Critical Planning

This article presents a history of jitneys from the Gilded Age streets until their return to discourse among post-1970s transportation neoliberals. Transportation neoliberals were an intellectual set including professors, policymakers, consultants, and con men. They discovered the history of jitneys, which Southern Californians invented during a wartime slump in global commerce in 1914. Abolished in the U.S., jitneys remained in operation in crisis-prone cities like Manila and Harare. Selective memories of jitneys in an age of austere state budgets contributed to the trade’s return as a cheap, unregulated alternative to public transit. History was the tool that led jitneys, in the guise of Lyft and Uber, back into U.S. streets after the global financial crisis.