Who or what uses streets? If you ask most people today, they would say that streets are for cars. People should use sidewalks and stay out of the road for their own safety. We teach this to even the littlest children to look both ways before crossing the street, to use crosswalks, and to only go when the light indicates that it is safe to do so.
But the invention of the road as a car-centered space is a relatively new one. For most of history up until the early twentieth century, streets were shared spaces where multiple activities took place. People walked. Sellers set up stalls with wares. Carriages inched their way through sometimes-crowded streets. Children sold ribbons or broadsides and newspapers. By the late nineteenth century, bicycles zipped along too.
Look at this image from Marseille, France from 1900. While some people are on sidewalks, many walk in the road that is shared by horse-drawn carriages, streetcars, and more.
La Rue Noailles, Marseille, 1900.
You can see the same pattern in the image of San Francisco from ten years later.
Intersection of Market Street and Grant Avenue, San Francisco, c.1914.
Now compare Market Street of 1914 to Market Street of c.1940. What differences do you see? Who uses the road? How do the people move? Did you notice the addition of crosswalks? What about street signs and traffic signals?
Traffic jam at Kearny and Market streets, 1946
Streets had become car-only spaces. It was from 1910 onward that the automobile lobbying organizations started turning public opinion against people in roads. The term “pedestrian” had been used for over a hundred years to refer to the sport of walking. (Yes, this was a spectator sport with famous athletes like “Champion Lady Walker of the World” Ada Anderson.) But it was in this period that pedestrian began to be used to describe a person in relation to a road. People who got hit by cars before the 1910s were seen to be victims of motorists. Judges handed down harsh penalties to drivers who hurt or killed people. Cities began to pass the first speed limits, some as low as 10 miles per hour. Generally, cars were seen as a menace to both people and slower forms of transportation.
“Sacrifices to the Modern Moloch” from the St. Louis Star, November 1923, criticizing the acceptance of high pedestrian deaths as a sacrifice to the god of automobiles.
But the American Automobile Association (AAA), founded in 1902, began to change public opinion against pedestrians. It was the position of AAA and the other motor clubs that people who were hurt by cars shared fault with the motorist. Essentially, if they didn’t want to get hurt, they should have stayed out of the road. This move was financially motivated as more cars on the road meant more pedestrians getting hurt and dying in accidents.
The next step in making roadways only for cars was to invent a new crime: jaywalking. “Jay driving” referred to a new driver who didn’t know to stay on the right side of the road, and early definitions of “jaywalking” from 1905 to 1910 referred to a person who didn’t know how to properly walk on a sidewalk. But by 1910, the term had acquired the meaning we know today: someone who doesn’t cross the street at the proper time or at the proper place within a crosswalk. By making jaywalking a crime, the transition from roads as a mixed-use space ended; roads were only for cars.
Officials holding an anti-jaywalking sign, Boston, 1960s.
One of the automobile lobby’s most famous and enduring programs related to this push was the School Safety Patrol Program established in 1920. Now often called junior safety patrol, the program emphasized that rather than it being the driver’s primary responsibility not to hit children, it was a child pedestrians’ primary responsibility to not be hit by cars. The programs were incredibly successful, and many elementary and middle schools still have them today.
The safety patrol at William Fox School, Virginia, 1957.
A sidewalk on Race Street in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, 1978.
Most people today are happy that there are sidewalks where people can walk with less concern about being hit by an automobile, but the criminalization of jaywalking has gotten renewed pushback in recent years. Prior to a recent repeal of New York City’s jaywalking law, statistics showed that of the people ticketed for the crime in 2023 were 90% were Black or Latino. There were similar racial disparities in California where jaywalking was decriminalized in 2022. Some cities are also pushing back against streets as car-only spaces by making pedestrian zones or blocking off entire blocks to vehicular traffic. Have you seen this in your neighborhood?
