Best Posts in Thread: Death Machines on Wheels

Rye83 · Jun 8, 2017

It's strange to imagine now, but prior to the 1920s, city streets looked dramatically different than they do today. They were considered to be a public space: a place for pedestrians, pushcart vendors, horse-drawn vehicles, streetcars, and children at play.

"Pedestrians were walking in the streets anywhere they wanted, whenever they wanted, usually without looking," Norton says. During the 1910s, there were few crosswalks painted on the street, and they were generally ignored by pedestrians.

As cars began to spread widely during the 1920s, the consequence of this was predictable: death. Over the first few decades of the century, the number of people killed by cars skyrocketed.

The Forgotten History of How Automakers Invented the Crime of "Jaywalking"
Click to expand...

Sound and look familiar? Note that it took decades before US cities were able to successfully deal with these new transportation contraptions.

Fun fact: Calling someone a "jay" in the early 1900's would be like calling someone a hick, redneck or country bumpkin today. So calling someone a "jaywalker" would have been incredibly insulting to city folk. Also, playgrounds were invented because children were getting ran over in the city streets so frequently...because that is where they had always played before...and these cars, that in the 1920s were the cause of 2/3rd of all deaths in NYC, were not enough for hard-headed parents to warn their kids to stay out of the streets.

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Best Posts in Thread: Death Machines on Wheels

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