A couple days before the San Francisco Earthquate the Mile’s brothers put a movie camera on a trolley (infamous for their third rails) and shot a nine minute movie of a leisurely non-stop trip down Market street. Four days later all of the city would be lying in heaps of rubble with 200,000 homeless. You can see the video here and marvel at the orderly chaos of horses, cars, wagons, bicyclists and pedestrians meandering in and out of each other’s ways in the day’s before there were any proscriptions against jay walking.
It reminds me of the short video I took of city traffic from high above the streets of Shanghai last summer.
