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As many other aspects of the German ethos, this seems to be dying away. I live near Stuttgart, jaywalking is rampant, and nobody cares; in two years, I haven’t seen a traffic cop anywhere except for accident sites.
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Note 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 laws, independent of how they are implemented only make sense if you start from a prior that the roads are specifically for vehicular use snd it’s pedestrians that are making exceptional use of them. The article is pointing out that belief was a specific policy choice driven at least in part by automakers.
So, they paid for cartoonists to draw cartoons that made pedestrians look like careless idiots, got their newspaper-owning friends to write editorials, the car companies joined in, and boom, jaywaying laws.
Where I live in the US, people simply do not stop at pedestrian crosswalks. It doesn’t matter that there’s a large fluorescent sign, and bold white stripes on the road, and a person waiting to cross. I’ve even had a police officer drive straight through while I was waiting to cross. But it seems like they’re respected if you install large flashing lights that the pedestrian can activate.
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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…
Urban design talks about street vs road. You can have places for vehicles to zoom about in (roads), and you can have places with shops and businesses and homes for people to use (streets), but you shouldn't try to make the same place serve as both. So in cities and town centres you need to prioritise pedestrians and cyclists: low (and enforced!) speed limits, narrow streets that naturally reduce speed, car-free zones. It doesn't need radical new development, you just need to break the assumption that cars are entitled to go full speed everywhere and everyone else has to deal.
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Then again, the only reason that that's particularly dangerous is because of the car. Such behaviour in front of a bike, for example, would ve annoying but not really dangerous.
bike brakes are usually pretty terrible though
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> Worth pointing out that "jaywalking" is not a universal crime. When I first moved from the UK to the USA, I assumed that "jaywalking" was a made-up thing that you warned tourists about, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_bear . How could crossing the road be _inherently_ illegal, even if done in a safe manner!?
Roads in the US aren't as safe to cross - you wouldn't take a shortcut across a dual-carriageway in the UK and that's just 2 lanes in each direction. Walking is just an afterthought really, until you get into certain areas like South Beach in Miami.
I would and do, and I appreciate the law being on my side when I do.
You 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…
That's how it's been for a LONG time. Loitering laws are explicitly that. They are often ruled as unconstitutional, as a result, law makers keep trying to find different ways to empower cops to remove "undesirables". Be it anti-camping laws, curfews, or whatever.
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> It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield. Alternative no-brainer - the new entrant to street traffic that doesn't have the handling or control to safely co-habitate the street with existing users shouldn't be allowed onto streets. They should instead be restricted to specific and limited long distance routes that actually take advantage of their ability to travel many miles an hour…
>In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town. What does that have to do with what I said? Without allowing vehicles on roads (and the jaywalking laws that came with it), deliveries to the high-density places where people live , or to city centers, would be limited to what can be drawn on a horse and carriage. Those laws specifically benefited those people who live without…
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The difference is that you’re cocooned in a tonne of steel, hurtling along at speeds which kill pedestrians. The onus is on both parties to be vigilant, but it’s more on you as a driver. As soon as you get over this entitled view, like the road is your own little go-kart track, it’s so much easier to drive safely. I used to hold the same view until I started walking regularly and could understand how much the game is…
> As soon as you get over this entitled view, like the road is your own little go-kart track This view was not espoused by the OP. You've made it up for some reason.
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Even the concept that the flow of traffic is more important than the pedestrian's flow is indicative of the change in attitude. Somehow the car has come to be most important while the pedestrian is a nuisance. Both own and pay for the road but the pedestrian is a second class citizen (obviously some people will moan on about road tax and fuel tax, but these taxes don't come close to paying for the road infrastructure…
"Even the concept that the flow of traffic is more important than the pedestrian's flow" Is it? It seems like in the example, both parties are following a signal. Cars must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Sure, some places have jaywalking laws when not in a crosswalk (in some cases including implied/unmarked crosswalks), and most require impeding traffic as a component. A few places could move towards common sens…