IN the future, perhaps our time will be known as the first decade of the Bicycle Wars, with righteous armies fighting over traffic lanes, bike paths and sidewalks, indeed over the very purpose of the streets themselves. Like many wars, it’s a question of territory, and the pedestrian has been losing for years.

For centuries, pedestrians had undifferentiated dominion over both the sidewalks and the roadbed — sidewalks were not pedestrian cattle pens, but off-limits zones for vehicles. “The street” meant the entire open area, from building line to building line.

This changed in the 1880s with the advent of electric and cable streetcars, with their much greater weights and speeds than horse-drawn vehicles, not to mention their guillotine-like wheels. It is a comment on how we viewed our streets that, by design, passengers were meant to board streetcars in the middle of the roadway.

But the installation of trolley tracks also created a kill zone. In 1894 The New York Times reported that a speeding streetcar on Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn had killed 10-year-old Theodore Cox, “a bright little boy” who was “ground under the wheels.” The police helped the motorman escape the crowd, which was crying “Lynch him!” This was not to be a bloodless war.