Phil,
I found the article below (Copyright © 1999-2000, David Zatz;
copyright © 2001-2004, Allpar LLC. All rights reserved.) interesting
on two levels: 1. It reiterates what I had read elsewhere that the
principal reason for the demise of the jitneys was the sudden high
insurance costs, and 2. It talks about most of the jitneys being
Chryslers, which *might* point to an active role played by a private
car company in the jitney market (today, Prius?).
Marcy
"Chrysler-based jitneys of San Franciscoby Mike Sealey
Just after World War II might be the best time to talk about San
Francisco's jitney service, which was closely related to the cab
industry and had many of the same links.
The word "jitney" means different things in different locations. In
San Francisco, a jitney was a privately-owned vehicle that covered a
fixed route, picking up and dropping off passengers much like a city
bus. An article in an unnamed SF newspaper dated May 3, 1950 opens
with: "The operators of San Francisco's 136 jitneys, which don't
conform to the dictionary definition..." Hmmm. Must've been a slow
news day if they felt the need to present THAT as if it were grounds
for a muckraking criminal investigation. The article continues with
the official definition: "According to the dictionary, a jitney has
two definitions: 1.-'A small coin, a nickel.' 2.-'A motor vehicle
that carries passengers for a fare of five cents.' But San
Francisco's jitneys charge a 15c fare on the Mission Street run, and
25c on the Third-st route to Hunters Point." (For comparison, a city-
run bus, streetcar or cable car cost a nickel at the time.)
Especially interesting is the name of the member of the local Board
of Supervisors who took issue with this departure from Webster's, one
Don Fazackerly... not sure what he was doing for his primary living
in 1950 - the Board of Supervisors was a low-paid part-time office at
the time - but I suspect he might have been selling cars, since he
became one of San Francisco's two Cadillac dealers in 1964. Wonder if
he was stirring up controversy to move some iron? Nah, an elected
public official wouldn't do that, would he? Fazackerly died about
1975 or so.
Anyway, most of SF's jitneys were long-wheelbase Chrysler products.
Probably over half of these were DeSotos sold by James F. Waters, but
local Dodge distributor J. E. French got into the game as well, and
there were also a few LWB Chrysler Windsors working Mission Street,
plus at least one guy in a Cadillac. I don't remember any V8s amongst
the MoPar jitney fleet, but don't remember well enough to say with
certainty there never were any - I was pretty young when the last of
these was retired. Certainly the vast majority were flathead sixes
backed by one variation or another of Fluid Drive. They had a series
of amber lights above the windshield on the passenger side, to let
potential fares know whether or not a seat was available, and were
painted in a variety of colors, including factory colors not always
seen on a limousine. One '54 DeSoto Powermaster in the factory shade
of root-beer brown stuck in my mind, since this was a longer and much
higher-mileage version of my grandmother's car.
Most competing medium-price makes left the long-wheelbase market
before World War II, assuming they were ever in that market at all.
Only Chrysler Corporation stayed in this market in a factory-built
offering. There were no long wheelbase Plymouths from the factory
after the war (at least domestically), but Dodge seems to have kept a
long wheelbase offering in the catalog through 1952, while DeSoto and
Chrysler soldiered on through the end of the 1954 model year. I
assume most of the more workaday long wheelbase models were purchased
for this kind of service, and that Chrysler stayed with this market
as long as it did by what passed for popular demand in jitney circles.
After 1954, the jitney operators patched their obsolete vehicles
together as best they could and kept them on the street as long as
they could. It's a shame the LWB Plymouth Coronado was not offered
here, as I suspect SF jitney operators would've snapped them up. At
least one operator switched to a first-generation Ford Econoline with
passenger seats, but most SF jitney operators stayed with their
existing Chrysler products, holding out until Chrysler got back to
building something they could use... which they eventually did in
1964 with the introduction of the Dodge A100 Sportsman passenger van.
This text is from the December 11, 1964 San Francisco News-Call-
Bulletin:
San Francisco's jitney buses are getting a new look. A 50 year old
institution, the service along Mission Street is converting to
minibuses from the big limousines which have long been a favorite
form of transportation for thousands of riders daily...
The Dodge A100 and later B100 passenger vans remained the vehicle of
choice among jitney operators for a number of years, but high
insurance costs and the lack of new blood to replace the old-timers
eventually killed off most of San Francisco's jitneys. Today, only
one jitney operator remains in business, against stiff odds. He
operates a couple of old RVs, an Argosy and an Itasca, converted to
seat twenty to twenty-four passengers. Whether these old workhorses
are on Dodge chassis is not known, but I would not be surprised.
Copyright © 1999-2000, David Zatz; copyright © 2001-2004, Allpar LLC.
All rights reserved. Recommend this page! "
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