In Defense of Jaywalking
[B' Spokes: This is very good so I recommend reading the whole thing.]**********************************************************************************
Banning the practice won't make pedestrians safer.
By Tom Vanderbilt, Slate
Looking at any number of big-city dailies over the last few weeks, one might reasonably surmise that we are in the middle of a new public-health epidemic with an old name: jaywalking.
A columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, commenting on a report on the city's most dangerous intersections, wrote: "[I]s it any surprise that three of the top four are near Sixth and Market streets, the home of the lackadaisical jaywalker? Seriously, how often have you seen someone there walk out into traffic against the light, confidently assuming that the car will stop?" In Boston, meanwhile, the Globe sounded exasperated about how "throngs of iPod-wearing, cellphone-texting walkers blew through the red 'Don't walk' signs, barely acknowledging the flustered drivers who slammed on the brakes and banged on their dashboards in futility." In New York, the Post bemoaned "jaywalking's steep toll," calling it a "foolish practice" that "needs to stop."
These accounts—which are typically combined with grim statistics on pedestrian deaths and injuries, but no deeper analysis—could well leave casual readers with the impression that jaywalking is the single greatest risk to the urban pedestrian, that pedestrians wantonly solicit injuries and death with their depraved behavior, and that properly corralling pedestrians could solve all our traffic safety problems.
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"A study out of Florida revealed that pedestrians are at fault 80 percent of the time." Such lines suggest the answer is simple: Let's crack down on dangerous walkers! But the truth is more complicated, and fault is a word rarely used by traffic safety professionals. Florida is, first of all, a generally terrible place to be a pedestrian: One survey of pedestrian danger found that half of the nation's 10 most dangerous places for pedestrians were in the Sunshine State. Are the people of Florida overwhelmingly predisposed to careless pedestrianism? Of course not. The real problem is that Florida doesn't offer many ways for pedestrians to safely navigate its streets.
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Facts like these tend to trickle into, and corrupt, crash-reporting statistics. As the Surface Transportation Policy Project points out, "a cursory glance at state and national statistics reveals a substantial number of pedestrian fatalities occur outside a crosswalk. Yet a closer look at national data shows that 59 percent of pedestrian deaths for which location information was recorded happened in places where pedestrians had no convenient access to a crosswalk. While jaywalking is often cited as a cause of pedestrian accidents, less than 20 percent of fatalities occurred where a pedestrian was crossing outside an easily available crosswalk." And police, who largely tend to be in vehicles, often misinterpret such subtleties or exhibit a pronounced pro-driver bias. And so it's not uncommon to hear statements like he "came out of nowhere," when in fact the pedestrian was crossing legally. In many cases, the pedestrian is no longer around to offer a rebuttal.
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So what can be done? The answer is not jaywalking crackdowns [This is what we do in the Balto Metro area]. These tend to be hard to enforce, lower the public opinion of the police, reinforce the idea of car dominance on city streets, and, most importantly, do not provide an effective bang for the buck. Indeed, the Netherlands, which has essentially legalized jaywalking, has an enviable pedestrian safety record.
... <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defense_of_jaywalking.single.html">http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defense_of_jaywalking.single.html</a>;
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