Existing comment:
"[It is] a jam; stages, carriages, cartmen, expressmen, pedestrians, all melted together in one agglomerate mess."
-- Description of Broadway, New York City, 1870
Traffic Jams and Mountains of Mail:
Urban intersections were free-for-alls at the end of the 1800s. Traffic signals had not been invented, and reckless drivers fought for the right-of-way. By 1900, 3 million horses and an assortment of wagons and trolleys clogged U.S. city streets. The postal service had to find ways to transport a growing volume of mail through cities and deliver the mail to its destinations. |