Why did the jitney die and Atlantic City live?

A short history of the jitney

In late 1914, a handful of out-of-work drivers in Los Angeles started running their own cars along the streetcar lines and charging a nickel a head. The word "jitney" was slang for a nickel, so the name stuck to the cars. Within a year there were something like 700 of them in LA, moving 150,000 people a day. The craze jumped to dozens of cities inside a few months. Then the streetcar companies leaned on the city councils, the rules tightened, and by the early 1920s the jitney was mostly gone. Ridesharing before ridesharing, choked out by the incumbents. Roll credits.

That's the standard version, and it's not wrong. But read the same story from inside a parking company and a different question starts to nag: why was it so easy?

The streetcar lobby was powerful, sure. Powerful lobbies fail all the time. The jitney had riders, momentum, and a price the streetcar couldn't beat. So what made it collapse in a matter of months in city after city, when other upstart industries have survived far worse?

Land.

The streetcar owned rails in the ground, a car barn to sleep in, a right of way nobody could take on a whim. The jitney owned a car. Everything else it needed, the curb it loaded at, the corner it idled on, the stretch of street it cruised for fares, belonged to the city. Its entire business ran on space it was only borrowing. Was the vehicle ever really the weak part? Or was it the ground under it?

The record leans one way. Cities didn't outlaw the car. They required bonds and liability insurance, charged license fees, forced fixed routes, and restricted where jitneys could stand and pick up near the streetcar stops they fed on. Salt Lake City passed one ordinance in the spring of 1915 and within days a fleet of about forty jitneys dropped to two. San Francisco's jitneys fell apart in 1917 when the insurers stopped covering them. Every lever that worked was a lever on space and standing, not on the automobile itself. You cannot easily push a streetcar off rails it owns. You can absolutely push a car off a curb it was borrowing.

The one that survived

One jitney operation from that 1915 wave is still running. Atlantic City. Same year, same idea, still on the road in 2026. The Atlantic City drivers stopped being a swarm and became an association, with fixed terminals and a home base they controlled. They have a yard, a real fleet, even an app now. Coincidence that the one survivor is the one that got a place of its own? Maybe. It's a pattern of one. But it's a striking one.

We're back again

Which raises the question we actually spend our days on: is it happening again?

Microtransit, AVs, rideshare, and carshare fleets are jitneys with routing software. Same demand-responsive model, same flexible pickup, same appeal to riders the fixed-route bus never served well. And often the same posture toward space: show up, run the routes, stage wherever there's room, and quietly bet that nobody makes you move. A robotaxi doesn't evaporate between rides. A microtransit van doesn't fold up at 2am. It goes somewhere and sits, for hours, every single night. If that somewhere is a gas station apron, a borrowed corner of a public garage, or a block the operator doesn't control, how different is that, really, from 1915?

If you run a fleet, you already know the routes are the easy part. The question that shows up late, usually after it's already a problem, is where the vehicles go when they aren't moving. Where they stage between shifts. Where they charge overnight. Where they wait out the dead middle of the day. If you own commercial real estate, it's the same question from the other side: what does it mean that this demand is out there hunting for ground, not for retail tenants and not for a customer at a counter?

What this means for mobility

For mobility fleets the question gets bigger, and it changes shape. The answer isn't a curb anymore, and it isn't even just a lot. It's connected infrastructure. And, perhaps a shared one. An association of competitors even.

Of course, there are differences between 1915 and now. The jitney needed a curb. Today's fleets need ground that's wired in, and the fleets treating that as an afterthought are making the jitney's bet with more expensive vehicles.

The jitney had the demand, the flexibility, and, a century early, basically the product. Whether the missing piece was really a square of ground it could count on is a fair thing to debate. But a hundred and eleven years later, the only one still running is the one that found a place to wait.