Prior to the invention of the automobile, if a pedestrian walked onto a public street and was struck and killed by a vehicle, the pedestrian was 100% at fault unless the driver was negligent. Merely operating a vehicle in a normal manner was not negligence.
It has been understood since the construction of Pompeii at the latest, that pedestrians belong on sidewalks and vehicles in the road.
Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris was built in the 1600s with sidewalks.
All of the oldest photos from the 1800s of major cities show a separation of vehicles and pedestrians.
If you have access to a newspaper archive like I do you can run a search for jaywalking and sort by oldest result.
Most of the pushback to jaywalking laws was because they required crossing at corners, not the middle of the street.
People instinctively (wrongly) believed that crossing in the middle was safer. Statisticians know that corners are safer.
Fun fact: you were more likely to die being run over by a horse in New York City prior to the invention of the automobile than you are to be struck and killed by an automobile today.
Much MUCH more likely.
>Horses killed in other, more direct ways as well. As difficult as it may be to believe given their low speeds, horse-drawn vehicles were far deadlier than their modern counterparts. In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003; given the modern city’s greater population, this means the fatality rate per capita in the horse era was roughly 75 percent higher than today. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city’s fatality rate per auto in 1997.
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344 is a lot. In 2024, there were 252 auto-related fatalities (drivers, occupants, cyclists, and pedestrians) in NYC.
I once saw an article that in the 1800s there were over 150 fatalities per year in San Francisco due to street cars alone so I wager the increasing value of human life in the early 1900s also contributed to jaywalking laws.
Everyone just used to accept people dying left and right due to horses and trains.
But again, it WAS NOT a conspiracy to steal the streets from pedestrians.