The pace of Market Street in 1906
The best way for me to describe this pace is to say it's how fast a horse walks. No, not gallops, or trots, but walks. It's about twice as fast as a person walks, and it's the pace that this video shows, about 4-5 miles per hour. A human, by the way, walks at about 2 miles per hour.
Of course horses, and people, can speed up, and occasionally in this video there are bursts of speed, the way that someone jogs a bit to hurry to catch a train, or the way that a horse picks up the pace to get out of the way of another vehicle. I don't know what the numbers are, but probably a burst to about ten miles an hour. I'm not talking about Seabiscuit or Roger Bannister here, I'm talking about ordinary horses, and ordinary people.
Like most people born in the 20th Century, mostly what I've known is the pace of a car, the pace of walking, or the pace of a bicycle, none of which are this pace. I discovered this pace for the first time in my life when I learned to jog, and would do a fifteen-minute mile pace, and nowadays I go this pace every morning when I ride my recumbent trike. I breeze past people walking, but I have to get out of the way of bicycles, and certainly cars! It's faster than walking, but I never have the sense that I used to have on a bicycle going faster, and not being able to navigate without it being an athletic event. At the pace that I go there's no danger that I'll run over a pedestrian, and I can easily stop for someone in a car who isn't looking.
As I watch the video, I'm fascinated how people easily move back and forth around each other, and can even accommodate vehicles going the wrong way down the street, or cars speeding up to pass (probably going as fast as ten miles per hour). This is a pace that doesn't require stoplights, or traffic cops. This is a pace that would allow you to be able to hop on a street car while it's moving, and go from walking at 2 miles per hour to riding at twice that.
This is the pace that people have been moving since the time they domesticated horses, and either rode on them or had them pull carts. It's a wonderful pace, and it sure beats walking, but it doesn't require you to stare directly ahead all of the time and never look around. It seems a shame that this pace not only went away, but was forgotten by most people, but that's true of a lot of things in history. I'd like to see it return.
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