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How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

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141–150 of 443 posts

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#141
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already true in many places, in a lot of European cities you see a sign like this when entering: https://lsmlomza.pl/pliki/2014/03/lsm-znak1.jpg And it basically means that pedestrians have an absolute priority before cars, they can walk on the street as much as they like and you as a driver have to exhibit some extreme attention because if anything happens, it's 99% certain you will be found at fault.

Is that sign real? It is awful design. The meaning is complete obscure to me.

> It is awful design. The meaning is complete obscure to me.

It's fine. It's just not the kind of sign you are thinking of.

There are at least two kinds of sign.

One kind tells you what the rules are or gives you specific instructions. An example of this kind of sign would be one that tells you that you must wear ear protection, or one that tells you that you must wear a hard hat.

Another kind tells you that you are in a region where a special set of rules apply. Examples are construction zone signs and school zone signs. These signs don't tell you WHAT the rules are, they just tell you that you are entering a place where the rule set changes from one well known set to a different well known set.

From what others have said, it seems this sign is the second kind. It's telling you that you are entering a region where the streets are shared more equally between cars, pedestrians, and playing children than they are in most places, and so you need to follow the rules that apply to such regions instead of the regular traffic rules.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, sidewalks are a separate right of way with significant barriers (parked cars)? Most train crossings are at-grade and use simple traffic lights. In congested areas, they install gates that prevent cars from barreling into trains.

You're thinking of sidewalks in a city. I don't know about elsewhere, but more populous places in Metro Atlanta have long sidewalks running between subdivisions and retail with no more than a small bump between it and the road.

Sidewalks found in suburban sprawl are purely decorative. Only the very unfortunate walk there because everything is miles apart from each other, making a car mandatory. Meanwhile, even super-dense cities, where walking is obvious, have to fight the ridiculous notion that cars deserve 80% of the street right of way and stupendously subsidized street parking.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#143

Now is an opportunity, perhaps first in ~100 years, perhaps last, to recover the streets for unaugmented humans: slow down cars in urban areas, increase qualifications for humans to drive, eventually ban human drivers entirely, leaving only automated vehicles with enough sensors and going slowly enough to reduce auto-related deaths for pedestrians and passengers alike to zero.

Probably not to zero - accidents will still happen. But I agree with all your points. I'll elaborate with:

a) during transition, human-driven cars must be instrumented. Automatic moving violation for speeding.

b) automatic moving violation for driving a non-instrumented vehicle in a zone where they are mandatory.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're attacking a strawman.

How is it a strawman? If motor traffic can only move at pedestrians’ leisure, what happens if they decline to let it through for hours at a time? The soccer players would be committing no crime - the streets are for them first, motor vehicles last.

I'm confident that society would be able to figure out a reasonable law and rely on a reasonable justice system to figure out abusive edge cases.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#145
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Streets are for cars and sidewalks are for people! That didn't used to be true. I'm fascinated by ideas that become so canonized, so ingrained that you can't even imagine the alternatives. > This article tries to make this seem like a pedestrian dystopia compared to the good ole days when kids could frolic in the streets. Well said, we do live in a pedestrian dystopia now. I love that many urban areas in the US and…

There are no better alternatives. That's the point. The article makes it seem like the only reason the rules exist as they do now is because some industry players forced us into this situation. No. The rules exist now because the majority of people agreed that cars should be given the road and people should be given the sidewalks, and that people darting to and fro on the street would be very bad for everyone involve…

> The rules exist now because the majority of people agreed that cars should be given the road and people should be given the sidewalks

That's a very generous interpretation of how laws are created and passed in this country.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#146
post #131
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to move around other than driving, you know...

I'll bite, what are my options for moving distances that are too far to walk, too short to fly, and don't involve vehicles?

You can use a vehicle that is small and slow enough that it won't kill pedestrians on a collision. For example, a bicycle or a segway.

There is also mass transit, which can go over rails away from pedestrians or even underground.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#147
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we grant special entitlements to people who opted to use two tons of steel to move one person? That sounds to me like a reason to place heavy restrictions on their behavior. There's an implicit assumption somehow being in a car makes you more important than someone who isn't. And any argument that presumes a pedestrian is wasting energy over someone who has chosen to drive in a car is absurd.

Why are you being so reductionist? Drivers have to accept extremely tight restrictions on their behavior already. I feel like I'm talking to an alien that's never driven a car. I mean good lord you have to 6 month class to learn a subset of the rules of the road. The fact that cars are given priority because its more efficient to do so doesn't imply that people think they're more important. In a world with only bikes…

> Allowing cars to achieve and maintain speed increases efficiency without impacting pedestrian walk times. Compared to this, a system where roads are shared does waste energy, time, and economic value.

Probably, but "energy, time, and economic value" isn't necessarily an unalloyed good that must be striven for. There are societal costs to the decisions we've made.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#148

This is silly. >"Ultimately, both the word jaywalking and the concept that pedestrians shouldn't walk freely on streets became so deeply entrenched that few people know this history" The article makes it seem like the only reason the rules exist as they do now is because some industry players forced us into this situation. No. The rules exist now because the majority of people agreed that cars should be given the roa…

Okay that's your opinion, and it's a fine opinion to have. But it's just one way things can work. Another way, is to give pedestrians priority and expect drivers to exercise due caution to not hit them the same way they do other cars or trains or ambulances or whatever. In an alternate universe where the laws had ended up with pedestrian-priority being the norm, then you'd be coming in here saying "Cars shouldn't dri…

>So let me ask you this: how are you any more right than alternate-universe-you? Other than the status quo bias that you're defending the way things currently are where you (and I) live.

The "I have a tank and I'll go where I damn well please!"-universe version of them shows up, then they all agree with that one. So tanks are clearly the answer to the cars vs pedestrians argument.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#149
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this as if it's unusual for news articles to be solely written by various company's PR and marketing teams.

But there is a difference between promoting a product vs shifting blame, isn't it?

In both cases, the entity creating the message is promoting a point of view in which it has a financial stake.

Re: How Automakers Invented the Crime of “Jaywalking”

#150

Sure, they were pro-active about it, but let's face it: It was going to happen anyhow. This just accelerated things.

Well, we could be living in a situation where pedestrians take precedence and have right of way over cars in city streets, and the opposite in highways, which I think would be much more desirable, especially in crowded cities. Perhaps even ban cars except for abutters, commercial vehicles and emergency vehicles from the densest city center areas. God that would be a relief. edit: OK, yes, obviously you can and should…

Some of us do.

I work in and regularly travel through towns and cities that have various streets and junctions marked with the "shared space" designation for about five years now. Said towns and cities have furthermore had pedestrian precincts for decades.

Coventry's plans for pedestrian precincts go back to World War 2; it has had one since 1953. Exeter beat it by 1 year.

* https://www.historiccoventry.co.uk/postwar/postwar.php?pg=pr...

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