This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If you live in an American city and you walk outside to a major intersection and look into the streets, you know what you'll see.

You'll see cars and trucks and buses. You might see a few bicycles trying to sneak their way through the traffic.

What you won't see are people, not on the street anyway.

Maybe on the sidewalk, waiting for their turn to cross,

and then crossing quickly,

hurrying to get out of the way so that the cars can get going again.

In recent times, some of us have come to think the city streets shouldn't just be for cars and trucks.

That cars take up too much space and release too much carbon, just to move a couple of people a short distance.

But even those anti-car haters, and I am one, we know the streets belong to our enemy.

We look both ways before crossing.

We don't let our children play in the streets. We might sometimes

jaywalk across the street at the wrong place or time, but we know in our heart of hearts we're in the wrong.

Skaflaws. That's our reporter, Jesse Dukes.

Because I actually love cars, but I just don't think they make sense in the city.

And this is a story about jaywalking.

Where that word jaywalking came from,

and how it was a weapon and a turf war between the people who wanted cars in the streets and everybody else.

You can probably guess who won.

All right, there's a wonderful cartoon in the St. Louis Post Dispatch from 1923. It's called the Modern Molok, and Molok was a deity of the Ammonites.

And this is Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia who studies city streets.

Molok was a deity to whom the Ammonites sacrificed their own children in return for prosperity.

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