A “jitney” is the traditional name for what some cities are starting to call, in a typically oafish, tone-deaf, acronymical sort of way, “PTV”s (for “Private Transit Vehicles”). A jitney (we are not calling them PTVs around here) is a van or similar that’s a privately owned shuttle that operates on a fixed route.
The word “jitney” appeared around the 1890s, and although nobody is really sure where it came from, there’s some speculation that it’s related to the French word “jitton” (something that’s thrown, like a penny or nickel). It also might have been used first in New Orleans, where the French origin would make sense. “Jitney” originally meant both the vehicle and was also a slang term for a nickel, which (coincidentally?) was how much a ride on one cost. But nobody is sure which usage came first. There was a 1915 article in a publication called “The Hub” about the term “jitney” that says the term was used even earlier in San Francisco, possibly as early as the 1849 Gold Rush.
Another reference appeared in the “Cincinnati Enquirer” in 1903; it talked about “gitney” as St. Louis slang for a coin. Apparently debating “jitney” was quite popular for a while; “The Nation” published an article in 1915 claiming that the word was Jewish slang for a nickel, and another one the same year claiming that “jitney” meant a bus, and the word was derived from the name of the smallest Russian coin. The Russian theory was debunked pretty quickly in a letter to the editor later that year, where it was explained that the smallest Russian coin is a “copeck”, and “jitney” had nothing to do with it. But 1915 was the year of the jitney for “The Nation”; the first printed citation in the OED for “jitney bus” is from that magazine’s January issue, where it pointed out that in Los Angeles, “automobiles, mostly of the Ford variety, have begun in competition with the street cars. The newspapers call them ‘Jitney buses’.”
Jitneys were getting pretty popular: “By 1915 the jitney vehicles were carrying about 150,000 Angelenos per day and the jitney had swept the nation, operating in more than 40 U.S. cities…” said an article in the “Pacific Standard” from that era.
As with many new innovations, jitneys created some uncertainty about the social mores that should apply. To remedy the situation, the “Los Angeles Herald” in May, 1915 published a guide to jitney etiquette that answered such common questions as “should passengers rob their jitney driver?” and “should jitney drivers rob their passengers?” Kind of makes you wonder about Los Angeles in 1915, doesn’t it?
Jitneys declined in the following decades as more public transportation options became available, from buses to subways to integrated systems like San Francisco’s BART. In fact, in San Francisco itself, the last jitney permit was issued in 1972. But now that bureaucrats have dreamed up “PTV,” apparently they’re working on reinstating the program, on the theory that there’s no problem that can’t be addressed by a new acronym.
