The Jaywalking Menace
Typically lucid article from Tom Vanderbilt at Slate examining jaywalking. There have recently been a few shrill articles in big-city newspapers about the “scourge” of jaywalking. The term has always struck me as loaded. Anecdotes of course aren’t hard data, but I’ve never seen pedestrians behave without regard to their lives or those of others, and all the pedestrian/motorist near misses I’ve seen were the result of people starting across a clear street and encountering a automobile travelling well about the speed limit. What about you? Excerpt from the article.
[T]he word jaywalking is often used as a sort of blanket justification for the dominating presence of cars on city streets. It also reflects a social bias against those people not in cars. (Note this comment in a Federal Highway Administration report: “Still, almost no one can avoid occasional pedestrian status,” as if they were discussing exposure to a venereal disease.) It’s also used to shift blame entirely to the pedestrian when drivers may have had what’s called, in legal parlance, “contributory negligence.” Consider, for example, this case of a driver who killed a pedestrian said to have been crossing outside the crosswalk. The driver was drunk and traveling at least 60 mph on a street whose limit was 30 mph. Statistically (and more-or-less legally), this enters the book as a “jaywalking” fatality, but it was predicated not merely on an illegal crossing but the active contribution of a driver whose reaction time was compromised—and who was traveling at a speed that made the pedestrian’s death much more likely.
None of this is to say there aren’t pedestrians who make bone-headed decisions, but it smacks of worrying about a butterfly when there’s a bull in the china closet. I practice benign civil disobedience while walking on on my bicycle. I realize that our cultural norms and road laws push those who aren’t in a motor vehicle to the margin, but streets are for people. They were for people long before they were made for machines, and the humanization of our streets isn’t served by deferential begging for scraps at the table of car culture. As Mr. Vanderbilt puts it “[I] frankly find the notion of waiting for a signal when no cars are in sight to be faintly ridiculous and anti-urban.”
If you haven’t looked at Mr. Vanderbilt’s How We Drive blog, which is a companion to his book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What it Says About Us), I suggest you do so.
This line of thought reminds me of something that happened at work the other day. Someone there drives a large truck with big mirrors – used for pulling long trailers and such. He actually has a reserved spot which happens to be next to a walkway. Someone turned in a “safety suggestion” that his mirrors posed a safety hazard to people walking by. Rather than tell this person to just watch out for his/her own self and not walk into stationary objects, they actually condensed two parking spots down into one and painted yellow hash marks all around the edge of the new space. The owner of the truck is on vacation all week, so he’s not even aware of his new parking accommodations yet.
Much like the speeding drunk driver can’t be at fault for hitting a pedestrian (because had he been in the crosswalk surely the drunk driver would have stopped), we can’t hold anyone to something as difficult as looking where you walk.
You ask if I’ve seen pedestrians behave without regard to their lives or the lives of other and I most certainly have here in Boston. As the Boston.com article puts it there is “a culture of jaywalking” here. People often walk into the road without regard for coming cars knowing that the cars will yield to them. When cycling in the city I have to worry more about pedestrians stepping in front of me than the cars on the road.