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This is mainly a question about the Late Victorian Period, but I'll relate it to the Ripper case in wondering about the kind of traffic Jack would have encountered as he made his way through the East End Streets. I'm an American, and I ask this from an American perspective. The horse was the major means of transportation before the car came along, and in the late 1800s while Queen Victoria, Charles Dickens and Jack the Ripper were making their mark in England, the Wild West was in full swing in America. What I see in depictions of LVP London is streets full of horse drawn carts and coaches, while over here in addition to similar vehicles there were also a lot of people simply riding around on horseback, with hitching posts lining the streets in cities and towns for tethering horses (the "parked car" of the Wild West). Were there also a lot of people riding in the saddle on horses in England at that time without a further vehicle? It doesn't seem so from the depictions we see. Just curious.
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Many people rode horses in the manner you describe in the 17th Century but by the LVP most were working horses that pulled carts or other forms of transport.
Mounted policemen and soldiers were common. The bicycle was very popular.
I suppose it has a lot to do with the paved roads in England as compared to the unpaved roads in the early American West
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