While you know what jaywalking is, did you ever wonder about where the term came from, or why it describes improperly crossing a street? The term “jaywalking” didn’t exist in our lexicon before automobiles started to grow more popular in the early 1900s in the U.S. Before that time, pedestrians shared the city streets with horses, carriages and other forms of transportation. Despite this, fatal accidents were a rare occurrence.
But with the introduction of automobiles into the mix, crashes became increasingly deadly. In the 1920’s, The Detroit News reported that 60 percent of those killed in automobile accidents were under the age of 9, and by the end of the decade there had been over 250,000 confirmed automobile-related deaths in the US.
As you may imagine, urban residents greeted the widely reported dangers associated with automobiles with a great deal of resentment to this new form of transportation. Civil groups throughout the U.S. rallied against the onslaught of what they viewed to be unnecessary deaths caused by the “pleasure cars” of the wealthy. Residents of Cincinnati even created a petition to pass legislation to limit the speed of all automobiles driven in the city to a maximum of 25 mph, which was signed by over 40,000 people but, ultimately, failed to become a law.
Although Cincinnati’s initiative to restrict car speeds was unsuccessful, what it did accomplish was focusing national attention on poor driving. This was hardly the first-time critics attacked American motorists for the way they drove. Almost 20 years before in Junction City, Kansas, a reporter for the Junction City Union wrote a scathing article where he used the common slang term, “jay” which at the time meant an uneducated person, to create a new insult “jay-driver.”
With all the bad press surrounding cars, the nation’s automobile organizations decided they had to fight back. They converted the earlier term, “jay-driver,” into “jay-walker” to describe someone who doesn’t know how to cross the street properly. They widely promoted the new word, along with the dangers of jay-walking. The American Automobile Association (AAA) sponsored educational programs about proper pedestrian safety to school children. One automobile proponent was E. B. Lefferts, the head of the Automobile Club of Southern California, who called on police officers to shame jay-walkers publicly.
Over time, between the education programs and public ridicule, people changed the way they crossed the street. And while people may no longer refer to a bad driver as a “jay-driver,” the term “jay-walking” has gained a permanent place in our vocabulary.
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