What was the traffic on the streets of San Francisco in 1906. Real video in color!

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Order on the brink of chaos – probably this is how you can call what you will see in this video. The NASS YouTube channel, leveraging the extensive Prelinger Archives archives of unique early-to-mid-century films, published a video of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco. The listing was made on April 14, 1906, four days before the earthquake and major fires in the city that destroyed 80% of the buildings.

A movie camera mounted on the front of the funicular (even then this transportation was the hallmark of San Francisco), films a journey from the point between 8th and 9th Street East to the famous Ferry Building. In the new version of the video, the frame rate has been increased to 60 frames per second, the resolution has been increased to HD and the brightness and clarity have also been improved.

Along with video colorization and CGI polishing, as well as a well-chosen soundtrack, the image is incredibly realistic – although the authors emphasize that the above was added for atmosphere and isn’t entirely historically accurate. Whatever it was, we’re watching a video that recently turned 116, and it’s just incredible.

The movement is right hand, but almost all cars are right hand drive. It would be inconvenient when overtaking if they were executed, as is the case now. But we don’t see anything like that – cars (of which there are many, many already!) Tackle along the street in an almost random order, and horse carts (there are still quite a few), bicycles and pedestrians move the same way across the roadway .

Relative order is the trams, as well as … trolleybuses (!), which run perpendicular to the trams. For all 12 minutes that the video is on, it’s impossible to get rid of the feeling that an accident is about to happen. But the situation is saved by the fact that there are practically no speeds: all participants move at the speed of a pedestrian or slightly faster. For comparison, here’s a video of the same route, but in the opposite direction, filmed about 30 years later. Horses disappeared, speeds increased, clear rules and… traffic lights appeared on the street.

  • The first gas traffic light appeared in London in 1868, electric ones were just installed in the US in 1914, starting in Cleveland, and they came to us in 1930, the first was installed in Leningrad.
  • “Behind the wheel” can be read in Odnoklassniki.

Video: Youtube / NASS

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