There was a time, back in the automobile’s infancy, when cars and pedestrians shared the road equally and equitably—there’s even documentary proof of it. Filmed in San Francisco in 1905, with the great quake a few months away, A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire shows footage of cable cars, automobiles, horse-drawn buggies, and walkers making their way along the main thoroughfare of a city soon to be destroyed, with everyone and everything moving in the most orderly of (frighteningly chaotic) fashions.
After San Francisco was rebuilt, Market Street would become the most traffic-clogged roadway in the city, with pedestrians pushed to its margins.
It took 115 years for pedestrians to become ascendant again. In January 2020, all noncommercial motor vehicles were permanently barred from
