Horse and buggy RIDERS didn't. DRIVERS did. That's the word they used to swindle the public on the topic.

A driver is someone who transports goods and people from place to place on public roads for pay. That can be regulated and thus, is subject to licensure.

A rider is someone who merely uses public roads to get around by whatever means they have available for any reason other than employment.

To simplify the idea, it actually does help to go back to horse and buggy days.

You ride a horse. You drive cattle. But you're still riding on a horse when you're driving cattle.

The lingo still exists in modern day when talking about bicycles and motorcycles. You ride a bike, but you..drive a car? No. None of use drive cars. Not even bus drivers or tax drivers or truck drivers "drive" any of those vehicles. They drive people in buses and taxis and they drive products in trucks. Yet this is how the lingo gets us. We work backwards logically "Oh you're a truck driver so you drive a truck, and I'm a car driver cause I drive a car." None of it is legally accurate and yet here we all are, using the lingo day and night, thinking we're subject to Vehicle Codes that have nothing to do with 90% of us.

And of course, police don't know this, and even if they do, they want to keep their job, so they don't put up with it and are more than happy to keep oppressing the people they're supposed to serve under color of law. And so many people like the idea of forcing people to pass a test to get a license to ride their cars that it's nearly impossible, even armed with the truth, to get a critical mass of people to care enough to band together and do something about it. These guys on the internet calling themselves Sovereign Citizens have tried, but more often than not they end up with a judge who doesn't want the curtain pulled back on that issue and invariably rule against them without any legal basis whatsoever.