WAY BEFORE UBER

On July 1, 1914, an enterprising motorist named L.P. Draper picked up a man waiting at a streetcar stop in Los Angeles, took him a short distance in his Ford Model T, and charged him a nickel for the ride. At the time, streetcars in most American cities had a flat fare of five cents, so Draper’s passenger was simply paying the going rate. Draper had invented a new model for urban transport: offering short rides in private cars for a flat fare. Draper had determined that this was entirely legal, provided he had a chauffeur’s license, which was easily obtained from the city authorities.

Once word got around, a few other drivers in Los Angeles began doing the same thing. Cars offering rides in this way came to be known as jitneys, after a slang term for nickel. Some drivers picked up a few riders while driving to or from their places of work. But an economic slowdown, which had begun in 1913, made operating a jitney an attractive option for anyone who had lost their job but owned a car and wanted a quick way to make a little money. A jitney driver, often in a Ford Model T, would typically cruise the main street of a city, looking for three or four passengers to ferry to or from the central business district.

At first, the phenomenon was limited to southern California. But the jitney craze spread rapidly as newspapers across America wrote about it, instantly prompting drivers and riders in new cities to try it. In Kansas City, for example, the number of jitneys went from zero to 200 in two weeks, carrying 25,000 passengers a day — and twice that number two weeks later. By the summer of 1915 there were 62,000 jitneys operating in cities across the U.S. One contemporary