No doubt each of us has had to address this question from some acquaintance or our wife or daughters. Here's the best response I've ever seen, and it is amazing!


105 YEAR OLD FILM CLIP – SAN FRANCISCO

This film was "lost" for many years. It was the first 35mm film ever that has come to light. It was taken by camera mounted on the front of a cable car as it`s traveling down the street.
You feel as if your really there, standing at the front looking down the street, amazing.
A piece of historic film.The number of automobiles is staggering for 1906. The clock tower at the end of Market Street at the Embarcadero wharf is still there.
This film, originally thought to be from 1905 until David Kiehn with the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum figured out exactly when it was shot.
From New York trade papers announcing the film showing to the wet streets from recent heavy rainfall & shadows indicating time of year & actual weather and conditions on historical record, even when the cars were registered (he even knows who owned them and when the plates were issued!).. It was filmed only four days before the Great California Earthquake of April 18th 1906 and shipped by train to NY for processing. Amazing, but true!.
This is a fascinating movie. A camera on the front of a street car 107 years ago. Some of the cars had the steering wheels on the right side, I wonder when they standardized on the left?
Sure was still a lot of horse drawn vehicles in use. Mass transit looked like the way to get around. Looks like everybody had the right of way.
Perhaps the oldest "home movie" that you will ever see!

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=NINOxRxze9k

That was really cool. I had to call my wife in who tolerates my train habit and even she said that was neat and watched for a little bit.

Steve

if youve seen some chinese traffic vid today , no stoplights, everyone weaves around everybody else, bikes cars whatever at an intersection, amazing no accidents.

The Library of Congress has quite a few short railroad films in its American Memory Collection:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html

That's "unreal"! Incredible footage - while watching, listening to the music background, I had to hop back to RYPN to see if this was "fake" footage.

First it was the background music chosen, then I started to notice how rarely a second or two went by before something forced it's way into the scene. An opening - let's put a car in that space cutting across the cable car.

Absolutely amazing.

As a reference, an incredibly entertaining one at that, enjoy a "VFX Breakdown" clip from HBO's "Boardwalk Empire":

http://youtu.be/aFHKwaW4Um8

/Mitch

For the definitive version of the "Cable Car Down Market Street", order the DVD from today's iteration of the Market Street Ry. at "streetcar.org". According to the "back story", the only reason why the film survived was that it had been sent to New York for processing, and was on a train when the earthquake hit. One can imagine the train stopping at some town along the way, and the express messenger reading "San Francisco in Ruins!" on a newspaper bundle being loaded into his car. All the while, the package with the film is safe in his care.

Getting back to the original question: One of the first times I took the woman who is now my wife on a "date", we went out to the California Poppy Reserve near Lancaster. On the way, we visited Vasquez Rocks, used as a location for everything from "B-Westerns" to Star Trek episodes. Then we headed for the flower fields, but at one point I pulled off the road, stopped the car in a cloud of dust, grabbed my camera and got some photos of a Southern Pacific freight. Some women would have said, "Have you lost your mind? Why the heck are we stopping here?" etc. Not my lady, she didn't bat an eye, just waited for me to come back and resume our trek to the poppy patch. We've been married for almost 14 years now.

The Library of Congress at loc.gov also has frame by frame commentary and another movie, taken from the front of a Market St. horse car a few days after the earthquake. Another movie of the same route was taken from the front of a Municipal Rwy. trolley car in Apr., 2006. I don't know how to buy or view that one. I heard that there is even a split screen version combining the cable and trolley movies!

We've been married over 51 years now and went together for five years before we got married. My wife has ridden fantrips, ridden in cabs (4960, Mississippian 76, 1522) we have climbed around on dead engines back in the late '50s-early '60s, prowled around in the IC roundhouse in Carbondale,IL full of live engines and chased many trips. We've sat in the heat for what seemed like hours waiting for steam trips and God Love her, she's been a trouper the whole time. We chased the 11 on the Kentucky and Tennessee and prowled around the Brimstone on our honeymoon. She's been teased by the best, such as Doyle and Steve.
I've been a lucky guy!

When was the notion of crossing a street at a corner or the concept of a crosswalk developed?

The idea of "crosswalks" for pedestrians is discussed in great detail by Peter D. Norton in Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The move to establish the streets as a place for automobiles, with pedestrians restricted to sidewalks and crosswalks dates back to the 1920s. The term "jaywalking" was reportedly derived from the use of "jay" as a pejorative term for "hayseeds" or "country bumpkins" who were supposedly totally clueless as to how to behave in the city.

Is that an early 20th century view of the "Wild West"?
The antics of other road users, particularly those with horses and carts, leaves me staggered.
I wonder what the fatality statistics would be. Also, the stress levels of the poor drivers.
Cheers, Bob

This clip reminds me of a conversation I once had with a state senator regarding a state-wide tourist rail network or system I tried to propose years ago in West Virginia (obviously far back enough that insurance costs and the intransigence of a certain eastern carrier weren't issues).

In the conversation, he recalled growing up in Capon Bridge, W.Va., and while he was a boy, that a trip by horse and wagon to Winchester, Va. took a whole day, a really long day, leaving early in the morning and not arriving in Winchester until after dark, all this for a distance of about 20 miles or so. When they got to Winchester, they would put the horses up in a stable, with the wagon being in a wagon yard. Everybody would go to sleep in a hotel, and the following day they would sell what they had brought in the wagon. This would be in the morning, again early. They would use the money from what had been sold to buy things in Winchester you couldn't get in Great Cacapon, including store candy. This senator also recalled what it was like the first time he saw a train, coming into the stone station that is still there today at Kent & Picadelly streets; he said that steam locomotive scared him so much he tried to become part of the station wall! The trip back was again a long one, and again they would not get back to the farm until after dark.

This gentlemen mentioned that some other farmers in his area would go to Winchester with a $20 bill in their pocket, and they would sleep in the wagon in the wagon yard. He said if possible, they wanted to come home with the same $20 bill.

All of this tells us much about how hard money was to come by back then, and it also tells us how slow non-powered travel was, too. The railroad would change all that, taking us away from travel that had been at the same pace since the days of the ancient Greeks, and placing us on the path to the pace of travel we have now, both for better and for worse.

A long time Federal senator, the famous Robert Byrd, was also a fairly accomplished fiddle player, a skill he had used for things like wedding entertainment when he was very young, and which helped him on the campaign trail later. In 1978 he recorded an album of old-time tunes, and one of them, "Wish I'd Stayed in the Wagon Yard," referred to this bit about the farmer and the long ride to town. I won't talk politics here, but simply note that we also have a musician of the old school recalling the wagon yard and the novelty of electric lighting from way back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1UD9B9E-6s

its a real clip, I recall seeing it on 8mm from a local library collection in Ft Wayne.
You could borrow films for a week, 8mm.

They had the New York City Subway shot brand new just like this.

This is the early heyday of films and the silent theatre films were just coming in.

Another story about the San Francisco 1906 film: a sharp-eyed viewer noted that the same touring car shows up a number of times. One explanation was that there weren't that many "gas buggies" in the City and the film maker wanted it to seem like there were more cars in town than really were.