When cars and horses shared the road

For a while in the 1910s and 1920s, if you wanted to rent transportation, you’d head to the nearest livery stable and be asked: “What’ll it be, horse or auto?”

A couple of calendars I recently bought on eBay reminded me of this fact. The first, from 1928, specifies the Trail Livery Co. had both “Horses and Autos for Hire.” [1] The other calendar, from 1929, only says “Cars for hire” (as well as “Piano and furniture moving”), suggesting the era of horses and cars sharing the roads was over. [2]

I can’t find a lot of information on the subject, though. Cars started appearing in the West Kootenay in the early to mid-1910s, but they remained a novelty until the 1920s.

Ed Mannings has a few billheads in his collection that refer to both autos and horses, but he says the one seen below, from 1915, is the earliest.

While the transition from horses to cars dominating the roads must have been gradual, I can find very few images depicting both modes of transportation. I looked at hundreds of postcards, but could only locate two examples. The one seen here of Baker Street in Nelson in the 1920s is by far the best. (I’ve used this image before to illustrate the location of the city’s Overwaitea store.) 

The other example shows Bay Avenue in Trail, but only through close study could I tell a horse and buggy were depicted in addition to automobiles.

What laws, if any, governed the interactions of horses and autos in the 1920s? I don’t know.

I did find an incident in the Nelson Daily News of July 19, 1923, where a “skittish horse” and a Ford truck driven by J.W. Gallagher collided near the hospital (which at that time was on High Street). No one was hurt, but the truck was pushed halfway across the road.

A more serious incident occurred in Vernon in 1928, where a runaway horse hit and overturned a car, resulting in the death of one man and the horse as well as minor injuries to five other people. It wasn’t clear what spooked the horse, but it threw its driver out of a wagon about half a mile from the place where it crashed into the car.

Today DriveSmartBC says “equestrians are considered to be traffic for the purposes of the Motor Vehicle Act when riders are on the highway. Drivers of motor vehicles must exercise care around them and share the road.”

In June 2024, new rules came into effect establishing minimum passing and following distances for horses and horse-drawn vehicles in BC.

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[1] Plus they offered a Trail, Columbia Gardens and Rossland Stage Line.” The civic directory that year called it an “auto stage.”

[2] The Trail Livery Co. was listed in the 1937 civic directory as operating at 1399 Dewdney Avenue, which would have been directly behind the Crown Point Hotel. M.H. McIvor was the proprietor. By this time they offered “Motor transfer, merchandise, distribution. Nelson, Trail, Rossland daily freight service.”