The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking" - Vox:
In some cities — Los Angeles, for instance — police ticket tens of thousands of pedestrians annually for jaywalking, with fines of up to $250.
To most people, this seems part of the basic nature of roads. But
it's actually the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led
by auto groups and manufacturers that redefined who owned the city
street.
"In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers' job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them," says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. "But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it's your fault if you get hit."
One of the keys to this shift was the creation of the crime of jaywalking. Here's a history of how that happened.