Mike Upchurch
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2024
11:52 · 1.6M views · Jan 6, 2014
A sound-designed restoration of the Miles brothers' 1906 film shot from a cable car down Market Street in San Francisco, four days before the earthquake. It shows streetcars, horse carts, cars and pedestrians mixing freely.
Cited in street-safety and self-driving threads as a picture of chaotic, shared streets before cars dominated.
4 comments from Hacker News
It's interesting to watch this video of San Francisco's Market street from 1906: this video Cars travel at walking pace, and cars, streetcars, horses, etc all coexist -- pedestrians seem to cross the street at will, not following any signals or staying in crosswalks. I think the reason this chaotic system works (aside from the lower speeds) is because street users expect the chaos, no one relies on a traffic signal to tell them when it's safe to cross, they know that they have to pay attention or they'll be run over (or will run over someone else).
>Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. This is not true and there are numerous counter-examples. City streets have always been dangerous for pedestrians and notable illustrations of this are the separate gates at city entrances for vehicles (pulled by beasts of burden of course) and pedestrians and the construction of sidewalks and crosswalks one example of which I've seen in person is the civil engineering of Pompeii where pedestrians were segregated from road traffic over two thousand years ago. [LINK] Another example is the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. Completed in the early 1600s it was built with wide sidewalks to keep pedestrians out of the road. [LINK] Oldest photograph of London: [LINK] Amsterdam, 1891: [LINK] What do you see? Sidewalks. In various paintings and engravings of city scenes from the 1600s and 1700s a common theme emerges: every area that could afford them built sidewalks and pedestrians were segregated from road traffic. Raucous examples of people teeming in the streets in similar works seem to be trying to depict scenes of anarchy or poor slums. Another is the fact that numerous Roman emperors banned carriages from city streets during daylight (both for safety and noise pollution reasons) with varying degrees of success. That was much easier when you had an army of slaves to carry goods into the city. One glaring expression of the dangers of pre-automobile urban stre
Reminds me of the video "A Trip Down Market Street" (in San Francisco, 1906, right before the earthquake) [1]. This comment on the video says it all: "The good old days when kids use to play in traffic lol". All the jaywalking. Look how relaxed people are. No smartphones. Its distasteful however how some people seem to break traffic laws. Especially speeding. A road at an elementary school nearby which I regularly pass enforces 30 km/h. People drive at least 55 if not 60 (the default is 50). The gains from such behaviour are minuscule, if any. Even the gains of driving 150 instead of 130 for 2 hrs are minor. [1] this video
> Let's hope we don't end up with an even more > pedestrian hostile world than what we have already. Unless there's a cultural sea change, you can bet on it worsening. If you take presentism out of the equation, what we have now - ie: most roads off limits to humans due to giant metal death machines - is insane. this video