certainly a better word than conspiracy. A coalition of car supporters won out against a coalition of of people who supported bikes, walking, and streetcars. There's nothing wrong with that, even if some of us think it's unfortunate.

What's more interesting to me is the completeness of the victory by car supporters in social and psychological terms. It's not so much that they opened up the roads to cars, as they opened peoples' minds to cars. At the same time, they closed minds to the possibility of bikes and other alternatives on crowded city streets. Nowadays, it's almost impossible for most people to even conceive that cars were once interlopers. Hardly anybody can imagine a future world where the streets are evenly shared by cars and bikes and transit vehicles and walkers.

thanks for sharing this article. and thanks for all the thought provoking talk it spurs. i'm learning tons.