Jitneys

Jitneys have long operated in the space between sanctioned public transportation and the private automobile. Jitneys take many forms: vans, cars, shared taxis, minibuses, buses, and even motorcycles. They are operated in numerous ways: semi-fixed routes, fixed routes with variable stops, and complete passenger control over pickups and drop-offs. Initially, the 5-cent fare (known as a “jitney”) was the sole distinguishing feature of the services, but today they often work in cooperative fleets and are highly organized. A brief history of jitneys and two cases are presented here to provide an overview of issues associated with these services.

The precise dates and origins of jitney services are fuzzy. In the United States, the New York Times first mentioned the rapid proliferation of jitney services across the country in a January 31, 1915, article titled, “‘Jitney's Bus Is Taking Many Cities by Storm.” Many accounts trace the origin of jitneys to southern and western cities in North America—most likely somewhere in California—in about 1914, and attribute its development to high levels of unemployment, the novelty of riding in a car, the availability of inexpensive secondhand cars, and advertisements in local newspapers.

Both historically and currently, labor issues with conventional transit have led to increases in jitney operations. For instance, a 1913 streetcar strike in Phoenix created an opportunity for jitney operators to establish their burgeoning service without competition, and a 1982 transit workers strike in New York City spurred the creation of modern jitney fleets in the city. In the early years, municipalities in the United States and Canada worked hard to curb the creep of jitneys by implementing both reasonable and onerous regulations to protect existing streetcar monopolies and union-organized labor. While such reforms reduced the number of jitneys legally operating, the services remained popular with the public for a variety of reasons. In comparison to fixed-route transit systems, jitneys offered the allure of point-to-point flexibility as paved roads became ubiquitous and automobile transportation became predominant during the Interwar period.

Even though mass motorization dominated North American transport for the last 100 years, jitneys never fully receded into the annals of transportation lore. Unlike capital-intensive, rail-based transportation, jitneys merely require a comparatively inexpensive vehicle and a driver, keeping the barriers to entry for jitney operations relatively minimal.

Jitneys have found eager adopters within segments of urban society. The primary users are those unable to purchase cars or whom public transit serves poorly, namely new immigrants. Over the last 100 years, Americans' travel habits have changed, but jitneys have retooled along with them. These services have become more organized and [Page 858]formalized to keep up with the times and to appeal to a new base of consumers. The international adoption of jitneys matches the North American experience, where, once again, the services have grown up in response to high levels of unemployment, declining or nonexistent public transportation, the changing spatial structure of cities, an influx of automobiles, and vast networks of paved roads.

The international context varies considerably from city to city and country to country, but this entry will showcase commonalities by highlighting three key international examples from South Africa, Mexico, and Peru, and two cases from the United States, Chicago and New York. While the root causes of jitney growth differ in the international context—apartheid in Cape Town, insolvency in Lima, and fiscal constraints combined with prodigious road-building in Mexico City—the cases share one key characteristic: the public sector or a private-public transportation monopoly failed to meet the demand for transportation services. Across all cases, it is clear that jitneys emerged when sanctioned providers neglected or lacked the wherewithal to satisfy the public-transportation-riding public.

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