"It’s an orchestrated series of near misses. But nobody gets hurt. An ancient law is at work: right of way."
Writes Brett Simpson in "Why Cars Don’t Deserve the Right of Way/The simplest way to make roads safer and reduce police violence at the same time" by (The Atlantic)(pointing to the embedded film that shows San Francisco in 1906, days before the devastating earthquake).
From the Roman viae publicae to the king’s roads of medieval England, Western public roads operated around a common premise: that every person has the right to travel unimpeded, with equal priority. Horses, walkers, and carts––and later bikes and trolleys––moved in a constantly negotiated balance of power.
But as cars multiplied, horsepower became the enemy of equity....
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Someone discovering yet again that low density traffic does not need a lot of laws, and functions better without them. Now do New Jersey.
I wonder how many vehicle/pedestrian accidents actually did happen in San Francisco on April 14 1906? Isn't that a missing piece of data here?
Big deal. They went twelve minutes without a traffic accident or a runaway horse, but my guess is that they rarely went two days without such an occurrence. I don't think the pedestrians looked especially nonchalant while crossing the street. Some had a "once more into the breach" type of bravado, but that's not a street I would want to cross while holding an baby.....Anyway, what's the point about worrying about traffic accidents when we're all doomed to perish in an earthquake brought about by global warming.
Brett Simpson is an abject idiot, and/or this is intended to make cars unviable in order to for people into public transit.
Look at how little throughput you get out of that large area of road. Double the amount of traffic and you have absolute gridlock without reasonable traffic laws.
And note that cars don't have the right of way...on sidewalks. Or in crosswalks when the walk signal is lit. Pedestrians can get where they are going quite reasonably obeying traffic laws that are no more onerous than the ones drivers are required to follow.
That's a foolish point of view. Horses killed and injured pedestrians all the time back then. And the deaths were not "equitable;" riders and carriage drivers rarely suffered injury.
There's no need to look to medieval history, though. Plenty of roadways in the developing world are complete anarchy. Those roads are not equitable, either. They favor the most aggressive, and they marginalize the old, the disabled, and those with small children.
Yancey Ward said...
I wonder how many vehicle/pedestrian accidents actually did happen in San Francisco on April 14 1906? Isn't that a missing piece of data here?
like Most Things, these days; their point works Far Better, without factual support
The Closest Thing to reality that they could Really Say, is:
IF vehicles DON'T move faster than a person can run, people (some people) can out run them
Reminds me of travel in India in 1980s and Beijing in 1990s. But I assume the private auto has taken over in both places since.
From the Roman viae publicae to the king’s roads of medieval England, Western public roads operated around a common premise: that every person has the right to travel unimpeded, with equal priority. Horses, walkers, and carts––and later bikes and trolleys––moved in a constantly negotiated balance of power.
This moron thinks pedestrian serfs had equal rights to the roads when mounted nobility rode by from Roman times until the advent of traffic laws in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
But as cars multiplied, horsepower became the enemy of equity.
Growing up in a quarry town, the young working class men in my town were more likely to own high powered cars. The wealthier people tended to buy cars that had more luxury options.
Contra to Bart Simpson's agenda, it was when the pedestrian culture moved from (1) the physics-science based "look both ways" prudence first of self-protection with the expectation that a ton of metal bearing down on you might not stop, to (2) me-first "I HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY AND I'M CROSSING DAMN IT" pedestrian culture of today that steps out onto the street with head down and ear buds in, but without first waiting for traffic to stop, that pedestrians getting hit started to rise.
The law be damned. 2000 pounds of mass hitting your soft body doesn't care. YOU need to look out for you first. Never expect others to do so.
Wow from “equal priority” to “equity” in the next graf…
And now I don’t give a shit what else he wrote.
The linked article is fuzzy correlation without accounting for population increase and other factors, wishful thinking, and outright lies and misrepresentations.
Reduce police violence?? Conditions in Democrat-controlled cities call for increased police violence.
This film is such a fantastic window into the nature of city life in 1906, it is a shame the writer apparently misses all the richness of insight this film offers in order to impose on it some irrelevant presentist morality lesson. It's a lesson I guess that even still I don't really get. The individualism and disorder of the street was both exhilarating and disruptive, and the need for more order and the price that was to be paid for imposing it are both easy to see here. Both were already present and already felt by people then. It wasn't the auto that introduced the issue, it was the industrial urban mass itself. Horses and trolleys and pedestrians were enough on their own. And there was nothing safe about that street at all back then. It was dangerous already. But so also was the freedom of the city, which is why people flocked there anyway.
Is this really the next item for The Agenda?
A great historical film. I never knew such records existed. This was when Mark Twain was a newspaperman in SF, and was made when my Grandfather was 3 years old. The view of the ferry building and the turn table is fantastic.
Hilarious to see these pedistrians just serenely saunter accross the road, not even looking at the trolly cars, automobiles, and horse drawn wagons. As someone wrote; They all the confidence of a born-again Christian holding 4 aces.
The cars were going slow enough that children could run along holding onto the back. From the Library of Congress notes on the film: "The filmed ride covers 1.55 miles at an average speed of nearly 10 miles per hour."
Also, "a careful tracking of automobile traffic shows that almost all of the autos seen circle around the camera/cable car many times (one ten times). This traffic was apparently staged by the producer to give Market Street the appearance of a prosperous modern boulevard with many automobiles. In fact, in 1905 the automobile was still something of a novelty in San Francisco, with horse-drawn buggies, carts, vans, and wagons being the common private and business vehicles."
I looked it up because there was a comment on the YouTube page for the video: "From what I understand, the cars and people careening across the front of the moving trolly were intentionally directed by the Producers of the film to drive that way to make the trip more interesting."
That is great old footage...
Where are all the bums, panhandlers, and junkies? The tents on the sidewalks? People pissing (and worse) in full public view?
At least the opium addicts back then had the self respect to get wasted indoors away from children and the general public.
And the police would have busted their heads if they didn't.
A more civilized time...
The past is a different country. Here's three different countries, doing the same thing, from the very recent past: How crowds work in India, Japan, China during rush hour.
You want no rules? India shows how that works. You want rules? Japan's subway packing pushers help you along. Chinese seem to flow in an intermediate state, maybe because their social credit scores will suffer if they act out.
My incoming truck will go 0-60mph in less than 2 seconds. Stand in front of me at your peril equity seekers.
Maybe the author needs to look up how the Dodgers got their name.
Eric said...
Is this really the next item for The Agenda?
10/16/21, 3:02 PM
Getting rid of the private automobile has been high on the Leftist wish-list for decades. How else will they be able to kill those suburbs and exurbs with their icky McMansions* and large lawns and get the peasants back under the thumb of their proper overseers?
*McMansion: def. A house I do not like owned by people whom I loath.
And on April 18, 1906–four days later— the whole place went up for grabs when 80% of the city was destroyed in the earthquake and subsequent fire.
That this film was taken four days before the Big One, when the San Andreas fault slipped and Point Reyes moved 20 feet north.
“Horses, walkers, and carts––and later bikes and trolleys––moved in a constantly negotiated balance of power.”
Sounds like the streets of Bangalore, India: cars, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, small (100cc) motorcycles (and the occasional cow or dog) all share the same right-of-way. And if one side of the street is crowded and the other, opposite-direction side is not, why, traffic just spills over onto the other side.
Perhaps someone who’s lived in Bangalore could comment on how well that works? The carnage does seem to be less than one might expect, but no one’s getting anywhere in a hurry.
My own take is that bicyclists already get plenty of ‘equity’: just look at all the bike lanes which, 95% of the time, remain bicycle-less.
How is that different from modern day big city traffic? Every time I've been in NYC, Los Angeles, Atlanta or Montreal, it's looked exactly like that: zig-zagging through lanes, ignoring stop signals, pedestrians crossing where and whenever they want, buses causing discontinuities in the traffic flow, etc. etc.
Why, when riding in this cable car, do we hear the clopping of horse hooves?
I've seen the film before. The confident stride of the people in the street was what stuck in my mind, those people were not crippled by doubts.
Plenty of wagon, train, and trolley accidents in the old days, especially when horse-drawn trolleys were replaced by electrics.
And today, African countries with comparatively few cars have the highest accident rates in the world.
Fuck you, Brett.
I can get a tom more accomplished with a car than you can walking. I can get more groceries, making for fewer trips out, and I can do it faster and easier. Letting some shit for brains pedestrian or bike rider slow me down to their pathetic speed is an assault on my freedom, my dignity, my life.
Here's hoping he's some day riding in an ambulance slowed down by pedestrians. Or that his home burns to the ground because the fire trucks were delayed by pedestrians
When I was about 12 years old, I came into possession of two large volumes of the history of the county that I grew up in in the 1890s. The population was only around 10,000 at the time. What struck me the most was the huge number of horrific traffic accidents and the gorey detail that the history had recorded. To a 12 year old it was fascinating that such a small city had weekly deaths in all manner of crazy circumstances. I can't imagine San Francisco was much different.
When I was about 12 years old, I came into possession of two large volumes of the history of the county that I grew up in in the 1890s. The population was only around 10,000 at the time. What struck me the most was the huge number of horrific traffic accidents and the gorey detail that the history had recorded. To a 12 year old it was fascinating that such a small city had weekly deaths in all manner of crazy circumstances. I can't imagine San Francisco was much different.
It helps that everybody’s going at about the same speed and that speed is not too fast. The idea that the same rules could apply today is nuts.
Arm the bicycle crazies, in-traffic rollerbladers and skateboarders and let them have at each other.
You need an "Equity Bullshit" tag.
Back in 1906, police violence was rather ordinarily used to keep people in line, especially the low class riffraff.
Brett Simpson is an ignorant idiot.
Horsepower was always the "enemy of equity."
Is it lost on him that a horse is 1-hp transport, a team of horses some multiple of 1hp? And that shank's mare is less than 1hp? (I really need to look up where that phrase comes from...)
Of course, like "income inequality" in the developed world, he's assuming incorrectly that "ROW equity" is something people get really exercised about.
Looking at the clip I realized that even with all those horses their was less poop on Market Street back in 1906 than their is today.
As a horse owner, I would like to point out that horses create an enormous amount of excrement. I wonder how they handled all of it in the big cities way back when.
As several people have noted;
this footage is as fake, and contrived, as a Kamela Harris NASA children's video
"As a horse owner, I would like to point out that horses create an enormous amount of excrement. I wonder how they handled all of it in the big cities way back when."
I'm thinking that it's pretty much as they do today on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron (Michigan). "Street Sweepers" equipped with brooms, shovels and carts.
We visited a few years ago and I concluded that the pervasive "Eau de Equine" probably dominated every urban business district until the internal combustion engine replaced horse power.
Brett Simpson in "Why Cars Don’t Deserve the Right of Way/The simplest way to make roads safer and reduce police violence at the same time."
I prefer Bart Simpson: "Don't have a cow, man."
Shorter Atlantic: Something there is that doesn't love a car.
Hearing loss (especially above 8Khz) makes me an easy target for electric cars.
The first traffic light was installed in 1914, about eight years after this was filmed.
So whatever we think about this anarchist's paradise, what they thought about it was "We gotta get some order around here!"
The author of this piece obviously has a major bias problem. He had a preconceived idea of what he wanted to propose and then cherry picked stats to back up his personal opinion. "The United States has the highest number of traffic deaths per capita of all developed nations." The United States also has a very high per capita rate of personal vehicle ownership and daily driving. We also have many large, congested cities that have a large number of car accidents. It's really easy to write an article and cherry pick stats to back up your theory, but you're not presenting an accurate picture of the situation. That would require a tremendous amount of research and the pay for an writing an article like that wouldn't cover the expense of doing it right. I maintain that we can improve on the way that traffic stops are done, but I suspect that they do actually save lives. But this author has that typical, "Throw the baby out with the bath water" mentality.
KQED had an article about this video clip in 2018. It's title was, "San Francisco Death Trip: The Street Carnage of 1906."
"The main menace plying the city streets in the year of the Great Earthquake was not automotive. Though frequent collisions involving motorcars were reported, just seven people were reported killed by motor vehicles.
Seven others died in incidents involving trains (that count does not include the dozen or more railroad workers killed in the city's train yards during the year).
Twenty deaths involved horse-drawn vehicles that struck and killed bystanders or sometimes their own drivers.
But the real scourge for people venturing through San Francisco's boulevards was the streetcar. Sixty-one people were listed as dying in incidents involving the frequently overcrowded transit vehicles. People fell from the cars. They were run down crossing tracks. Many were fatally injured as they got on or off the cars."
https://www.kqed.org/news/11667830/san-franciscos-grisly-mobility-reality-1906-style
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