For a nice Saturday morning post, David over at Greater Greater Washington points to a great video from San Francisco, circa 1905.  The video is shot from a cable car traveling down Market Street, San Francisco’s great axial street.  The clock tower of the Ferry Building terminates the view, all while pedestrians, horses, cars, streetcars, and just about every other mode of transport share in the controlled chaos of a street where all modes share space.

Our streets weren’t always so compartmentalized, with segregated spaces for cars, pedestrians, bikes, and so on.  David gives a hat tip to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for the video, where the free-market libertarians posting the comments attribute the resulting order to the power of markets to organize themselves.

Several, however, note the limitations of such an example as a case for removing all traffic restrictions and separations – changes in technology, mass, speed, and so on – as well as the fact that managed and planned order can indeed be more efficient than this type of organic order.  Another notes that some of the chaos may not have been completely authentic:

I saw this video before, with a commentator talking alongside it. The car that crosses the tracks and is barely missed by the streetcar is actually part of the filming team, asked to do that to keep things interesting. If you pay attention, you see him cutting accross [sic] many times, actually crisscrossing in front of the streetcar.

Yet another commenter points to an almost exact re-creation of the same video from 2005, this time making use of travel along the F-Market streetcar line.

The arrangement of street space, obviously, has changed.  So has San Francisco’s urban fabric, now complete with skyscrapers.  The older video just predates the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, a major factor in re-shaping San Francisco’s urban form.  The comparison between the two is stark, both for the things that have changed, as well as for the things that have not.

Back at GGW, commenter Lance throws a few barbs about overhead wires obstructing vistas.  It’s worth noting that DC’s current streetcar plan does not have any long stretches of track along the main vista avenues, such as Pennsylvania Ave.  Under the idea of a hybrid solution and careful routing, we might not even need wires to cross those main vistas, yet alone run along them. It’s also worth noting that San Francisco’s wires in the 2005 video are not just for streetcars, but also electric trolley buses – a few of them are seen in the video itself.  Since trolley buses do not run on steel rails, they require two wires to act as a ground.