As a European I never really got what "jaywalking" is. We just cross the streets whenever we want and whenever it's safe. It's not allowed on motorways off course, but they usually have fences, so you can't do that anyway. In some countries you need to use a pedestrian crossing if there is one within 20-50m.
Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
201–210 of 324 posts
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#202You should be thankful it was just jaywalking. In Kaplan, Louisiana they've now made the simple act of walking after 11pm illegal. https://www.klfy.com/local/vermilion-parish/kaplan-starts-pe...
Holy crap! That article is full of low-level facistic quotes: > “I was approached by a couple of citizens asking if there was anything we could do about certain people walking around at night riding their bicycles,” "Certain people" > “The curfew would more or less be at the officer’s discretion,” Cool, so you're explicitly giving cops a legal reason to harass people if the cop thinks they looks suspicious. I can't s…
I'm picturing people crawling home from the neighbour's dinner party in an effort to satisfy the authoritarians.
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course not, but the same right-of-way concept applied to horse and buggies sharing the same street and streetcars on rails, not to mention railroads, which certainly zoomed by pedestrians in many urban areas. If you want it back to the old way of chaos on the streets, then you'll have to admit that horses would regularly shit all over the street and pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as…
> " pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as they crossed busy roads of buggies, streetcars and early autos zipping around with no lanes or traffic lights. " In the old days if an early auto hit you and killed you, it would be the driver's fault. Pedestrians were pushing back on cars because they were so deadly; from the article: "The November 23, 1924, cover of the New York Times shows a com…
One of the reasons the Dutch transportation system is so radically different is because there was strong backlash to rising child deaths from motor vehicles - aka Stop de Kindermoord.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_de_Kindermoord
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
In the Netherlands in many residential areas, the streets are primarily for walking and bicycling; drivers must yield to everything else, because they are the greatest danger on the road. There's extensive, comprehensive separated cycling infrastructure. There's a presumption of fault, not innocence, if you hit a cyclist or pedestrian with your car.
In the US, guns have only recently overtaken motor vehicle related deaths (which have been declining) as the top killers of children.
Unfortunately, the Dutch are weaponized against cycling infrastructure elsewhere. "Well, you can't have bicycles in the streets until you have comprehensively education of children in how to cycle", for example (despite plenty of evidence that, around the world, cyclists do not break traffic laws more than drivers.) Or defeatist nonsense like "there's no point to legal protections for cyclists in the street, we must only work for separated infrastructure."
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#204As a European I never really got what "jaywalking" is. We just cross the streets whenever we want and whenever it's safe. It's not allowed on motorways off course, but they usually have fences, so you can't do that anyway. In some countries you need to use a pedestrian crossing if there is one within 20-50m.
My experience in Germany was very different. I walked across a street without the walking man and people looked at me like I was naked.
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#205If you cross the street "near" a red traffic light, that costs you 5€ in Germany. If you admit that you did it intentionally, the ticket price doubles. Happened to my wife some years ago when walking to a bus stop on the other side of the street. How did the cop know that it was intentional? She remarked that there was no car in sight, neither left nor right, on a straight road in town. Oh, and what's the definition…
I think Germany is the only country in the world that has fines as low as 5€. Also parking your car without paying the parking fee can be ridiculously cheap as 15€.
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#206As a European I never really got what "jaywalking" is. We just cross the streets whenever we want and whenever it's safe. It's not allowed on motorways off course, but they usually have fences, so you can't do that anyway. In some countries you need to use a pedestrian crossing if there is one within 20-50m.
My experience in Germany was very different. I walked across a street without the walking man and people looked at me like I was naked.
If there is are traffic lights and they are red, you're not allowed to walk. Germans really seem to care about those rules, in many other countries people also walk on red lights if there are no cars coming, and nobody cares.
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you've misunderstood the law you've quoted. It's not about "crossing without checking", it's about the pedestrian "yield[ing] the right of way to all vehicles". It's hard to imagine from a modern perspective, but until laws like this were passed roads were not, as today, universally perceived as places for cars to drive. In cities in much of the developing world the pre-jaywalking regime remains: road users w…
In any shared transportation space, you need rules for right of way. When two modes of transport want to occupy the same exact space, someone has to be given a priority for the space at any given time. Almost all right of way rules require that the smaller and/or more maneuverable vehicle gives right of way to larger less maneuverable vehicles. Examples of this: Trains have right of way, always. On water, jet skis mu…
This is not how it works in the UK. There is no such thing as "right of way" on a road in the way you have described it. It does not refer to any kind of legal priority of one kind of road user over another. You will sometimes hear irate motorists complaining "you can't do that, I had the right of way!" but it doesn't mean what they think. The "right of way" simply means that the public has a right to use the way, by whatever lawful means -- on foot, on a bike, on a horse, etc. So, "having the right of way" is the tautology that you happen to physically occupy some chunk of public highway; it has no bearing on whether you were in the right.
If the term meant what people thought, motorists would never have the right of way, since driving is not a right, but requires a license, and the ability to travel on public highways in cars is a creation of statute, not common law.
Recent revisions of the Highway Code put about a hierarchy of road users, but opposite to the one you have put across. Smaller, slower, more vulnerable road users have priority over larger and faster vehicles.
>Designated crosswalks by their very existence imply "this is an area you should be especially aware of pedestrians", which by nature makes it easier for a driver to avoid causing a collisions. If cross walks have been provided, it only makes sense to require pedestrians to use them if they want prioritized right of way.
This begs the question. You only need specially designated areas where pedestrians might be, if it is otherwise dangerous for pedestrians to cross the road. Why build roads to be dangerous to pedestrians in the first place? Why should pedestrians have their freedoms curtailed because of the actions of motorists?
In the UK, pedestrians are not required to use zebra crossings, nor are they even required to obey a red light at a pelican crossing (it is merely advisory). Britons have the absolute freedom to cross the road wherever and whenever they please, so long as it's not on a motorway. You are simply allowed to use your own common sense and situational awareness. And we have far fewer traffic fatalities than North America, so maybe we are doing something right.
>Every rule I've seen on cycling requires pedestrians to give right of way to bicycles.
As a cyclist I find this idea appalling. What you are describing sounds like the Law of the Jungle.
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#208Note that like most laws, Jaywalking laws tend to make more sense when you read them. Here's the law in New York: https://law.justia.com/codes/new-york/2015/vat/title-7/artic... 1152. Crossing at other than crosswalks. (a) Every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right of way to all vehicles upon the roadwa…
Jaywalking shouldn't ever be a criminal offense. (Intentionally obstructing traffic is a separate issue.) Ticket pedestrians for creating an unsafe environment. It's what we do to drivers when they do the analogous thing.
it doesn't need to be an "offense" at all. in the event of a collision, it's enough to have a strong prejudice towards the person who had the legal right of way.
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very interesting video. Thanks for sharing. It looks a bit chaotic but honestly not _that_ unsafe to me as everything is going quite slow. It reminds me a bit of the idea of "shared space" which is a recent concept that is actually claimed to make streets safer.
I think it comes down to things like speed. If we accept that the road is a place to be able to quickly move a lot of vehicles, then that just isn't a safe place for pedestrians. If we go back to lower speeds then maybe it could be manageable in a same way. But as it is actually used now for 3000 pound vehicles to zoom about in, it makes no sense for pedestrians to be intersecting and sharing the space at all. Just d…
> ... new cities to be designed differently in several ways. One of which is for roads to be only for small autonomous vehicles and entirely separate ...
As I understand it, this vision does not compute. The number of movements of people in a dense city is too large for everyone to move in a car, autonomous or not. Cars take a lot of space. They need to stop someplace for someone to get in and out, merge in and out of traffic. Streets cant be designed in a way that accomodates this at the scale of a city like NY.
Similarly, in spread-out suburbia, autonomous cars would still get stuck in traffic jams if everyone has to use them to get to work. Making cars autonomous makes things a bit more efficient, but not by orders of magnitude.
Mass transit, combined with walking and biking, is simply way more efficient for moving people in cities and is a proven model that does scale.
Re: Automakers invented the crime of jaywalking (2015)
#210Automakers are also directly and/or indirectly responsible for the destruction of American local mass transit and the dysfunctional regression in urban planning* towards inefficient suburbanization.
* It wasn't unplanned. It was the purposeful design of city planners who failed to take into account unintended externalities including gridlock, pollution, and cost.