How the Auto Industry Invented the Crime of Crossing the Street

It's Saturday, October third. I jaywalk. I do it all the time. If I'm walking in San Francisco and I need to cross the street and there are no cars coming, I cross. I have done this my entire life. And for my entire life, the word for what I was doing was jaywalking.

I never questioned it. It just meant crossing the street wrong. Same category as running a red light or speeding. Basic traffic law. Common sense.

Then I learned two things. The first is that the word "jay" in jaywalking means idiot. Early 1900s Midwestern slang for a rube, a hayseed, someone from the sticks who doesn't know how to behave in a city. When you called someone a jaywalker, you were calling them a dumb hick who couldn't figure out how to cross a street.

The second thing is worse. Jaywalking is not a law that emerged naturally because cars got faster and somebody had to regulate pedestrians. It was invented. Deliberately. By the auto industry. In a coordinated campaign in the 1920s, car manufacturers, dealers, oil companies, and auto clubs — they called themselves "Motordom" — redefined who owned American streets. Before that campaign, if a car hit a person, the driver was at fault. After it, the pedestrian was at fault. They did it so successfully that a hundred years later, almost nobody knows it happened.

Before the 1920s, city streets looked nothing like they do now. They were public space. Pedestrians walked anywhere. Kids played in the street. Pushcart vendors set up shop. Horse-drawn carriages, streetcars, bicycles, all sharing the same surface: no lanes, no lights, no crosswalks. The car was the newcomer, and the car yielded.

"If you were going to do something like drive an automobile, it was on you, the driver, to watch out for people walking everywhere," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia who wrote the book on this — it's called Fighting Traffic. "The car was the newcomer and the car was supposed to conform."

When cars did hit people — and as cars got faster, they hit a lot of people — judges consistently blamed the driver. The reasoning was simple: you brought a heavy, dangerous machine into a shared public space. You're responsible for what it does.

In the early 1920s, newspapers called automobiles "death cars." Cartoonists drew them as the Grim Reaper. Cities built monuments to children killed in traffic. Mothers who lost kids to cars were called "white star mothers," recognized publicly the way we recognize the families of fallen soldiers.

In 1923, the backlash peaked. In Cincinnati, 42,000 residents signed a petition for a ballot initiative that would require every car in the city to be fitted with a mechanical governor capping its speed at 25 miles per hour. Auto dealers panicked. They formed an opposition group, sent letters to every car owner in the city, ran ads about "personal freedom," and defeated the measure.

The close call terrified the industry. If they didn't act, more cities would follow Cincinnati. The car as a mass-market product was not inevitable. It could be regulated into a niche. So Motordom launched a campaign.

The campaign had three parts: change the law, change the news, and change what people thought was normal.

The legal part was the most straightforward. In 1928, auto industry groups took control of a series of meetings convened by Herbert Hoover, who was then Secretary of Commerce. The product of those meetings was the Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance — a template traffic code cities could adopt. It was largely based on laws already passed in Los Angeles in 1925, drafted by the auto lobby. The key provision: pedestrians would cross only at crosswalks and only at right angles. That one sentence is the foundation of almost every jaywalking law still on the books.

The media part was more cynical. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce set up a free wire service for newspapers. A reporter in any city could send in the basic facts of a car accident and get back a complete, ready-to-print article. Those articles, written by the auto industry, blamed pedestrians. Norton says the shift was sudden: in 1923, newspaper coverage uniformly blamed drivers. By late 1924, they were all blaming jaywalking.

The cultural part was the most sophisticated. The industry needed a word that made walking in the street sound stupid. They had tried "reckless pedestrian" and newspapers mocked it. Then they landed on jaywalker. "Jay" was already an insult; they took an existing slur and aimed it at anyone who walked in the street. They staged safety parades where actors dressed as clowns or in old-fashioned clothes were rammed repeatedly by a slow-moving Model T — the message being that walking in the street was something only backwards people did. AAA took over school safety curriculums, teaching a generation of kids that the street wasn't theirs. Police were instructed to publicly shame jaywalkers by shouting at them instead of quietly fining them. The goal, as one auto club president put it, was that "the ridicule of their fellow citizens is far more effective than any other means."

It worked. By the 1930s, the idea that streets were for cars and pedestrians were allowed on them only under specific, regulated conditions was fully naturalized. A behavior humans had done for thousands of years — walking across open ground — had been recategorized as a crime in less than two decades.

The city that invented jaywalking was Kansas City. The first known use of the word appeared in a Kansas City Star cartoon on April 30, 1911. The first anti-jaywalking ordinance passed later that year. The first person arrested was a guy named Samuel Hebel, caught at 10th and Main in January 1912. Kansas City exported the idea to the country.

In 2021, Kansas City became the first major city in the United States to completely repeal its jaywalking ban. The city council voted unanimously to strike it from the code. Four years later, New York City followed, legalizing jaywalking in February 2025. In August of this year, 2026, the California legislature passed a bill ending the practice of jailing people over jaywalking tickets. The arc from invention to repeal took about a hundred and ten years.

Most of the rules we live by feel like they were always there. Gravity was always there. Jaywalking was a decision. A group of companies with a product to sell looked at the problem — people kept walking in the street and cars kept hitting them — and instead of slowing the cars down, they made the walking illegal. Then they gave the crime a name designed to humiliate you for doing it. For a hundred years, almost nobody remembered that it had ever been any other way.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.