The one story that immediately comes to mind is something that comes from a followup comment I made on a thread about Grover Cleveland a couple years back.
So Cleveland became the guardian of his future wife through tragedy; his law partner Oscar Folsom had died rather foolishly in July 1875, when he'd gone out drinking with another lawyer and then drove his buggy back to his place.
When he saw a streetcar at an intersection, Folsom decided to essentially gun it buggy style and pass it on the right in order to not to wait. Unfortunately for him, by doing so the rear wheel of the buggy hit a wagon parked on the street, Folsom took a flying head dive out which fractured his skull and paralyzed him from the neck down, and to add further injury to insult he got run over by his own wagon and died within an hour of the accident.
Despite his legal training, Folsom actually died intestate - without a will - and Cleveland was appointed as administrator. (As a side note, probate records are a godsend for research.) While the estate was sizeable (~$250,000), as /u/Captn_Oveur points out, the Folsoms lived fairly modestly thereafter.
The simplest answer to this is yes, though how one goes about showing this is another matter altogether. I will link a comments by /u/sunagainstgold (one) and another previous comment tangently related (two). With time and manpower, one could certainly make a hefty compilations of them from city (or other jurisdictions) records (laws, cases, public debates and grievances) or private accounts (letters, private journals, chronicles, etc.).
So, briefly and probably the easiest way, one could go through respective regulations, starting from the (high & late) medieval period, mostly through city ordinances, bylaws, statutes, etc., and how they evolve through the following centuries up to the twentieth and the start of motor vehicles. While common parallels on this can be drawn across vast swaths of urbanized Europe (and whatever they later colonized, for example, plenty of American city ordinances in the eighteenth and nineteenth century are digitalized online), the countryside is much trickier, where prior to eighteenth and nineteenth century, provisions were mostly limited to fees/travel papers and critical infrastructure, like bridges, conduct was mostly subject to torts should accidents resulting in injury or damage arise – for example, in the Habsburg provinces, improper road conduct leading to injury and death was criminalized by the end of eighteenth century, Art. 24 (Carinthia) specifically resulting from improper speed.^(1)
Cities used a variety of ways to regulate traffic, from total carriage ban, or partial to some city sections or streets, to only allow certain kinds of travels (from residence to outside the city, not inter-city, or only for aristocracy), to limit total number of carriages or persons (via license and high entry fees) allowed to drive carriages, walking speeds, usage of sleighs, etc. and naturally, (road) conduct was overarchingly regulated by general conduct laws, bylaws or statutes, barring special statutes for traffic specifically. There is a rhyme from late seventeenth century Amsterdam that was written on one of the coaches;
Die hard rijd wint wel tijt
Maar raakt licht Paard en Wagen quijt.
Voorzichtig en verstan-
Dig is een goed Voerman.Who drives fast make a quick start
But easily loses their horse and cart
Careful and sen-
Sible is a good carriage man.^(2)
Of course, there are other issues of effectiveness, enforcement and consistency, or how this changed from decade to decade (also note that “legislative” activity on the issue was oft sporadic, sometimes with quick successive revisions, and sometimes left alone for half a century or more – but these kinds of details need city-specific accounts. See for London^(3), specially p. 114-119).
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