Do you know if back in the 19th century if there was ever horse and buggy rush-hour (stop and go) traffic? ?

Question

Do you know if back in the 19th century if there was ever horse and buggy rush-hour (stop and go) traffic? ?

Answer 1

Interesting question!

I don't know, but I doubt it. Maybe busy times, but not a regular daily rush hour. Reasons:

1. We never read about it in books from that time - it has been mentioned in many 20th century books re automobiles, so I would expect to see it in books from the 1800s if it had existed then.

2. Rush hour is caused by everyone going back and forth between home and work. In the 1800s, most working people didn't have horse and buggies - they rode horses or they walked, I would think. They lived close to work - not miles away, the way we do today.

3. And fewer people worked in cities. No high rise office buildings, no office parks, much less city businesses to work at. Most people stayed on their farms or worked on the farms of others. Going into town wasn't a daily thing.

It's possible that there was some stop-and-go traffic for church or evening concerts and theatre.

Answer 2

New York City was flat congested, horse and buggy traffic, horse pulled trolleys rolling down major streets.  Big delivery wagons pulled by teams of Clydesdale's and Morgans rumbling along.  Yeah, I would say rush hour and probably duplicated in every major city.  They had traffic cops.

Read "Time and Again"  fascinating novel about life in NY in the 1880's.  

Answer 3

I don't know the answer to this, although I expect the answer is Yes.

Traffic in London during the rush hour currently moves at the same speed it did at the turn of the 20th century

I don't remember where I heard that.

Answer 4

Probably not, as horses were very expensive.  You're average sod-buster (I'm thinking the American west) could not afford one, but would have had a mule instead.  (Couldn't you have gotten hung for horse-stealing, back then?) The main use of 'beasts of burden' was for farm work, not transportation. When the industrial era began in the late 19th century, most people would have got to work by public transit or even on foot, as you can see in many older industrial cities - where housing is located very close to factories.  Horses were confined to three principal uses:  Delivering goods (eg., milk truck left milk at homes, morning), transportation between cities (eg., stagecoach), or by the well-off within the city.