University of Virginia engineering professor Peter Norton has documented a century-long conflict between motorists and pedestrians for control over city streets.
When the automobile was invented, Norton notes, it was an intruder. States a profile of Norton in the University of Virginia News:
Early in the 20th century, pedestrians claimed the right of way on country roads and city streets, sharing the public space with children at play, domestic animals, carts, vendors, carriages and streetcars. … There was a clash of cultures, particularly in the cities, between residents who used the streets as an extension of their homes, chatting with neighbors and watching their children at play, and drivers of the newfangled vehicles who wanted to travel quickly from one place to another.
Eventually, motorists gained the upper hand in the battle for right of way. By 1930, the pejorative term “jaywalker” was routinely applied to pedestrians engaging in once-uncontroversial practices. “By then most people agreed (readily or grudgingly) that streets are chiefly motor thoroughfares,” Norton wrote in “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street.”
But the clash continues. Norton sees modern-day activists carrying on the fight by advocating bike paths and bike lanes, traffic-calming measures in residential areas, and pedestrian malls, which ban cars and reclaim the street as public space for strolling, street performers, sidewalk cafes and vendors selling their wares from carts.
