High-tech ride-hailing arrived in Pittsburgh in 2014 when Lyft rolled into town. Uber followed not long after. The new services reignited a decades-old battle between traditional taxi drivers and jitneys, a low-cost and unregulated alternative with deep ties to Pittsburgh history.
Jitneys originated in Los Angeles in 1914. They were a grassroots response to high transit fares imposed by legally sanctioned streetcar monopolies. Less than a year later, in 1915, Pittsburgh had several jitney bus operators. They became the forerunners to later jitney cab operations and 21st century app-based ride hailing services, and August Wilson paid homage to the jitney’s place in the Steel City’s urban fabric with his 1979 play, Jitney.
When Lyft and Uber pulled into Pittsburgh, writers glossed over the deeper history of informal livery services in the city. It’s a story of resistance to economic hegemony and racial segregation featuring characters who easily could have found themselves as role models for Wilson’s play.
Katie Wells a Washington, D.C., geographer who studies Uber and the company’s impacts on labor and communities, quickly switches into professor mode when someone describes Uber and its predecessors as ride-sharing services: “Please call it ride-hailing. I mean, it’s digital ride-hailing, it’s digital chauffeur services,” says Wells — in her opinion, there’s no sharing involved, only economic transactions.
Wells sees clear connections between early 20th century jitneys and present-day ride-hailing services. “It was a public infrastructure for the underground economy,” Wells says about jitneys.
“There were real issues they were addressing, but we have to see the history,” Wells tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “[Jitneys are] a symptom of these really difficult, thorny questions about how do we offer mobility.”
Today’s ride-hailing economy stems from inequitable access to reliable transportation and people who are unemployed or underemployed. “This informal economy for Uber, it helps people make ends meet, and it also helps other people who are struggling to get to where they need to go,” Wells explains.
Those factors are a lot like what drove Pittsburgh residents to “drive jitney” and to use jitneys to get around, says historian Jessica Klanderud. “One of the people that I did an oral history interview with,” Klanderud tells City Paper, “her husband … was a construction trades worker during the regular season, and in the off season, then, when construction trade dried up, he would drive jitney to help supplement the family income.”
Wilson’s Jitney is set in the 1970s inside a Hill District jitney station. Its characters include Youngblood, a veteran who works several jobs trying to save enough money to buy a suburban Penn Hills home. Becker, the jitney station manager, ends up dying in an accident in the steel mill where he also worked. The play turns on the precarity of jitney drivers’ experiences inside their homes and workplaces.
The Hill District’s jitney stations were one of four jitney markets active in Pittsburgh, according to economists Otto Davis and Norman Johnson. The pair published a paper in 1984 about Pittsburgh’s jitneys that, according to later historians, remains one of the only comprehensive explorations of the service. Unlike other cities in the United States and Canada, “jitneys in Pittsburgh are a peculiarly Black phenomenon,” reporter Glenn Garvin wrote in 1985.
Jitneys at the crossroads of history
A long-forgotten episode that played out in a Hill District parking lot, Pittsburgh City Council chambers, and in Allegheny County courtrooms sheds some light on early tensions between cab companies, city officials, and consumers. It began when Crawford Grill bartender Oscar James opened a Wylie Avenue parking lot in 1941. “It’s the only one on the Avenue owned and operated by a Negro,” the Pittsburgh Courier reported.
Oscar’s Parking Lot moved to Fullerton Street in 1945 after James sold it to Dave Captain, a smalltime numbers writer. Captain renamed the business the OFA Parking Lot Company, and the events that unfolded after Captain took over read like they leapt from the pages of Wilson’s script. (Coincidentally, one of the company’s earliest shareholders was a man named Sam Youngblood.)
The company occupied a boxy concrete block building built on the site where Pittsburgh’s first Greek Orthodox Church was founded in 1906. “The premises consist of a vacant area and a shanty type building,” read court papers filed in later years.
Internal squabbling and accusations of fraud and mismanagement rocked OFA soon after Captain became the company’s president. In 1946, OFA’s secretary, Thomas Gaylord, filed charges against Captain alleging that he forged a $150 check drawn on company funds. The case ended after Captain agreed to liquidate his interest in the company.
The 1946 case kicked off seven years of conflict between Captain and his former partners, who went to court in 1953 to get an injunction barring Captain from the property. Captain answered the charges by claiming he had installed the company’s telephone in his own name and that he still had a right to use it for business purposes: i.e., driving jitney.
Captain claimed he repeatedly entered the property to protect the interest he had in the company. In court papers, Captain cited city efforts to eradicate jitneys. “Beginning in the spring of 1950 the city of Pittsburgh began extensive operations to wipe out such illegal taxi service,” Captain’s attorneys wrote in response to the company’s charges.
The Owl Taxicab Company, founded in 1946 by jitney driver Silas Knox, was one weapon in the city’s toolkit in its battle against jitneys. Owl began operating after a pitched battle to get approval from the Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission (PUC). Knox and others claimed that a Black-owned taxi company was the best way to combat discrimination against Black residents and to get rid of jitneys.
Testimony in the PUC hearings included many accounts from Black residents who claimed that Yellow Cabs didn’t provide service in Black neighborhoods and that the company didn’t hire Black drivers.
“The Yellow Cab Company holds a monopoly on taxi service in the city but virtually ignores fares in the Hill District,” the Courier reported in 1946.
Owl prevailed and got its license after such influential figures as Mayor David Lawrence and attorney Paul F. Jones, who later was elected to the Pittsburgh City Council, testified on behalf of the company. Lawrence told the PUC that Pittsburgh’s taxi service was “inadequate.”
Owl became Pittsburgh’s first Black-owned taxi company, and Jones became Owl’s attorney. In 1954, Lawrence appointed him to city council. Captain, meanwhile, organized jitney drivers into an informal union, the Pioneer Workers Association, to oppose one of Jones’s first legislative efforts: a jitney ban.
“Leaders of the Pioneer Workers Association threw the book at Councilman Paul F. Jones in an angered reaction to Mr. Jones’ introduction Monday of an ordinance to require jitney drivers to obtain licenses,” the Courier reported in 1954. Captain claimed, without providing evidence, that Jones had worked off the books for jitney drivers before taking office. “We paid him $200 a month protection fee,” Captain said at the time.
The paper subsequently apologized to Jones for publishing a story that appeared to validate claims that Jones acted unlawfully or improperly.
Contemporary twists on an old theme
The 1954 law didn’t end jitney service in Pittsburgh. Like liquor after Prohibition ended in 1933, the lottery in 1971, and the creep towards marijuana legalization, the state and creative entrepreneurs found ways to transform a once-illegal enterprise into a profitable modern business. And, much in the same way that the Pennsylvania Lottery didn’t end numbers gambling, Black-owned taxi companies and a ride-hailing market cornered by large corporations haven’t driven jitneys from city streets.
It’s still possible to find jitney drivers picking up fares in the Hill District and the North Side, Klanderud says: “I wonder just what kind of commonalities we would find if we looked at how many people were driving jitney at one point and went to something like one of these rideshare services in the digital age, because there are still people driving jitney.”
There also are opportunities for ride-hailing drivers to work off the books by offering private chauffeur services to fares they pick up at the airport and other transit hubs. Instead of serving customers of limited means with inequitable access to transportation, these drivers fill a niche demand for low-cost private transportation.
“These are people for whom the bus doesn’t come,” says Wells. “Or, these are wealthy people that always were going to find a chauffeur service, and this is just that much easier.”
Wells sees parallels in the debates over Lyft and Uber and jitneys. They both to fill gaps in urban transportation networks — gaps where people who live in underserved and marginalized communities find themselves. “That’s where it freaks me out about the parallels to Uber, right? Which is that, can we not learn this lesson? Are we going to do this again?” Wells wonders.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2025.
