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jordanb 5 hours ago

> Just because they invented cars doesn't mean you stop jogging.

They literally made it a crime to walk down the street.

bombcar 5 hours ago | parent [-]

across the street, no?

It's also a crime to jog on the railroad tracks.

nunez an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Down the street also.

"Fighting Traffic" by Peter D. Norton talks about this at length.

The suburbs didn't exist when automobiles hit the market. Most people lived in cities because that's where the jobs were and transportation (outside of whatever public transportation options the cities provided) was limited. Kids and adults used the streets freely (which were for horses, though they were widened as automobiles started growing in popularity).

This changed as cars killed kids (and adults) who didn't know that cars were much faster than cars and didn't react in time. Traffic deaths were so numerous, cities invested lots of money in "safety parades" that were kind of gruesome, actually (like showing tombstones of the future deceased). [^0] Jaywalking was a crime that was invented to deal with exactly this phenomenon.

People fought HARD to keep the streets free (where else are kids going to play). People lost that battle, as we know.

[^0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-10/how-citie...

jordanb 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Prior to cars walking anywhere in any street was completely normal. You can watch movies filmed before the 1920s and city streets are full of people walking around or congregating.

If a wagon or trolley hit someone that was considered the fault of the driver, every time.

When cars started arriving and being driven around by people who were wreckless and bad at it, you started getting manufacturers and "motorists" lobbying for the concept and laws around jay-walking. Even the word was a way to delegitimize what used to be normal. "Jay" was negative slang for country-person (think red-neck). The idea was "modern city people stay out of the streets!"

beeflet 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If it's a crime to jog on railroad tracks, and the avalibility of rail makes it so that everything you need is only accessible by rail, I conclude that rail prevents you from jogging.

bombcar 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm sorry for all the people who lived in my original SimCity towns. They must have been nearly spherical.