My first year of college, I was cited for jaywalking. I was walking across a barren street in our small college town on my way to class, and there was a town cop standing against a wall of a nearby building waiting for an easy catch.
I had fully crossed the street and was walking to a nearby building when I heard someone yell "Hey" behind me.
I contemplated not even turning around, because I wanted to get to class on time, but I did ... and saw the officer standing on the other side.
He didn't feel like coming to me, so he instructed me to re-cross the street back to him.
"Are you sure you want me to jaywalk back?" I asked. "Isn't that dangerous?"
My boss decided to jaywalk an otherwise empty street in downtown LA during a conference (not a big deal where we're from). When he got to the other side, a cruiser pulled up onto the sidewalk blocking his path, and the cop got out and berated him while writing him a ticket. Crazy and overzealous to say the least, but we still haven't let him live it down to this day.
Before corona I visited some colleagues in LA for a knowledge transfer, as they were handing over ownership of a whole bunch of infrastructure to me. As we were walking to lunch, I couldn't help noticing that they very clearly and insistently walked as far away from the street as they could. Very edge of the sidewalk away from the street. They warned me about cars never looking when they turn, etc.
I got a ticket for jaywalking when I lived in downtown Washington, DC about 15 years ago. The officer asked to see my license (what if I hadn't had one?) and wrote a ticket, but as a warning with no fine. Said it was the first sunny day of the Spring and the city had him out to try to cut down on tourists etc. wandering around and possibly getting hit by cars.
The cops love issuing jaywalking tickets in DC, it's a tradition. Quick story: about 10 years ago I walked over to the Library of Congress with two friends from Virginia, and we walked across the street in the middle of the block. There was an officer way down on the corner and he screamed at us "HEY! No jaywalking!" and we hustled across as quickly as we could and went inside the library, looking at each other with puzzled glances. It never occurred to any of us that we simply couldn't walk across the street, and all of us are from the northeast US corridor. I'm a US citizen and that was the first time and the last time that anyone has scolded me for jaywalking (just so the EU people reading this understand: it's not usually enforced here except in the biggest cities).
Generally in the US you are not required to carry identification but you are required to give truthful identification information when asked by a law enforcement officer. If you didn't have your drivers license that day, you likely would have still received the warning ticket. If you lied about your identification, you may have gotten away with it but if caught in that lie, the consequences would have been much higher than a mere jaywalking ticket.
That's the key phrase. Police in small towns of America have nothing better to do than setup ways of levying fines against outsiders so they can afford to upgrade their cruisers to the latest dodge chargers or outfit everyone with DOD hand-me-down weaponry.
Police in small towns are mostly fine and don't care about petty stuff because they have meth labs and whatnot to give them perspective. Police in wealthy suburbs, rural retirement small towns, tourist destinations and college towns are mostly not fine because they don't have much Real Crime(TM) to give them perspective.
Yeah right. Except that if you drive around the country enough you’ll find out that speed trap towns are usually small towns with nothing better to do. One pharmacy, a subway, 2 gas stations but 5 cruisers waiting for you to go over the silly 30mph limit imposed right after the crest of a bridge.
Speed traps aren’t because they have nothing better to do, it’s because it’s a non-trivial revenue stream for small towns that get a decent amount of through-traffic.
I've never seen it happen in a college town. See comment above. Usually the only place jaywalking in enforced is in the really big cities, especially Washington, DC.
I remember story about woman who got hit by speeding car along with her kids who got hurt badly or died. They charged her with endangering kids, but not the driver - crossing was over half mile away.
It’s like interfering with a police investigation, it’s only illegal when the police decide to enforce it and want a reason to stop someone. If it’s a baren small street then I say it’s harassment. If it’s 3rd Avenue on a Tuesday, then maybe it’s for safety sake. The issue is that Jaywalking is applied too unevenly it’s laughable
Just want to point out how special interests can actually pretty insidiously change your viewpoint by making you think "that's the way things have always been". It was relatively recently that I discovered that jaywalking, as a crime, was a distinctly American phenomenon, when in an HN discussion someone mentioned that British folk think the crime of jaywalking is insane (in the UK you can cross pretty much wherever you want as long as you're not impeding traffic). My initial reaction was "Wait, that's nuts, of course jaywalking should not be allowed." I didn't even realize how the "default" of what I was used to in the US was basically just constructed by the auto industry for their benefit.
Glad this is coming to light and hope more places get rid of jaywalking.
When an American friend explained it to me at uni I honestly thought they were trying to trick. It's just such an absurd concept, like how does anyone walk anywhere? Then I realised they don't.
I've been to business hotels in the USA in my travels that literally don't have pedestrian access. There's a road without a pedestrian sidewalk up to the front of the hotel, and that's it. You CANNOT get in or out without a car. It is crazy.
Read many posts and what many folks are missing is the amount of space the US has... it takes more than 1 day of driving to get across Texas alone.
Where I live there arent even roads being improved in many areas. You just drive across the dirt
None of the countries folks are comparing have close to the amount of space to cover.
Yes bigger metro areas are dense enough to have public transit... problem is most folks dont live in that area and commute in. Example ...areas like the SF bay area has folks traveling 2 hrs 1 way on train or car to get to the office
I live in Australia, which has less than a tenth of the US population on a land mass the size of the continental US. We allow pedestrians to cross the road unless they're within 20 metres of a crossing. If anything, lower population density should mean more rights for pedestrians, since there will be roads which see no traffic for hours or even days.
We in the US do an absolutely horrific job of recognizing and compensating for the externalities of our automotive culture. The criminalization of jaywalking is one major aspect, but also consider:
1. The construction of highways through poor (read: minority) urban areas, causing mass respiratory disease and premature deaths[1].
2. Allocation of free public space (car parking) to drivers, effectively subsidizing (disproportionately suburban) commuters at the expense of residents.
3. A general culture of entitlement to the road among motorists, resulting in tens of thousands of pedestrian and cyclist injuries a year with virtually no legal (beyond costly civil) recourse.
One of the biggest is that people actually like living in suburbs, and they could afford to do so after WWII.
The promise of the suburbs is a detached house, with some private outdoor space like a back yard, in a quiet area: essentially what the rich had always preferred and been able to afford. That lifestyle became broadly available to the middle classes after WWII. It's hard to blame people for wanting that.
People still like living in suburbs. They still like owning cars. They still vote against new transit projects for a lot of reasons, but the biggest reason is that they don't want to pay taxes to support a system they would not use themselves.
So I just don't buy the idea that the National City Lines conspiracy caused our current automotive culture. I think we would have ended up with the same car culture anyway, because huge numbers of people wanted to live in the suburbs.
> The promise of the suburbs is a detached house, with some private outdoor space like a back yard, in a quiet area: essentially what the rich had always preferred and been able to afford.
You can do that and still have density. Things were built like that pre-WW2; see street view of this Toronto, Canada neighbourhood:
Those houses (actually land) are very expensive now, but that's because urban living is now cool again. Up until the late-1990s they were quite affordable because all the Cool Kids wanted to live in the suburbs: downtown was mostly for immigrants post-WW2.
There's a bus line to the west of there (Parkside), a streetcar line to the east (Roncesvalles), and both of those connect to a subway line (Bloor). And one doesn't have to give up their car: it simply becomes optional for day-to-day stuff instead of being a necessity.
There's no reason why post-War suburbs couldn't have been built this way. The above neighbourhood was a suburb of Toronto and folks commuted via streetcar "to the city".
For slightly smaller sized homes, but still with backyards and laneway garages, see the next street over:
Post WWII bylaws mandated super wide streets and wide separation between houses, ostensibly for fire protection. I spent Grade 6 through 13 (Ontario prolonged the torture) in a new build Toronto suburb. Virtually no transit to speak of and the nearest bus stop a twenty minute walk away, followed by nearly an hour to get downtown. Cycling was faster - still is,even with decades of transit improvements.
After high school I moved to the inner city and stayed clear of the suburbs.
Today I'm in a walkable century old dense neighborhood in a small regional center, but have to drive to get groceries. The car can stay parked for a week.
Other than commuting, and grocery shopping, my car also stays parked. My wife and I only looked at small urban areas to live (we both lived urban when we met). I have telecommuted through COVID, and in the last year, I have only put 3500 miles on my car (now fourteen years old), and that includes three months of commuting before we went 100% on-line.
Except, the difference is mostly a stereotype that isn't held up by the data. In France, 70% of commuters travel by car and only 3% by cycling.[1]
That's less car-centric than America for sure. But Americans have a misguided notion that all Europeans live in quaint pedestrian-friendly town centers that look like Prague or Copenhagen. Mostly because we tend to spend our European tourism in the dense centers of the capital cities.
France != Paris. Considering only the cities, there is a massive difference between the majority of European cities I’ve visited and all US cities I’ve visited — the worst in Europe is about the equal of the best in America (e.g. Bay Area, NYC), to the extent that the only time I’ve owned a car was a 2-week period when my ex moved out of the country and wanted me to sell hers on her behalf.
My worst pedestrian experience was Salt Lake City, where the footpaths stopped suddenly and without apparent reason in the middle of the residential area I was staying in. I had to backtrack and guess a lot.
Sure, the sudden absence of footpaths can happen in Europe too (I’ve seen it in Λάρνακα, Luxembourg, and Hochstadt, though never to the same extent), but for the most part even tiny villages in Europe have better public transport and pedestrian access than the various American cities I’ve visited.
People still commute by car in Europe because it's often much faster than public transport, but generally Europeans were more successful in preventing sprawl wastelands where you can't survive without a car.
In the US there are many places where the next supermarket is twenty minutes by car away and literally impossible to reach on a bike without getting run over. In contrast, even in the smallest town I've lived in, with just 20k residents, there where three supermarkets and two specialty stores in walking distance.
This is for France as a whole, not Paris. Ofc the figures will be majority car when you take a whole country into account instead of a city/metro area.
Some Japanese cities seem to be pretty good for that too. Apparently even very young children can safely take the bus, train or bike to school by themselves.
I don't understand how you can be so oblivious, but maybe you really just don't get it. Let me spell it out for you: Suburbia means that every trip out of the house will require a car.
This is a not a living style that we can afford for everyone. Great that you enjoy it, but enabling it for everyone is simply unsustainable.
Right now you are offloading it's cost externalities elsewhere:
Cost on Your Health: More driving = less walking = decreased life-expectancy. More driving = more air polution = decreased life-expectancy
Cost on the planet: More driving = more greenhouse gases = global warming.
You make many terrible lifestyle assumptions and its insulting to me to call me 'oblivious' and frankly, it is unnecessary and below this forum.
More driving does not exclude a healthy walking routine.
More driving != equal more net green house gases. Yes the ICE generates greenhouse gases, but check out the carbon footprint of a battery supply chain for an EV sometime, or that of the MTA, MBTA, logistical supply chain of supplying the ENTIRE nyc 5 boroughs.
Bottom line, I'm willing to engage a deepdive discussion with critical eyes, not endure a superficial antisuburbia smear campaign while being namecalled.
We are not talking about your lifestyle. We are discussing effect of urban sprawl on the population and on the world. I was just so surprised that somebody on this forum could be able to miss the point so entirely, and be so ready to fight for whats clearly an indefensible position.
Walking
More driving means your natural walking related to commute and errands goes to 0. There is a reason american states have a huge obesity problem compared to lots of european countries.
Cars
Are you seriously comparing the carbon footprints of a personal car compared to the metro?
More driving means more green house gases. This is not about what vehicle you use, it's about the fact that urban sprawl requires a vehicle for even the most basic errands. This is unsustainable.
Not to mention do realize people can live in cities where they walk to work, walk to the grocery store, walk to gym, and walk to a restaurant?
> Suburbia means that every trip out of the house will require a car.
That is quite a generalization. Some suburbs can be like that, with houses for miles on end and nothing else. That seems like the exception though.
Plenty of suburban neighborhoods have walkable commerce nearby. I have never lived in a city. And yet, I've never lived in a place where I couldn't walk to at least a supermarket. Currently I live in very suburban (borderline rural, really) area and nearly everything I could need is within a 15 minute walk (multiple supermarkets & pharmacies, hardware store, clothing, restaurants, movies, medical, etc.)
The no.1 factor is single-use zoning. This means people live in a certain zone, and commerce happens in another zone. No amount of personal anecdotes will affect this fact.
It is a generalization to assert "Suburbia means that every trip out of the house will require a car", when it is easy to show there are counterexamples where this is not true.
One could say "There are suburban areas where every trip requires a car" and that's a true statement. The generalization is not a true statement.
No it really isn't clear what the responder intended, and the contextless data point about vehicle emissions says nothing about the implications of a suburban style city on the health of the planet.
But it is pretty sad for the rest of the world. In Latin-America our oldest cities are European-style cities, totally walkable. The new developments (say last 50-60) are mostly American-style suburban hell.
Did you grow up without it? Are you biased as a result of that? Bias is practically impossible to eliminate here.
(You could try to find people who moved from one place to another, and ideally limit it to those whose reason for moving had nothing to do with their preferences... and poll them. I don't know how possible that is. It likely also makes a difference at what age they moved.)
I grew up in a car-centric country with fairly poor public transport, and have since moved to London. Here it’s genuinely faster to take public transport to most places than it is to drive.
I occasionally wish I had a car (say for a weekend getaway) but it’s rare enough that I’m happy to live with rentals for those occasions.
I have 3 major grocery stores (Safeway, QFC, Target) within 15 minutes walking from me. And at least 20 bars and restaurants within the same distance. Public transportation to downtown takes about 35 minutes, which isn't great, but it's okay. Uber works well if you need to be faster.
Ballard is pretty isolated, constrained by the Ballard Bridge or going over to Fremont to get to Downtown. Bike access is poor, either risking death on the sidewalks of the Ballard Bridge, taking the lane on the bridge or doing a large detour to Fremont.
Wedgewood, Fremont, Queen Anne & Freelard all successfully resisted the mass redevelopment that Ballard has seen, compared to 15 years ago Ballard looks completely different while the aforementioned neighborhoods have not seen that same level of mass demolition.
I'm also in Ballard and tend to agree about it being isolated.
Also, there are a lot of Ballard drivers that hate cyclists — that first/last mile to access the Burke is by far the most dangerous. I get some anti-cyclist vitriol, honking, or aggressive passing almost every time I ride. And I am fast enough to keep up with the speed of traffic! Some drivers just see bikes and think "I should be in front."
I really don't mind the short jaunt to the Fremont bridge, but it does add some extra travel time. Never ride on the Ballard bridge; it just doesn't have anywhere for bikes to be. The sidewalks are too narrow and unprotected from traffic, and the primary traffic lanes are going 40+ mph. That whole thing needs to be replaced for the 21st century, although there may be some resistance as it's a nationally registered "historic place."
Depending on where you live and where you're going, crossing the locks is a great way to bike downtown. Also sometimes the Fremont bridge route is going to be shorter. I hate riding my bike over the Ballard bridge, but I'm not sure I'd call riding on it "risking death".
Bike access within Ballard is pretty great since the hills are a bit more manageable than in other parts of the city.
All that aside, it's pretty easy to live in Seattle and not have a car, being able to walk to groceries, bars, restaurants, parks, etc.
The Locks aren't great because cyclists must dismount for the entire length of the federal facility. This is a nuisance for platform pedals and conventional shoes and obnoxious for clipless pedals and cleated shoes.
I would highly encourage avoiding the Ballard Bridge. IMO it's very dangerous.
Walkability in Ballard is pretty good. We're within 15 minutes walking distance of QFC and the bar/restaurant area south of Market. That said, I prefer to drive to the grocery store so I can go infrequently and buy more at once.
What is bad about NYC in particular? I’ve rented bikes in lots of European and US cities and have been thousands of miles in NYC and haven’t found it that much more dangerous than somewhere like Paris or London, except for certain large Avenues.
LA has a decent bus system? Are you serious? Have you ever lived in LA, and lived in a european city?
LA has no unified bus system. It has multiple ones and its super confusing. Each bus makes a stop nearly every minute, making every ride impossibly long. Lack of bus lanes make for shitty traffic stuck trips as well.
You cannot compare San Francisco with Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, etc. SF is so unsafe that most people avoid public transportation and use
Uber instead.
I don’t think unsafe is my main issue, with saying SF is comparable. Having lived in SF, Stockholm, London and worked for years in Amsterdam, SF just doesn’t have the density of public transport.
Let’s us Stockholm as an example: 100 metro stations and 170+ suburban rail stations, 60 light rail stops, on 2.3 million people in 6,519.3 km2 (2,517.1 sq mi).
San Francisco (Nine county, Bay Area), 33 metro stations, plus 87 additional metro stops about 200 station (ACE, Amtrak, BART, Caltrain, SMART, and VTA), on 7.75 million people, In 6,966 sq mi (18,040 km2).
The station density is nearly 2.5 times higher and on less than half the population.
Buses are under-utilized, but walking and various forms of wheeled transportation (motorized longboards, those one wheel things, bikes, scooters, etc) are popular.
San Francisco is only about 7 miles wide. You can walk from one side of the city to the other in about 2 hours. When I lived there, I walked almost everywhere. The only times I did otherwise was when it was a really long walk (over 45 minutes), or I needed to be somewhere fast. The bus will not get you anywhere fast, it's only about twice as fast as walking. I think that's why a lot of people use Lyft. The buses are actually quite nice inside imo, they're just slow. Plus the stigma that only poor people ride the bus.
I've never heard anyone self identify as "European" before, do you not feel a stronger personal identity to your own country? Or is it a "in the context of HN and the US affect"?
It's quite a common thing. I would identify as a European too. UK is about to leave the EU, but UK is still in the European continent. Some of my fellow countrymen are not so sure, but for me, I feel more European than not.
Ah yeah, it's just in this context. While I'd never introduce myself by saying "hi, I'm from Europe", I feel that there are more similarities than differences between EU countries in terms of public transport, healthcare, mass shootings, education, etc. compared to the US, and I feel very privileged to be born on the right side of the Atlantic. :)
They could only afford to do so because the government subsidized it, at the behest of car companies. id check out strong towns research on how suburbs are unsustainable
Government killed public transit by mandating that bus and rail had to be separate entities. As rail travel plummeted bus routes were trying to increase rail traffic with bus routes serving rail stations.
> 2. Allocation of free public space (car parking) to drivers, effectively subsidizing (disproportionately suburban) commuters at the expense of residents.
The times I've commuted into a city, I had to pay for parking, usually in a private lot. I suspect it's like this in most big cities, and in smaller cities where people still commute, parking is probably private lots owned by the employer, not street parking. Picture a standard office park.
In places with free street parking (or public lots), I suspect the population is sparse enough that the added land cost for parting isn't a big deal, most people have cars, and most people support having parking.
> In places with free street parking (or public lots), I suspect the population is sparse enough that the added land cost for parting isn't a big deal, most people have cars, and most people support having parking.
This is not true in Manhattan, which (to my knowledge) is the most densely populated borough in the most densely populated city in the US. Almost all street parking in Manhattan is free, with small carve-outs for meters on high-traffic blocks.
The city also has a semi-official policy of allowing commercial traffic to ignore parking laws[1]. In practice, that means trucks parked on sidewalks, with pedestrians exposed to car traffic on the streets.
> In places with free street parking (or public lots), I suspect the population is sparse enough that the added land cost for parting isn't a big deal, most people have cars, and most people support having parking.
Of course they support it, because it doesn't effect their wallets. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a cost to it:
> parking is probably private lots owned by the employer, not street parking. Picture a standard office park.
But this is still subsidized because regulations mandate that buildings have lots of parking. These regulations are typically quite extreme with requirements intended to support the 99.999% demand case (think peak hour of black friday) conditional on a parking price of $0. Most developments build the minimum amount of parking they can by law suggesting this isn't a free market outcome.
So if you want to have business you have to provide tons of parking and make up for it with higher prices for your goods and services. This subsidizes vehicle driving over other modes a transport. Especially so because giant parking lots make it harder to reach the store front by foot.
I'd prefer for there to be a more market incentive to build parking garages than a mandate for commercial/offices to have to all have their own parking, or effectively subsidized free street side parking. Think of all the surface area used up by cars parking on the street; pave that over with a sidewalk and allow bars/restaurants to set up shop there. That's what I would like.
Building a parking spot in a modern building can cost $20k, which is hard to recoup with parking revenue.
If the break even target is 10 years with no interest accrued, we are talking about $5.47 a day in revenue needs to be generated (plus the overhead of managing the lot itself).
How many paid parking lots do you see that are full on a regular basis? Are they really generating revenue even half time?
I don't think car-free cities are easily obtainable. I can't think of one that currently exists.
Even cities with world-class mass transit, e.g. Tokyo and London, are full of cars, and taxis are still a better option for some trips -- even though there are also surface trains, subways, and buses to choose from.
In those places, step 1 has already been solved: convince the population that mass transit is desirable and should be well funded. London even charges congestion fees for cars. But they still can't achieve car-free cities.
This is an interesting observation but I'd argue there certainly cities where cycling is a norm (Amsterdam, Copenhagen) and cities that are increasingly turning to 2 wheels as a way to solve density (Paris, Berlin, Oslo). I think the UK, like the US, suffers from the idea of cars being a status symbol. I've no idea how this works in Tokyo for example, would be good to know their approach to cycling as an alternative, but pedestrianisation of areas and city centres are what we should certainly strive for.
I don’t know for London, I wouldn’t describe Tokyo as full of cars.
There are major axes to accross the city with constant traffic and most bigger blocks are accessible by car (even just for deliveries). But there are pretty large areas with no car entry, and small residential parts are often shared car/bike/pedestrian zones were cars are not privileged.
I also think the goal shouldn’t be car-free, but to have clear separation of the “liveable” space with shops, parks, administrations, schools etc., and the “transportation” space with the trains, cars, cans and trucks. Speaking of Tokyo it often layers the two, with lower level streets/buses/truck roads and upper level walkable space. Seems to be the best compromise, albeit more expensive to build.
That layering takes place only in the densest urban core, primarily around significant train junctions. In the rest of the sprawl, there's no separation, some parts of residental greater Tokyo (particularly those still using pre-war streets) don't even have sidewalks.
Tokyo's residential neighbourhoods without pavements are great - it makes the whole road a shared space rather than one that belongs exclusively to cars.
A lack of sidewalks combined with narrow streets forces drivers to slow down and pay attention, which is ideal if you want to see fewer injuries and deaths caused by vehicle traffic on a stretch of road.
> Even cities with world-class mass transit, e.g. Tokyo and London, are full of cars
I've found Tokyo had surprisingly few cars for a massive city with high population density. Also, virtually no street parking, which makes the cityscape much nicer, and many side-alleys that are largely car-free.
Anecdotally last time I was in central London I counted the vehicles going past parliament. About 1 in 10 was an unmarked car, the rest were commercial vehicles or taxis
>Funny, those are 3 of the main reasons I live way out in the nearly-rural suburbs instead of in downtown San Francisco.
And this is precisely the problem: automotive culture presently represents a massive subsidy to rural and suburban areas at the expensive of urban dwellers.
I can't possibly blame people for making that trade. But the observation is that it's sweetened by externalities that ex-urban areas don't have to bear.
We don't have to trade convenience. We have to trade houses for apartments. Cars are largely what make having a house in the middle of nowhere largely possible.
> 1. The construction of highways through poor (read: minority) urban areas, causing mass respiratory disease and premature deaths[1].
Isn't this kind of leap? I've lived plenty of expensive places (e.g. downtown San Diego, Boston, Los Angeles) that had free/highways close to expensive property. What is leading you to believe highway construction targets the poor areas, other than those real estate markets are already depressed (which is possibly why poor people live there)?
The role of highways and red-lining of federal house building loans in segregating and suppressing black communities is well documented. (You can argue about intention, but the effect is pretty apparent) [1]
Remember this happened in the 40s and 50s. Plenty has changed since then, including the gentrification of poor areas near highways. But that doesn’t change the history of the US highway system.
1. The Cross Bronx Expressway, which basically created the South Bronx[1]. "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro is one of HN's most frequently recommended books, and covers this subject (as well as other racially-motivated planning projects by Robert Moses) extensively.
2. I-65 and I-165 in Mobile, AL cut directly through the historic "Africatown" neighborhood[2]. Residents regularly complain about both automotive and nearby industrial pollution, encouraged by ease of access by the highway[3].
Most of these effects are more visible on the East Coast rather than the West Coast, since the East's older and denser cities had fewer "paths of least resistance" when building the Interstate Highway System during the midcentury. But it wouldn't particularly surprise me if the areas that are now expensive in the cities that you mentioned were originally cleared for highways under "slum clearance" or similar laws.
Edit: This is anecdotal, but I figured I'd mention it anyways: I grew up in Manhattan, and virtually everybody I grew up with has (or had) asthma. Some of that is to be expected from other pollution sources (in particular, NYC used to burn very dirty heating oil), but I also went to public schools that were directly alongside major state and interstate highways.
Here in Seattle they bulldozed parks and diverse neighborhoods (parts of the International District, First Hill, Capitol Hill, Eastlake) where primarily queer and non-white people lived to build I-5.
Portland's I-205 has much the same story, my father lived through that terrible process where many of his friends had their homes razed to build yet another freeway.
Big example here in Denver, cut off historically black/hispanic neighborhood straight down the middle. Plus added a big leaking chemical refinery, dog food plant etc. The smells and pollution and asthma have had generational health effects.
Links to read below. #2 specifically has moving images/graphics.
They're currently expanding... to be fair they will add a small amount of benefits to 'bridge the gap' like a small park over a new small lowered section (but i think like only a couple blocks wide).
But it's still an expansion and the construction is bringing even more problems & nuisance.
Plus mostly young, mostly white expensive new construction apartment buildings have been creeping north and displacing a lot of historically black low income families. I think infilling and repurposing some of the old warehouse type space is good but the inequity is undeniable.
It's that joke about how real estate developments are named things like "Shady Grove" after whatever they destroyed to build it, but taken one step further.
Cut down the trees and name the neighborhood after them, then cut down Oak Street and name a highway after it.
> The road is named after Stacy Wilson Wade. He was the North Carolina Secretary of State from 1933 to 1936. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees for North Carolina State University.
Los Angeles has several examples, which I personally attribute to red-lining in the 1930s that led to current transportation policy and infrastructure choices.
-Boyle Heights was a predominately Latino community in east LA, which had the East LA interchange built right through it (I-10/I-5).
-Communities along what is currently I-105 were opposed to the construction since the 1970s for the typical NIMBY reasons, and these communities were predominately Black.
And the reverse:
-CA-2 was supposed to route from Silver Lake to Santa Monica via Beverly Hills, but community opposition prevented the freeway from being built and is why there's large parts of LA (mid-city/Melrose) that are far away from a freeway.
-I-710 was intended to connect Long Beach to Pasadena, but the city of South Pasadena protested heavily in preventing the freeway from being built and closing the gap. This litigation occurred up until the late-2010s when the CA State Assembly and Governor Newsom ended the 710 project once and for all.
> The construction of highways through poor (read: minority) urban areas, causing mass respiratory disease and premature deaths[1].
This has nearly nothing to do with automotive culture and everything to do with the system of governance in the US. In local politics in the US, your level of representation is roughly equal in proportion to your property tax bill every year. If you're renting, or otherwise in a situation where you don't directly pay (significant) property tax, your voice doesn't matter.
The rest is pretty much true, but would be worth noting that the only options for the US are for every city to have extensive sprawling underground metros interlinked by high-speed rail, or to have most people own a car and have highways everywhere. Any middle ground or half measure is untenable in our current society without causing direct, real, dire consequences to the very people you're trying to champion.
The Democracy Voucher program in Seattle has leveled the field quite a bit by enabling candidates that can connect with voters to field a viable, funded campaign: https://www.seattle.gov/democracyvoucher/program-data
We have a much larger field of candidates running due to this program.
1) I will be curious to see if the BEV revolution happens there will be a huge statistical change in cancer rates in the US.
3) as a cyclist who transitions from commuting by bike in the summer to car in the winter, it is astonishing how my psychology is impacted by driving in the two modes. I am so much more impatient and angry from driving.
There is just a nasty psychological feedback cycle of the obvious pure potential of the automobile as a time savings device and the visceral feeling of losing that when encountering any traffic or obstacle.
At least I get the cycling part to enlighten my perspective. Most americans are car-encased permanently and oblivious.
Not sure where you live but I am pretty far north. I'm in a similar situation but in the winter I ride the bus. My psychology changes just based on the lack of light. Driving is definitely super stressful but combine that with short, dark days and less exercise and it just compounds.
Estimates seem to be <10%, and I believe even that was by mass, so much less penetrating.
It is an issue, and I don't want lots of cars even if electric, but if you are weighing them as having similar air pollution, it's probably fearmongering, or fantasyland where cars don't have deteriorating emission control.
Regarding your third point, I've nothing but distain for bikers in my community. They put up signs to be treated like cars (since there generally are very poor shoulders in this area) but then will plow through stop signs and will not signal turns or anything. Nearly ran one over in a fire truck because they just ran right through the stop sign.
It’s been seen [0] that having a slightly different subset of traffic rules for cyclists (while maintaining that they are indeed a vehicle with rights to the public roadways) is safer for all parties.
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I think they were referring to nineplay's post, which was the GP of the post that replied to you. It gets pretty confusing, I guess pointers are hard even in natural language.
nineplay's post seemed to me to suggest that they believe that jaywalking being illegal is in itself a way to deal with the externalities of the car culture - it seems they are happy with jaywalking being illegal. I would guess that is why they also got the down votes.
Your reply seems to be written as if you thought nineplay was praising people making jaywalking not illegal, which I believe is the wrong reading of their post.
I cannot get to the site (blocked for EU) but the rule in France is two way.
The driver must not enforce its priority when there is someone crossing the street at a place they should not. The price is high.
A pedestrian can cross anywhere but has priority only on a zebra crossing. They are however expected to use a zebra crossing if there is one less 50 m away. It may cost you 11€ if you do not.
The reality is of course that people cross everywhere and it takes a lot of self control not to crosson a red light when there is nobody (I did that when I had small kids to give the right example)
And typically, the forensics would try to determine if a driver that hit a pedestrian in a situation where it could have been avoided at least tried to brake.
If not, the driver would typically be charged for negligence and it would launch an investigation for murder.
You may want to hold on with the pitchfork for a moment.
TL;DR If @satellite2 is, like myself, French, we do not have separate words for "murder" and "manslaughter" in the everyday language.
Longer version: we have the verb "tuer" ("to kill") which can be applied to people, flies, bears, time or boredom. It just mean to go from a state of "live/be" to "not live/be".
We then have the noun "homicide". It is never used in the everyday language (but would be in legal proceedings and sometimes on the TV news when they want to qualify the act). Its etymology is "homme" + "occire" ("man" + "old French word for kill"). It means "to kill a man". There is no connotation beside that and you add the adjective "volontaire" or "involontaire" ("intended" or "unintended") to make the English difference between "murder" and "manslaughter". And then plenty of other legal qualifications (premeditation or not etc.)
Again: this is a word you would not use in everyday conversation. Please note that there is no verb derived from "homicide". It is only a noun.
In many cases people will use "murder" to mean "someone was killed somehow", while technically "murder" ("meurtre" in French) is an intended act. But since our "manslaughter" ("homicide volontaire") is too long we use "murder".
This is entirely about the same politics of safety we're seeing play out with the pandemic. If jaywalking was legal, the sacrifice is that we'd have to drive slower to watch for pedestrians.
As Americans our priority has been individual convenience, over collective safety of our neighbors. Its shifting slowly, but for the most part this is a battle we're grappling with as a society on multiple fronts right now.
> If jaywalking was legal, the sacrifice is that we'd have to drive slower to watch for pedestrians.
There is a middle ground: the law could say that, while you can't get a ticket just for crossing a street outside the marked crosswalks, if you do cross that way and get hit by a car, the presumption is that you were at fault--whereas, if you get hit by a car while you are in the marked crosswalks, the presumption is that the driver of the car was at fault. That would basically reflect the same presumption that is in our current laws, but it would remove the excuse for cops to mess with people when they haven't caused any harm.
Note that "presumption" does not mean an automatic finding of fault; it just means that whoever is presumed to be at fault has the burden of establishing that they weren't, if they believe they weren't. That's a common situation in law.
In short, making jaywalking itself--crossing a street outside the marked crosswalks--illegal is not about safety at all; it's about local municipalities finding ways to shake down people for money. Just like most traffic laws.
> if you do cross that way and get hit by a car, the presumption is that you were at fault--whereas, if you get hit by a car while you are in the marked crosswalks, the presumption is that the driver of the car was at fault
I'd be wary of this. A pedestrian's position in the street is hard to prove (and defend) when they're hit by a vehicle. Say someone gets hit and is thrown twenty feet when crossing at an unmarked intersection (which in most municipalities is still a valid crosswalk). It's hard to reconstruct the scene to prove that the ped was in the crosswalk when hit. A safer perspective would to err on the side that the driver is at fault in any instance. You could also argue that the driver has assumed the responsibility of their actions and any mistake they might make before getting behind the wheel.
> A pedestrian's position in the street is hard to prove (and defend) when they're hit by a vehicle.
This is true today, so how do such cases get handled today in jurisdictions where jaywalking is illegal?
Note that I am not proposing changing the current presumptions of guilt if there has been an accident, only the rule about what cops are allowed to write a ticket for if there hasn't been an accident.
> You could also argue that the driver has assumed the responsibility of their actions and any mistake they might make before getting behind the wheel.
And you could argue that pedestrians have assumed the responsibility of their actions and any mistake they might make when they choose to walk on public sidewalks and cross public roads. I don't see that this helps either way.
In the UK we have a good setup where is a pedestrian walks out it's on the driver to be careful and try stop, therefore the presumption is normally that the driver (or larger vehicle generally so lorry>car>cyclist>pedestrian) is at fault in most cases. It sounds chaotic but in practicality it's balanced by the fact most people don't want to be hit by a car and we teach kids from a young age how to cross roads.
There are still marked crosswalks in the UK, though, correct? (The only part of the UK I've been in is London and that was years ago, but I remember seeing marked crosswalks and people generally keeping to them when crossing and obeying traffic signals.) Does the presumption that the driver is at fault depend on whether the pedestrian is in a crosswalk or not?
There are a few for the busy roads, but there are many, many smaller roads with unmarked crossings. In the countryside this is the norm and pedestrians and hikers walk along the road as well.
We even have a few national trails go straight across motorways without crossings!
In a situation like that, where there is a presumption of fault on both sides, fault would probably end up being split 50-50. Which in practice usually means each party ends up paying their own costs. A large disparity in costs (as would probably be the case in the example you give) might change that, but it would probably end up having to be decided in court.
(Note that what I am describing would be the case under current law wherever jaywalking is illegal, not just under the hypothetical law I described.)
This middle ground currently governs most interactions between people in cars and people on bicycles. This fails in practice, as criminally irresponsible drivers are able to speed away from crime scenes while their victims are injured, dead, or otherwise incapable of seeking redress.
Sec. 19-151. Crossing a roadway.
(a) No pedestrian shall cross the roadway within the central business district other than within a marked or unmarked crosswalk.
(b) Every pedestrian crossing a roadway outside of the central business district at any point other than within a marked or unmarked crosswalk shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway.
(c) No pedestrian shall cross a roadway where signs or traffic control signals prohibit such crossing.
Having lived in the country, hitting deer at 55pmh (100km/h) is a fact of life. You repair the car and move on. Many will call the sheriff, but that is because if you report it you get a permit to eat the deer (otherwise it is poaching - the sheriff is supposed to make sure you aren't intentionally hitting deer with your car).
If you hit a dog with your car it is the fault of the owner for not taking care of the dog.
I worry about children though, as we all know they are not as smart as they should be.
> If jaywalking was legal, the sacrifice is that we'd have to drive slower to watch for pedestrians
The majority of countries don't have laws like jaywalking yet they have similar speed limits to the US. Instead you have a mutual understanding of don't step out infront of traffic when you're a pedestrian, and look out for pedestrians when you're driving.
> If jaywalking was legal, the sacrifice is that we'd have to drive slower to watch for pedestrians
I'm not too well-versed on the various American speed limits. But I can tell you the Danish ones. Here there's no concept of "jaywalking". There's simply "crossing the street", and that's functionally never illegal.
We drive 50 kph in cities, towns, and villages. That's 31 mph. On wider roads that speed is 60 kph, or 37 mph. Those are still legal to cross as you please as a pedestrian.
Our normal country roads are driven at 80 kph, or 50 mph. These have a single lane in each direction and shared with pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, and every other road-going transportation method.
The next levels of road speeds (90 kph [55 mph], 110 kph [68 mph], and 130 kph [80 mph]) are only found on roads that don't connect directly to anything used by pedestrians. Specifically, on two-lane expressways and motorways. These can only be used by cars and motorcycles.
As I said initially, I'm not too well versed in US speed limits, but it's my understanding that these speeds at least match, if not are higher, than those. In other words, there is no inherent need to slow cars down in the US to make "jaywalking" legal.
I grew up in a trailer park that exited onto a highway. The parts with the intersecting streets were a 35 or maybe even 25 zone, but within a half mile in either direction it was at 55, so the traffic coming through was particularly unpredictable.
Directly across the street, with no marked crossing, was a gas station with a 24/7 mini-mart. It's a miracle I was only hit crossing that street once.
Americans commenting negatively on Americans collectively is quite common, and I think the common sense thing to do is just assume that whenever you see it, understand that the author is only telling you about their own biases and stereotypes, and not about any empirical fact of Americans.
As someone that nearly hit someone that walked out from behind a bush, with a chemically fueled disregard for the world, I don't think the rules are so bad. As unpopular as the opinion appears to be here, I don't like the idea of having to dodge humans randomly entering the road. Should we also take down the signals and barriers that prevent cars from crossing train tracks, since they have the similar goal of preventing a high speed object, with orders of magnitude more weight, from colliding with something relatively squishy?
edit: No need to immediately downvote. I would enjoy some discussion.
> I don't like the idea of having to dodge humans randomly entering the road
Attitudes like that are why cars are the number one killer of small children in the USA.
I think the idea is that car drivers should be able to see a human and adequately respond to avoid deadly collision (this usually means driving slowly and with more caution in areas where there are humans. this also can mean driving a lighter/smaller vehicle but that seems harder to do nowadays with cars getting beefier over time).
Trains, after operators see an obstruction on the tracks, literally cannot respond in time.
All children, and even young adults. Drivers are scything down tens of thousands of people a year and for the most part we do. not. care. We won't even charge them with negligence (again, if sober). It's OK to slaughter children with your car ("vehicular manslaughter", that is - because it's OK if it's vehicular)
> with a chemically fueled disregard for the world,
a law against it doesn't stop that kind of person.
And the rest of the world does pretty much fine without strict jaywalking laws, which doesn't mean that there are no laws regulating how pedestrians behave when interacting with street traffic, just that crossing a street safely isn't be default illegal. (and most people have the self-preservation sense to figure that out). It's also easy to create situations where not crossing a street at all is extremely impractical, and flat-out banning it then is not a good idea.
I am not downvoting you. Your comment illustrates the mindset difference here, and honestly before I left the US I wasn't so different. But as noted in the article, streets used to be for play, chatting, etc. It would be more convenient to go deer hunting on playgrounds if shooting kids on accident had no consequences, too.
Trains going any useful speed can't drive on sight because stopping distances are insane. That is why it makes sense to have signals and barriers for trains. Cars' stopping distance is about a hundredfold shorter, so we can expect drivers to drive such that they can brake if humans randomly enter the road.
Another related law is the requirement for cyclists to keep as far right as practicable regardless of whether or not there are marked lanes for traffic [1].
Most states have a law that requires vehicles moving at less than the normal speed of traffic to use the right most lane that serves their destination. But the law that specifically applies to cyclists states that they have to keep as far right as practicable within the right most lane itself (with some exceptions).
For instance, here's the law [2] in New York:
>> Upon all roadways, any bicycle or in-line skate shall be driven either on a usable bicycle or in-line skate lane or, if a usable bicycle or in-line skate lane has not been provided, near the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway or upon a usable right-hand shoulder in such a manner as to prevent undue interference with the flow of traffic
They state the reason is to prevent undue interference with the flow of traffic. They don't mention anything about cyclist safety.
Seeing as encounters with law enforcement are probably more deadly on average than jaywalking - I wholly support this change. Being poor in a car city is something most folks in the circles I run in now have never experienced or thought about. The documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” has a fantastic section about this.
> encounters with law enforcement are probably more deadly on average than jaywalking
36 pedestrians were killed last year in accidents in my city. We have one contested police shooting.
31 the year before that, two contested shootings.
At least biweekly there's an article in the local paper about someone hit while illegally crossing a highway, often at night. I have unfortunately seen a pedestrian get hit by crossing on a red walk sign, luckily they survived.
On the other hand, there are probably many more instances of jaywalking than police encounters, so the statement you quoted may still be correct. At 36x, I'd guess that's more likely than not—I've been stopped on foot by the police once that I can remember, and I've probably jaywalked thousands of times.
In my own anecdotal experience, the most dangerous way to cross the road is in a marked crosswalk with a signal—as in, this is how I've come closest to death by car the most times in the city where I've been living for a few decades. Intersections with these crosswalks often have traffic coming from multiple directions, and you have to really understand the local traffic patterns to cross safely without exposing yourself to a vehicle running a red light or taking a hasty left turn without checking for pedestrians.
I would be interested to know how many of the pedestrian deaths in the statistic you quoted were due to jaywalking.
In my own anecdotal experience, the most dangerous way to cross the road is in a marked crosswalk with a signal...
When I visited London a couple of years ago I was surprised to see that they set the crosswalk significantly back from the intersection. Meaning that a car turning actually can turn, and stop in front of the crosswalk for pedestrians. Which in turn means that the driver can pay attention to cars, decide to turn, and then separately deal with pedestrians rather than have pedestrians be part of a complicated decision.
I know of no research on it, but I have to believe that this design saves lives over the American standard of having the crosswalk right at the intersection.
Did you also notice that there's no such thing as jaywalking in the UK? I had to be told so many times on visiting the US to start to internalise it!
Here, you cross where and when it's safe. Busy roads have crossings, because otherwise you might wait a very long time for it to be safe, but there are no crossings on 99% of streets, because you're allowed to cross them wherever you need to
> I have unfortunately seen a pedestrian get hit by crossing on a red walk sign, luckily they survived.
These stats are not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to compare injuries per incident: number of vehicle-caused pedestrian injuries per pedestrian crossing vs. number of police-caused injuries per police interaction.
I have seen countless pedestrians walking at their top speed, the moment the walk sign turns green, only to have it turn red before they've cleared the intersection. In many of those situations where I've been driving, I've been honked at for not carelessly running down the elderly or disabled. If every crossing was long enough to permit those folks to cross in time, cities would be deluged with complaints. How many pedestrians in your statistics were physically incapable of crossing in time?
I've been nearly run over by probably a dozen cars in my life, while I've had the right of way in a crossing (my favorite being the time that a cop was looking one way and turning the other, and my timely shout saved my legs). How many pedestrians in your statistics had the right of way?
This is more due to terrible urban design. Often in car oriented cities you have the option of a 1mile+ detour, or jumping a dangerous road.
Same with people running don't walk signs. Often (but not always) they are set to be incredibly short for pedestrians and very long green for cars (to reduce traffic). This again makes people chance it.
The solution isn't criminalising it, it's building better cities.
Criminalization of jaywalking is like criminalization of drug use (or ownership). It's not only not solving the problem - it's actively making it worse.
The right way to fix pedestrian deaths on the streets is to slow the traffic down. It's a solved problem. It's been tested all over Europe. It works.
As a bonus you get walkable cities, less suburbanization, smaller rich-poor division, less crime in the cities, less traffic jams, more people using public transport and bikes, less air pollution and CO2 emissions.
Slowing traffic down is the least desired solution because we'd have to remake all of those other things too to get the benefits. It doesn't lead to less suburbanization until people get fed up of wasting time and give up the home they actually wanted.
You could solve people getting run over on the subway tracks by slowing those down too, but criminalization and station design is just a much better approach. Slowing down is inefficient and may cost just as many lifetimes, only in little pieces every day.
While I agree about slowing down traffic I don't agree it's a solved problem in Europe. More and more countries and cities are on board but we are far away from the target in both regulations and road culture.
You're right, drivers should simply pause physics and magically stop their vehicle or wear nightvision goggles at all times.
I was making a right turn on a 40mph road on a green light. There's a crosswalk there so I checked and the crosswalk was vacant, made the turn and proceeded to get up to speed on that road.
And then immediately did a hard brake because a woman was illegally crossing the road around a bend, covered by trees, with a kid being dragged behind her, 40 feet from a crosswalk that clearly indicated DO NOT WALK.
There's a reason we have signs. Follow the signs. Having the right away is not the same as being impervious to being struck by a moving vehicle.
So you're driving at over 60km/h in the city (which is illegal in many countries and for a good reason) at night near a blind corner and narrowly avoid killing people and you think you did nothing wrong and it would be their own fault.
That's the exact attitude that criminalization of jaywalking is teaching drivers. And that's exactly why it's killing people every day.
It's just as absurd as making a law that forbids women to walk alone at night (for their own safety) and blaming them if they break that law and get raped.
For every instance a driver like you has with someone crossing like that, there are probably 100+ of someone walking and a driver nearly plowing over them.
I walk and bike around my town a lot, and I'm very cognizant of my surroundings.
I can not even count how many times I've had people driving see me start to go in to a crosswalk and just totally blast through it, back out of driveways where I was very visible on the driver's side and not even look (TWICE only getting attention in time to not get hit by bashing on the car), people driving at high speed in to parking lots inches away.
A month ago I was walking out of a nearby park on the only road in and out, that doesn't have a sidewalk for some idiotic reason, and I had some asshole try to sideswipe me and ended up clipping me with their mirror on purpose.
Think about this next time you bring up a single instance of someone walking in a dangerous way. The design of cities in the US and the contempt of many people driving is many, many times worse for pedestrians than the other way around.
> You're right, drivers should simply pause physics and magically stop their vehicle or wear nightvision goggles at all times.
You're being ridiculous here. Nobody is asking for that, they're asking for sensible road design and sensible rules.
> because a woman was illegally crossing the road around a bend, covered by trees, with a kid being dragged behind her, 40 feet from a crosswalk that clearly indicated DO NOT WALK.
That's shitty road design (if the crosswalk is 40ft from a blind blocked corner in either direction, someone might not see it travelling at speed), and arguably careless driving - blind corners could have a deer, pedestrian, broken down car, etc.
> Having the right away is not the same as being impervious to being struck by a moving vehicle.
Right of way or not, you are the operator of the dangerous machine,not the pedestrian. The onus is on you to pay attention to your surroundings. It doesn't matter whose fault it is if you clip a child at 40mph, they're dead.
> Right of way or not, you are the operator of the dangerous machine,not the pedestrian. The onus is on you to pay attention to your surroundings. It doesn't matter whose fault it is if you clip a child at 40mph, they're dead.
This is disingenuous.
Say for instance a person wants to die by being hit by traffic: they can jump out from behind a parked car right as the car passes. So in at least some percentage of cases, there's simply nothing even the most attentive driver could do to avoid hitting someone.
I'm not saying cars are never at fault (I walk, ride a bike, and ride a motorcycle, each more than I drive a car; I've got plenty of first hand experience with at-fault drivers) but framing it this way seems very dishonest to me.
> So in at least some percentage of cases, there's simply nothing even the most attentive driver could do to avoid hitting someone.
Only a sith deals in absolutes. Just because you can't prevent someone who _wants_ to be hit from being hit doesn't mean you shouldn't be completely vigilant. As an example, it's not reasonable to expect an obstruction on highway/motorway traffic, but it _is_ on a 40mph road with crosswalks.
If you're driving along a road with parked cars, you slow to a speed where if someone (say a 4 year old child) jumps out you can stop within your reaction time. Anything else is dangerously reckless.
> If you're driving along a road with parked cars, you slow to a speed where if someone (say a 4 year old child) jumps out you can stop within your reaction time. Anything else is dangerously reckless.
Going substantially slower than the posted speed limit is a ticketable offense in most areas.
It also makes it more difficult for other drivers to judge your speed and position if you are not going either the posted or "accepted" speed for that stretch of road. This can and does cause accidents, particularly in retirement communities where older drivers slow down because they feel it will be safer.
My previous post was merely stating that driver vigilance is not the only factor in a collision with a pedestrian. Jumping out in front of the car is just one example because it's easy to visualize.
I am very much not stating that drivers are already vigilant enough. Only pushing back against a disingenuous statement. I don't want people to espouse a view I agree with (drivers should be more vigilant) with an argument that is easy to debunk.
>> You're being ridiculous here. Nobody is asking for that, they're asking for sensible road design and sensible rules.
Oh, you'd be surprised what "city activists" can devise in their stupid heads in my country. Their recent idea is: driver hiting pederastian should always be at fault, even if a drunk pederastian is suddenly jumping in front of their car, from behind the parked car or other obstacle.
If you can't see around the bend, you're required to slow down so that there is sufficient room for you to stop, should there be a vehicle, pedestrian, or obstruction in the road.
> There's a crosswalk there so I checked and the crosswalk was vacant, made the turn and proceeded to get up to speed on that road. And then immediately did a hard brake because a woman was illegally crossing the road around a bend, covered by trees,
1.) If you cant see, you should not speed up.
2.) If you cant see, she cant see the crossroad either. Also, pedestrians dont are the ones with requirement to have driving license - drivers are the ones supposed to be in the know and in control.
> Seeing as encounters with law enforcement are probably more deadly on average than jaywalking
There are far more instances of jaywalking than police interactions, and yet pedestrian deaths are 6x higher than deaths from police. So no that is not true in any way, especially when you account for armed vs unarmed police shootings (~25 unarmed black people were shot and killed by police in 2019, where unarmed includes fake guns).
>There are far more instances of jaywalking than police interactions, and yet pedestrian deaths are 6x higher than deaths from police.
"And yet" is entirely the wrong conjunction here; if there are more instances of jaywalking than police encounters, then it logically follows there would be more deaths.
In fact, I'd argue that there are far more than 6x as many instances of jaywalking than there are police encounters, which kind of undermines your whole point.
"Pedestrian deaths" does not equal "deaths caused by jaywalking."
> There are far more instances of jaywalking than police interactions, and yet pedestrian deaths are 6x higher than deaths from police.
The first assertion actually cuts against your argument. If there are far more instances of jaywalking than police encounters, then even if there are many more deaths caused by jaywalking, police encounters could still be deadlier on a per-instance basis.
Given that non-cop/cop interactions are not risk-free, avoiding them is only sensible, as is not creating unnecessary reasons for interaction, like inventing "crimes" like this.
If you don't like thinking of cops as danger sources, then tell yourself it frees up cops for more important work.
I was telling a coworker about this once and he didn't believe me, but it was basically a deliberate and successful attempt at mass social engineering through domestic propaganda.
We went from vilifying reckless drivers as "speed demons" to vilifying pedestrians as "jays" (yokels or hicks.)
Jaywalking is such ridiculous 'crime'. It's not a thing here in the UK and when an American friend first explained it at uni I thought they were winding me up. It's no wonder American cities are so unwalkable and that America has an obesity crisis
It’s very interesting to visit compact cities like San Francisco, DC, and NYY, and see how much people jaywalk without a worry. Having walked across the street outside of a crosswalk an uncountable number of times, I cannot recall ever being stopped or being alone. Seems people can adequately decide the risk. It would be better to put the onerous on safety back on to vehicles, but this new law could be used to justify blocking traffic.
Having lived in several major cities I think that most traffic (pedestrian, car and bike) behaves reasonably and predictably.
Online discussion is dominated by people who are only ever in one of the above groups and wants the law to completely and totally favor them at the expense of the others. I don't think this jaywalking thing is a big deal or that much changes with/without a law.
> San Francisco, DC, and NYY, and see how much people jaywalk without a worry.
I'm only familiar with San Fransisco, but the speed difference between a car in San Fransisco and a human is often pretty slight. Bicycles are usually the highest speed object.
This is because, at least in California and New York, jaywalking is not a crime. It is a civil infraction.
This means there is no criminal record or court/jail time. It’s a ticket just like a parking or speeding ticket. I find it hard to believe people believe we should be allowed to just hang out in the street. It’s there for general safety of everyone. Could we adjust the rule to account for situations where no cars are around? Sure. But obviously we can’t have a rule where people are allowed to just cross busy city streets at will anywhere. It would be terrible for overall mobility in the city as well as dangerous.
These articles are just typical internet extremism and conspiracy theories about “Big Something”. It’s a non issue most places.
> But obviously we can’t have a rule where people are allowed to just cross busy city streets at will anywhere. It would be terrible for overall mobility in the city as well as dangerous.
That's how many many countries operate and it's actually relatively safe.
Tidbit: Jaywalking is more typically associated with hard-charging city dwellers, but it means "country walking".
Specifically, the word "jay" colloquially referred to a country bumpkin.
Traffic lights were first installed in cities. People from rural areas were not aware of the traffic light system and it was the country folk, not the city people, who were most originally associated with perpetrating jaywalking. Hence, "country walking".
[can't read the article because it's blocked in the EU, not sure if they covered this]
Jaywalking drives me crazy... sometimes I wish American culture was more German/Japanese in this area and Americans walked the extra 20 feet to the nearest crosswalk and waited for the light. A few times now I've had to tap my brakes for some guy dashing across the street to the island in the middle because he was too impatient to wait for the light to change. Sometimes it's a lady with a shopping cart.
These aren't slow residential roads either, but roads around commercial centers with speed limits around 45 MPH.
> In the Netherlands, for example, traffic engineers and urban planners have actually worked to lower the country’s curbs so as to encourage people to cross wherever they like.
This I don't understand at all unless it's in low/slow traffic areas.
Many US cities are designed to be downright hostile to pedestrians, California in particular. Some areas in Orange County have blocks before cross walks, or cross walks only on one side of the street so you had to make the right decision a block ago about which side of the street to be on! Strip malls seemed designed to have people drive the 1k feet between businesses rather than having accessible walking. With city planning focused on driving you start to realize why pedestrians can behave so badly?
If you're talking specifically about urban cities, I still bet Japan/Germany have been urban planning for sidewalks which encourages "good behavior".
I don't think I've ever seen an American strip mall without a wide sidewalk running in front of every business on the strip. The sidewalk is such an integral component of a strip mall, it sounds like what you're describing isn't a strip mall at all. And if people are so lazy that they drive around the parking lot instead of using the sidewalk, that reflects on them, not the sidewalk.
Walking TO the strip mall, not walking across the storefronts. Strip malls typically have awful pedestrian accommodations in the parking lot; there's often no "safe" way to get from the street to the stores.
> And if people are so lazy that they drive around the parking lot instead of using the sidewalk, that reflects on them, not the sidewalk.
I think this reflects a lot of comments, "American's are lazy" and "Look at this german punks walking and respecting traffic laws!" Is the argument US is just inherently lazy? Could there be something else at play? I think it's just that when a use case isn't a main focus of design those users will be stuck trying to hack the system or having a poor experience. USA isn't designed for walkers most places, those people will behave "badly" because of it.
Also, yes there are strip malls that bad, I can show one but then we'll be having pedantic arguments over "hey if you walk an extra 600 feet you have a sidewalk!" or something. Like, even the idea of a strip mall inherently is car centric, with most square footage devoted to parking and who wants to walk (or even drive!) through a parking lot.
If the shoe fits... I've seen too many young slightly chubby people coasting around on mobility scooters at Walmart instead of walking a few hundred meters to think laziness isn't a strong component to this sort of behavior.
You're only thinking one level deep, what causes the laziness. My argument is US society actively encourages it on multiple levels starting from just the design of our cities.
> Many US cities are designed to be downright hostile to pedestrians
Exactly, which is why the decriminalization of jaywalking in those cities is a terrible idea. Orange County isn't going to be redesigned, so more jaywalkers means more pedestrian deaths.
Why do you think the default should be that it's your right of way in the car?
Why should pedestrians keep out of your way and not cross your path? Why don't we instead say you should keep out of the pedestrians way and not cross their path?
Maybe we should reset the expectation that cars own the streets, and make them a guest there, deferring to human beings in the first instance.
Because if cars are being driven at a speed where they are actually useful, then basic physics dictates that it is not safe to mix cars and pedestrians. The car can only stop so quickly, and you must also factor in that both the pedestrians and drivers are humans and will make mistakes in gauging distance, speed, visibility, and will not always have ideal response times. The legal "right of way" cannot ignore reality. To avoid deaths it is far better to designate areas where cars have right of way and where pedestrians have right of way and clearly mark them.
I agree that the US infrastructure doesn't do enough to support pedestrian and bicycle transport. Expecting people cross only at intersections that are a half-mile apart is unrealistic. Expecting people to cross at a cross-walk that is 5 yards away is not. Crossing just beyond an intersection is the most dangerous possible place to cross due to inherently poor visibility, and all the competing demands for attention that drivers and pedestrians encounter around an intersection. This isn't a matter of rights or relative importance, its a matter of physics and human ability.
Wishing away all the cars is not practical solution, which is what your post essentially amounts to.
This is exactly the problem wit the car culture, almost everywhere outside the netherlands. You give cars so much space, they start behaving like it's the freeway, and then drive into buildings or do other stuff which kills drivers and other users. Of course they are speeding, and they shouldn't do that. But the netherlands thinks ahead, and tries not to give cars the opportunity to speed. So, we make a lot of obstacles and opposing traffic. Somehow drivers still do not like to kill people, slow down, and save themselves in the process.
Look at this video's and others from this channel, to see how the netherlands builds infrastructure being more forgiving of mistakes, and find out how our cities turn out more livable:
It's not a law of physics that dictates that you must be allowed to operate cars at a speed that you feel is actually useful.
There are plenty of things that could be useful, yet aren't in the context of civilized society. For instance, shotguns are useful for killing squirrels. That alone doesn't grant someone the right to use them that way at any place or time.
"Wishing" people into crosswalks is also not a practical solution.
> Why do you think the default should be that it's your right of way in the car?
a) Because it's the law, b) because there's a power dynamic. I can accidentally kill a pedestrian, a pedestrian can't accidentally kill me unless they throw a brick off an overpass.
> Why should pedestrians keep out of your way and not cross your path?
So that they take responsibility for their own safety.
> Why don't we instead say you should keep out of the pedestrians way and not cross their path?
Because I disagree I should be liable if someone darts out into traffic and is struck by my car.
> Maybe we should reset the expectation that cars own the streets, and make them a guest there, deferring to human beings in the first instance.
In dense cities... sure, I agree. In car-heavy suburban areas where everything is super spread out? I don't think this is a necessarily a good idea.
All your arguments are about protecting yourself and limiting your liability at the expense of the pedestrian and you just slowing down and taking more care.
You even talk in the passive voice about people being struck by your car rather than you striking them with your car.
I would have to drive very far below the speed limit on any street in my vicinity to be able to safely stop before hitting a jaywalker.
I can do that, of course, but I then become a road hazard. I find it hard to believe that the overall safety would increase as a result. I'm open to being otherwise convinced.
The solution there is that you drop the speed limit for everyone and therefore you're not a road hazard. Anywhere that could have a reasonable number of pedestrians should have adopted limits such that the majority of traffic can safely stop before hitting someone in most cases. Drivers convenience should not trump people's lives.
Why am I being villainized for a) going the speed limit, b) complaining about a legitimate safety issue?
I would never intentionally strike a pedestrian in my vehicle, but a situation where a) I am driving the speed limit, b) a pedestrian jaywalking forces me to reflexively brake is not safe. So either the speed limit needs to be lowered, or pedestrians need to behave more safely. I would not need to reflexively brake if pedestrians waited their turn at a designated crosswalk.
In the effort to find common ground, maybe the villains are not the specific drivers, but the planners or collective culture who decided to built highway like roads next to shopping plazas. "The speed limit needs to be lowered" is a good compromise.
You argue by Germany and in Germany jaywalking the way it exists in USA does not really exist. There are a lot more options for pedestrians to cross the street, the marked crossing is not necessary.
There are ways for pedestrian to get small fine, but generally cars are supposed to be in control and watch for pedestrians.
> Without the jaywalker there is no safety issue either.
This isn’t true - a street of just cars will have lethal crashes amongst themselves even with no pedestrians. A street of just pedestrians will never lethally bump into each other. The only lethal thing in the situation is the cars.
> a) Because it's the law, b) because there's a power dynamic. I can accidentally kill a pedestrian, a pedestrian can't accidentally kill me unless they throw a brick off an overpass.
In Germany, car drivers must always be prepared to brake for pedestrians, including children and elderly people. Children as young as 6-7 walk the streets alone or in packs, so the kid dashing is real possibility. No one is gonna call CPS over it, schools literally recommend first graders to walk to school alone.
Pedestrian must use shortest path through street, but does not have to use crossing - you have to use crossing only if one is available within 40m or so.
The power dynamic does not really plays out. The cars are slow in cities, cross walks are everywhere.
> b) because there's a power dynamic. I can accidentally kill a pedestrian, a pedestrian can't accidentally kill me unless they throw a brick off an overpass.
I'd argue the opposite conclusion and say that as one operating dangerous machinery you should be given lower right of way for safety reasons. The burden should be on you to drive safely more than others to safely stay out of your way.
> So that they take responsibility for their own safety
And what about your responsibility as the person choosing to speed around in a ton of metal?
> In car-heavy suburban areas where everything is super spread out? I don't think this is a necessarily a good idea.
There's a chicken and the egg problem here. Such cities came about because of monopolization of streets by drivers. We can't change that over night but given the vast benefits of people centric urban design we should be tilting the balance away from cars and towards people.
Why can't you take some responsibility for their safety? You're the one in a 200+ bhp murder machine, not them. If somebody can dart out into the path of your car, you should be asking yourself why you let yourself get into that situation.
>"You're the one in a 200+ bhp murder machine, not them. If somebody can dart out into the path of your car, you should be asking yourself why you let yourself get into that situation."
If somebody can dart out in front of my car, isn't that the fault of the person who darted? Or, the civil engineer who designed the road? How can you possibly say that I let myself get into this situation?
My point is: why were you not more carefully assessing the situation, to ensure that you were driving at an appropriate speed, given the risk of having somebody leap into the path of your car? That is after all a situation you presumably want to avoid.
(Even if you don't care about hitting somebody, maybe at least consider that it's equivalent to having a 75 kg lump of meat fired at your car at, say, 35 mph.)
I've had pedestrians dart out in front of my path on three separate occasion in my life. Thankfully, I was aware enough to prevent hitting them. A combination of a slow enough speed, good brakes, enough distance, and luck (to be honest). It was a jarring experience each time, and each time it was completely unexpected. Of course I care about the life of the people who almost got hit - and I'm glad they didn't get maimed. But I absolutely did do a lot of cursing and wondering why they didn't look both ways.
From a city that has a lot of public transport (Prague): some people will dart in front of fully loaded buses, trams, or even trains at a railway crossing. That is humanity at its finest. (/s)
I would be pissed off if maximum speed of a train (a 20000+ bhp murder machine, by your standard) that I use to commute was lowered to some 10 kph in order to keep those candidates of the Darwin Award alive.
Being weaker (pedestrian) does not absolve you of all guilt if you decide to hazard with your life.
But a train is on specific tracks where a pedestrian has little need to be. That's not the case with cars, which intermingle heavily with pedestrian areas. In those cases I think it's perfectly fair to restrict their speed for safety and to put the onus on the driver to prioritise safety. The alternative is we either ban cars from pedestrian areas completely or we just accept the deaths or heavy inconvenience of pedestrians (which seems to be the current US model).
That's exactly what the jaywalker said about their own life when they decided to jump out into traffic to get across sooner. And it's a rational calculation: the five minutes saved is concretely useful and the chance of a death is low. When you do the math and present value calculation, you get more of your life to enjoy if you risk it sometimes.
Yes. If you disagree, jump in front of an oncoming train at the last second. After all the train has much more power than you and therefore the burden falls on the train operator to keep an eye out for you and save your life.
And in fact, train operators, do in fact make significant efforts to avoid killing people. It doesn't prevent all deaths. I believe it's reasonable to hold motorists to the same standard. "Make significant effort to avoid killing people". It's not a guarantee, if that's what you wanted to hear.
> because there's a power dynamic. I can accidentally kill a pedestrian, a pedestrian can't accidentally kill me unless they throw a brick off an overpass.
I think this point supports the other side of the argument. The pedestrian already has a very strong incentive to be careful: they might die otherwise. Of course most car drivers would be horrified to hit a pedestrian, but most care much less about a stranger's safety than their own (and some are complete psychos who won't care unless it materially costs them). So placing the main legal burden on the driver will do more to deter risky behaviour than would placing it on the pedestrian.
No, commercial. There are homeless people that jaywalk everywhere and the shopping carts hold their worldly possessions. If there is a shopping cart in a residential area, it usually means the shopping cart was stolen.
Same here. In Utah, if there's a 4-way intersection, pedestrians always have right of way and police enforce it. I was pulled over for not yielding on a 45 MPH road and when the officer asked "do you know why I pulled you over?" I sincerely had no idea.
I think I understand the intent of the law but I guess my own philosophy of "cross where you're far less likely to die" isn't the legal one.
The idea is that you should make it easier and more comfortable for pedestrians and cyclists at the cost of cars because cars in the city make our lives miserable, especially cars driving fast. The fewer and slower travelling cars there are the better city life is. Better as in healthier, more comfortable, pleasant to be outside and safer.
I really don't care what other people do so long as they don't cut people off and force them to react (and I apply this heuristic to all types of traffic). Jaywalking into moving traffic is solidly an example of the latter.
There is a noticeable anti-automobile crowd here on HN. Personally, anti-jaywalking laws just make sense and there doesn't need to be sinister motivations from the auto-industry to explain why we have them.
There are not anti-automobile people on here. There are people who are sick of cars being pushed as the /only/ way for things to be done. Almost every person you see advocating for better safety for pedestrians, people biking, etc understands that cars are necessary for some things. It just doesn't need to be forced for literally every small thing.
there are at least a few commenters here who repeatedly advocate for banning cars altogether in cities. if not "anti-automobile", how would you describe this position?
Perhaps that's where we are in making sure the overton window doesn't cede ground to vested interests; only the extreme alternative as a starting point if negotiations of whats possible are being made.
That almost exclusively refers to largely limiting personal cars, it doesn't include service vehicles, delivery automobiles, etc (so construction vans and trucks, ambulances, etc are still allowed).
tbh I don't actually disagree with banning personal cars in very dense city centers. but I have to say it is a special sort of linguistic backflip to not call this position "anti-automobile".
Why try to tribalize this? I explained how a lot of people feel, and that there is a bit of a spectrum in what people want.
It really feels like you're trying to make this an "us vs. them" situation negatively, rather than understanding that it's people wanting safer, healthier, more enjoyable places to live by means of reducing car dependence.
I get what you're saying. And for what it's worth I do like the idea of making city centers more walkable and pedestrian friendly.
But based on some comments in this discussion there are absolutely anti-automobile people here and they are vocal. I just responded to someone calling a car a "murder machine".
Not that I disagree there's an anti car segment here (I'm personally very anti car) but a car can be (can not necessarily is) an effective murder machine. What other pieces of personal property does Western society openly embrace everyone owning but that can be used to murder people? I'm not saying that's the intent but when people call them murder machine the point they're raising (hyperbolically) is that cars and dangerous pieces of machinery and that has to be taken into account more when we consider urban design.
That's the point. Cars have an unmatched level of potential damage compared to almost anything short of actual weapons. Insisting that drivers are careful in any areas where pedestrians might be and being strict about that isn't unreasonable.
I see what you're getting at, but I don't think this is a great way to show your point. a chef's knife is primarily a kitchen tool, but it makes for a much more effective weapon than a car. the thing that makes cars somewhat unique is their potential for unintentional damage.
> Insisting that drivers are careful in any areas where pedestrians might be and being strict about that isn't unreasonable.
sure, but this is a vague statement that has no real teeth. everyone agrees that drivers ought to try not to hit pedestrians. what gets fiercely debated is how civil (and possibly criminal) liability ought to be apportioned.
I am definitely not anti-car (I love cars and driving), but I don't agree that jaywalking laws make any kind of sense. as a driver, it's enough to be presumed not at fault for hitting a pedestrian that is behaving erratically. as a pedestrian, it's absurd not to be allowed to cross an empty street when convenient.
I don't know about "sinister", I think everyone involved thought they were doing the right thing, but it's historical fact that US jaywalking laws are the result of a deliberate concerted effort by the auto-industry and law-makers. They weren't shy about it. There were announcements and photo-ops and stuff.
Fucking stupid. I used to live in a college town where no one obeyed traffic laws. I can't tell you how many car on car, car in bike, car on people accidents were caused by dumbasses walking into open traffic.
Predictably traffic is safe traffic. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about pedestrians, cars or bikes, the ability to accurately anticipate other parties moves is what makes for safety.
College campuses suck so bad for safety because you have people from tons of different regions with different etiquette and standards, in a new environment and nobody can predict what anybody else is about to do. Add in the drunks and it's amazing they're as safe as they are.
Lots of vitriol and stories. The bottom line is, pedestrians and cars don't belong on the same piece of road. The difference in speeds is too great to be safe.
They figured all this "mixed traffic safety" stuff out during the industrial revolution (the first time people frequently shared the workplace with big fast rolling things that could kill them).
The only reason we're still arguing about the details is because everyone wants their pet favorite type of traffic to be favored by law.
I remember a work colleague from Canada asking if it was OK that we were walking across a busy street in Frankfurt Germany. I was a bit confused, but said that, Yes it's OK to walk across the street. In retrospect I might have added, you also don't have to ask anybody if it's OK to go to the bathroom. North America is a strange place.
I had the misfortune of talking to a psychopath recently who admitted to intentionally killing a pedestrian. It made me wonder how many traffic deaths are actually homicides. Legally there is zero accountability so it's the perfect crime.
Which means they can safely ignore GDPR. But they're not, they're blocking visitors. That's an incoherent response: if they need to pay attention to GDPR blocking doesn't protect them, and if they don't need to pay attention to GDPR blocking visitors just deprives them of page views.
> if they need to pay attention to GDPR blocking doesn't protect them
Could you explain why? I thought that GDPR was applicable only to residents of the EU, and blocking them was a “good enough” way used by websites who do intensive personalized data tracking to avoid having to follow it.
I don't personally approve of this way, but fail to understand why it's supposedly ineffective.
Although unless they do business in Europe, there would not be any legal recourse for the EU right? I'm always surprised that any business that can block all EU/GDPR users without impacting their business would even need to care about the laws in those places.
I guess the EU could fine them and then force Google to hand over this newspapers advertisement income, and Google would probably comply since they want and need to do business in the EU.
This site clearly doesn't want to, but you still have people like the GP and others here complaining. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If commenters here want sites to have the option to not deal with Europe, then they shouldn't also turn around and chide the sites for making that choice.
Note I’m not complaining; my comment was not sarcastic. This is a simple news website run by a nonprofit. Its data collection is probably limited to an off-the-shelf analytics solution.
Well they could just ignore the GDPR, like probably 80+% of the world's websites (of course then someone would complain how dare they ignore EU law...)
It's simply impossible to be aware of all the laws in the world. At some point the simplest and most realistic thing to do is to ignore what does not directly concern you.
From what someone else has commented they are accessible from Norway, so they may already be in breach of the GDPR depending on how they track visitors. Are the Norwegian authorities going after a small-ish organization from Virginia? Nope. They are not even aware that those guys exist and won't bother anyway.
I do agree with you, though, that it is absolutely fair for non-EU websites that don't want to have anything to do with the GDPR to block EU visitors.
I don’t agree that this is flamebait. A significant fraction of the Bay Area seems ok with decriminalization of street crime including shoplifting. There are many stories of businesses like Walgreens closing due to the impact of constantly theft in San Francisco.
I'm being sincere. My research indicates both problems cause roughly $40 billion/year in damage to the economy. It's not my fault that most people posting here don't see the impact of wage theft and/or the impact of tangling shoplifters in the criminal justice system.
Your median wage thief probably steals way more than the median shoplifter.
Flamebait means a comment is likely to provoke a flamewar. This doesn't vary with sincerity, but rather with substantiveness and flammability. Those are the variables you need to modulate.
We have to moderate effects (or likely effects), not intent. Effects are observable while intent often isn't, and of course it's effects which actually make a difference on the site, whether intended or not.
Intent doesn't communicate itself, especially on flammable topics, so the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate it. One way to do this is to write thoughtfully and add information. Your reply here is already much better than your GP comment. This often happens in response to moderation—people respond by explaining some of the background that was in their mind but which they didn't say earlier. The thing to do is to include more of that in the first place, and then it will be clear that your intent is substantive discussion rather than provocation.
Here are some previous explanations in case they're helpful:
Depriving others of their property without their permission is generally seen as a bad thing and worthy of self-defense actions. Theft should be a crime.
I understand leniency if a hungry person is stealing food.
If wage theft were a criminal offense, the people being locked up wouldn't necessarily be of the social class of people currently being locked up for non-violent offenses.
Decriminalization without functioning social work infra is this result. Just because SF is incompetent in this regard does not mean continued criminalization of minor offenses should continue.
There’s nuance, and that nuance is critical to the discussion.
Oh please. These crimes have real consequences, both financially and in quality of life for the people who live in these areas. Almost everyone I know has had their car broken into. I know multiple people who have been assaulted. I personally have had to run from a homeless man with a knife. I’ve seen people grind up pills on the roof of a trash can and snort them next to a police officer.
We deserve a better quality of life than this. There is absolutely no reason to tolerate people behaving in this way in society. These are adult human beings with agency who should face consequences for their actions. The problem isn’t lack of investment or infra, the problem is incentivizing behavior that is destructive to a functioning society.
There's a massive gulf between crime with a victim like shoplifting and general petty theft and crime without a victim, like jaywalking, that everyone seems to go willingly blind to on an ideological as-needed basis.
How much does it cost to run someone through the legal system for shoplifting? Is that an effective use of resources versus preventing the shoplifting using social services? Three strikes laws have proven very expensive and not very useful for behavioral nudges, so maybe we explore other ways to get folks to shy away from committing property crimes.
If cost were what mattered we wouldn't prosecute all sorts of crimes. It's not about the cost. It's about making it not worth people's while violate other people's property rights.
I would sympathize with your confusion if it were just the first half of the post, but the second half makes it obvious that it is a sincere suggestion (and a reasonable one).
Why not punish both? Shoplifting and wage theft involve theft. It's not okay to harm some random business because some other business made you bus tables after your shift ended or whatever.
Who suggested in this thread that we shouldn't punish them? The grand parent commenter asked for them to be punished the same, the parent commenter for some reason thought that was so outlandish it must've been sarcasm.
"the auto industry made it a crime", I mean, we hear lots of allegations that USA is actually ruled by corporations but was this crime not established as such by elected officials in an elected institution?
Jaywalking is a ridiculous "crime", no doubt. But let's not go blame some abstract group (auto industry) for democratic society's failure.
Only, the history of this is well documented. The auto industry consists of auto manufacturers, dealerships, and their lobbyists. Here's a couple of articles that are more specific:
Well the crime was democratically instituted in a world where the "abstract group" literally bought up all the public transit they could and then shut it down to create more drivers. Who then vote.
Let’s not blame abstract group/process “democratic society” when it’s clear that a concrete commercial organization, the auto industry, had profit motive to advertise and lobby for favorable PR and legislation.
I assume because of selective enforcement. The more that we make normal everyday events technically illegal, the more likely the police will have to pick and choose what they enforce and what they let slide. Then you have ample opportunity for that discretion to be applied in a discriminatory way.
Sure, but why make a specific point about that with jaywalking? Can't that argument be made for just about any crime? Just seems like a useless red herring to make it about race when it doesn't need to be; it's a related but separate issue to whether jaywalking should be a crime in the first place.
Because jaywalking is very frequently used by police to target communities of color. As an example, 90% of the jaywalking citations given in NYC in 2019 were issued to people of color.
"You were Jaywalking, so I'm going to check you for Weapons / Weed / etc. etc."
----------
I think there should be some provision for Police to officially detain someone if they think there's an issue (but can't quite find a legal reason of doing so...). But at the same time, "abusing" the Jaywalking laws to do so is certainly the wrong way of doing it.
I recognize that racial profiling happens, even in urban centers where Police are given plenty of anti-racism training. I don't know what to do about that however, aside from making people at least aware of the issue.
Police need some leeway to do their job correctly. But whenever its because "I smell weed" or "You were Jaywalking", that just makes people angry and is counterproductive.
> I think there should be some provision for Police to officially detain someone if they think there's an issue (but can't quite find a legal reason of doing so...). But at the same time, "abusing" the Jaywalking laws to do so is certainly the wrong way of doing it.
why exactly? it's hard for me to imagine a situation where a cop reasonably needs to detain someone but can't come up with even one possible charge.
not quite sure if you're being sarcastic, as this is a fairly controversial topic. just for the record, my personal position is that the police should not be stopping or detaining anyone without at least reasonable suspicion that a crime is being or about to be committed. "effective at scaring people off from doing X" is not a sufficient justification.
I'm not being sarcastic. I understand that in the abstract, people talk about all sorts of situations that may or may not be grounded in reality. Which is why I point out real life situations and real life case.
I don't think I've ever met someone who has campaigned against random DUI checkpoints. You're not allowed to leave until you've completed the DUI-test at the checkpoint. There was no evidence for a crime. So under most definitions of "detained" or "detention", it seems to fit the bill.
I've heard that DUI measures can be too strict or that gaining a criminal record from DUIs is too harsh, but never really heard complaints about police enforcement of this particular issue. (DUI leading to jailtime is more of a judge / jury issue than a police officer issue anyway).
>As an example, 90% of the jaywalking citations given in NYC in 2019 were issued to people of color.
Do you have a citation for that?
Apparently, another poster did[0] have a citation.
In a three month period 80 people were cited for "illegal crossing" in a city of 8.5 million. I can tell you that at least half of those 8.5 million folks jaywalked in that same period.
I've lived in NYC since 1966 and I've never seen anyone receive a citation for jaywalking.
What's more, "jaywalking" in NYC is generally referred to as "crossing the street."
In the busiest of intersections, it's often useful to wait for the light, but that's no guarantee that the operators of vehicles will yield -- even if the signal is against them.
As such, I generally don't even look at the traffic signals; I watch the traffic coming my way and only cross if it's safe to do so, regardless of the status of the signal.
In fact, crossing at a marked intersection with the signal is no guarantee of not getting struck by an automobile. I'm at least as vigilant when crossing in a crosswalk with the light as when I cross against the light or in the middle of the street.
Is it possible that "people of color" account for 90% of the total people who jaywalked in NYC in 2019? Unless all data and all variables in the argument are made available for inspection, it is difficult to derive any meaningful conclusions.
> Is it possible that "people of color" account for 90% of the total people who jaywalked in NYC in 2019?
No.
I cannot say this in strong enough terms: every single person in NYC jaywalks.
Jaywalk ticketing is part of a longstanding policy of the NYPD, which is to use any occasion that presents itself to frisk people they deem "suspicious." The NYPD's definition of "suspicious," in turn, looks a lot like a colorwheel.
There's different levels of jaywalking.
There's walking across the streets when there's no car and everyone is doing it. And then there's the crazies who walk across open traffic on a green light where there are cars speeding along causing accidents. A large percent of the homeless and drug addicts in cities are minorities.
> A large percent of the homeless and drug addicts in cities are minorities.
I'm sorry, but what exactly are we supposed to derive from this claim? That unprompted police frisking under the pretense of jaywalking is acceptable so long as the jaywalker is a member of a vulnerable class?
> Can't that argument be made for just about any crime?
No. The argument is only effective for crimes that a large percentage of people do frequently but which is only seldomly enforced with criminal sanctions.
And I am hard pressed to find any crime fitting that description that I would not be in favor of eliminating. I'm perfectly happy to start with jaywalking.
I think "is this something that often reinforces racial discrepancies" is a useful thing to know when evaluating should it be a crime in the first place. I think it's another point in the "con" column of having harsher treatment for it.
It's an example of a minor infraction, and police are most likely able to use their discretion with this type of lawbreaking. Other more serious crimes will almost definitely require a charge.
The fact that their discretion overwhelmingly leads to the racial bias described, shows a situation where police behaviour needs to change.
Yes, the argument can be made for any rarely-enforced law on the books. But if the people fighting injustice are inspired to do so based on injustice against a specific group, then you should examine your own motivations before discouraging them.
I'm generally opposed to such racism, but it's not like there is a good alternative in these times. It's unfortunate that the campaign against police unaccountability has crystallized around "Black Lives Matter", but it's hard to dispute that Blacks have been feeling most of the pain. If "All Lives Matter" were an alternative non-racist campaign against police unaccountability then we could debate the merits of each. Alas it's just a reactionary stand to maintain the status quo.
This, I don't get. It's quite common to point out the systemic racism in law enforcement when it comes to many common crimes. Why is it that people in this thread are speaking as if this can only be applied to jaywalking? It comes off as very dishonest. At some point, it made sense to enough people that jaywalking have a penalty that it was written into law, and it wasn't because a bunch of people agreed that it would allow cops to punish more black people. Doesn't mean they were right, but it's hardly different from an intent perspective than any other crime on the books. The only difference between jaywalking and speeding(another common way to be pulled over while black/brown) is that far fewer people consider it reasonable.
Is it just because jaywalking is hardly a crime, thus its only conceivable utility is in discrimination? I'm just trying to understand what you're getting at.
Same reason enforcing random pat-downs for illicit substances, or traffic stops for speeding, racist or biased. Because the people enforcing it are biased, and often racist.
That's exactly why it's phrased as reducing encounters with police, because police encounters are disproportionately negative (or hostile) for people of color. Has nothing to do with the actual infraction.
Of course, you'd know this if you'd paid any attention to the news, considering it's currently the third most major political issue US.
It looks like non-hispanic whites have much lower rates of pedestrian deaths than other demographics, this indicates that other groups are likely walking in riskier areas, or in more dangerous ways, and may explain some of the 'disparity in ticketing'.
Quick check in NYC shows that there were 1.7 deaths / 100K for black folks and 1.8 for white folks between 2012 and 2014. Given the urban/suburban breakdown by race, I'd be inclined to limit the geography to not include, say... Wyoming. Comparing NYC is also valuable given the variance in enforcement of jaywalking along racial lines that we explicitly know about thanks to their open data policies.
Walking in riskier areas you say? I wonder how that happens... It wouldn't have anything to do with building highways through non white neighborhoods, would it?
Isn’t the real causation here that they’re lower class? I would imagine high-class blacks don’t often get ticketed for jaywalking.
Lower-class people tend to walk more for reasons related to expensive car maintenance. Are blacks more often lower-class? Sure, but that’s a different issue entirely.
While that's interesting conjecture, it doesn't bear out in reality in this case. From an article linked elsewhere in this chain[1]:
>From Jan. 1 to March 31, the NYPD wrote 80 tickets for illegal crossing — less than one a day in a city of more than eight million people — and only one went to a person identified in police logs as “white.”
So unless you think the "lower class" is 98% people of color, it's clear that the bias here is race-based, not inherent in the population.
Right but we have no way of knowing how many walkers were blacks, how many black and white walkers actually jaywalked, and how many walkers of each race got let off on warnings.
It’s a nice talking point, I’ll grant you, but it won’t hold up to scrutiny on HN.
>how many black and white walkers actually jaywalked
Are you seriously proposing that 98% people of color could be a representative sample of jaywalkers, or are you a bad troll? That pretty clearly shows a bias in the level of policing.
I hate to break it to you, but in NYC, nearly everyone, regardless of ethnicity or melanin content, jaywalks.
In fact, we don't call it jaywalking, we call it "crossing the street."
And the fact that out of 8.5 million people, only 80 were cited and 79 of those were people of color (and all 80 male), it's not only obvious that such citations are motivated by something other than "routine" law enforcement, but it's clearly just a trumped up charge to stop someone they wanted to stop anyway.
Spend an hour in midtown Manhattan and you'll see that's absolutely the case.
Its not a different issue entirely. Saying that is wrong and its harmful. Our "class system" is defined by the deliberately racist history from which it is derived. Communities of color are not disproportionately poor (and visa versa) by misfortune, random chance, or defect, but by several hundred years of cruel oppression and discrimination. Its factually and morally wrong to promote an idea that laws which predominantly target the poor are not also disproportionately targeting PoC, or that poverty in america and racism in america are "different issue(s) entirely".
> All but one of the jaywalking tickets issued by NYPD cops in the first quarter of this year went to blacks or Hispanics
It would be foolish to deny that stratification of classes is not reinforced by selective enforcement. However, cases such as Henry Louis Gates's arrest show that even the rich are not immune to racial profiling.
That's the problem with criminalizing basic activities like walking. Law enforcement becomes the entity that decides who gets in trouble for breaking the law.
> Before the advent of the automobile, pedestrians in America were widely recognized as having the right of way in all situations.
OK, let's go back to this. You can argue right-of-way with a ton of fiberglass and steel going 35 mph. Tell us all how that works out for you. Placing blame doesn't mean anything when the laws of physics dictate which one's going to be the winner in any given scenario.
> You can argue right-of-way with a ton of fiberglass and steel going 35 mph.
Shooting someone is still a crime, even though the laws of physics dictate that the bullet is going to win against my flesh. Right-of-way is a normative statement, not an extension of physical laws.
Maybe that's not a place the vehicle should be going 35mph, then.
Maybe the vehicle should be smaller, instead of ever-larger SUVs and trucks.
Maybe there should be crosswalks and signals.
There's nothing in the laws of physics that dictate that roads should be hard to cross on foot, and that cars should move at their current speeds, and be designed the ways they are. Those are all choices.
In Norway pedestrians have the right of way on zebras. There was a fair bit of discussion a few years ago about how someone jogging in the dark would dart across a zebra and then drivers had to slam on the brakes not to hit them.
As a driver though, most roads to my right have the right of way. So if there is a road to the right where the view is blocked by some bushes or a house ... I will slow down just in case a car could pop out of there. That is what right of way means.
I also do this for zebras. I will slow down just in case, unless I'm sure that no one could possibly cross.
> In Norway pedestrians have the right of way on zebras.
For only a moment, my brain thought you meant that Norwegians riding zebras had the right of way, but half a second later my brain realized they could no longer be considered pedestrians if they were riding an animal. Is "zebra" the real term for "crosswalk" and I've been wrong my whole life?
Genuine question: don't pedestrians have the right of way on crosswalks/zebras everywhere? I thought it's the very idea of having the crossing in the first place.
In Italy and also bigger cities in France you probably only have the right of way if they hit you. I remember once in Paris standing at a main road for 5 min waiting for someone, anyone, to even slow down slightly. When I did try to venture across the zebra the cars all had to stomp on their brakes as if they were surprised that waiting at a regular zebra meant I intended to cross.
Pedestrian crossings in Paris really are a leap of faith, you just have to be assertive and walk out hoping the driver isn't looking at their phone, otherwise you'll stand there for hours because no-one will stop for you.
>Pedestrian crossings in Paris really are a leap of faith, you just have to be assertive and walk out hoping the driver isn't looking at their phone, otherwise you'll stand there for hours because no-one will stop for you.
Which, I guess, is why I felt so comfortable while in Paris. Exactly the same is true in NYC.
A shift in thinking toward cars not being kings of the road rightfully able to plow through any and all obstacles with impunity will make all road users safer. Removal of a tool police use to disproportionately stop and harass poor and/or non-white people will contribute to wiping out the absurd extant bias in policing.
This has nothing to do with advocating that pedestrians start stepping out in front of cars. Take a moment to understand the issue before deploying your straw man.
> Before the advent of the automobile, pedestrians in America were widely recognized as having the right of way in all situations.
Before the advent of the automobile, you had carriages drawn by teams of oxen. If there was lesser risk to pedestrians, it's because the oxen themselves don't enjoy walking on humans. Irony being that the automobile places more responsibility on the driver, who (ITT) sees an opportunity for manslaughter as a justification for manslaughter.
That's not the point OP is making. OP is saying that having the right-of-way does a fat lot of good to someone who now has to live life as a quadriplegic.
I had fully crossed the street and was walking to a nearby building when I heard someone yell "Hey" behind me.
I contemplated not even turning around, because I wanted to get to class on time, but I did ... and saw the officer standing on the other side.
He didn't feel like coming to me, so he instructed me to re-cross the street back to him.
"Are you sure you want me to jaywalk back?" I asked. "Isn't that dangerous?"
He rolled his eyes and gave me the ticket.