The history of “jaywalking” is pretty interesting.
Basically, it’s a made-up thing designed to blame pedestrians for motorists being dangerous.
Kind of like when motorists “can’t see” cyclists while looking down at their phones, because it’s up to the cyclist to have on enough high-viz clothing, reflectors, bright lights, and a billboard saying “I’M HERE!!!”.
In most places, even when people think that jaywalking is illegal, it’s actually not.
Cops around me regularly use jaywalking for fuckery too. I lived in a low income apartment directly across the street from a convenient store. Basically a stones throw from apartment property entrance to store front door. It wasn’t a terribly busy road, it was four lanes and did get traffic, but it was pretty easy to find breaks in the flow and cross.
To get from the apartment to the store legally, you had to walk nearly a quarter mile (400m) to the nearest cross walk, cross, then another quarter mile back to the storefront.
Police would post up outside at that store and write jaywalking tickets all day for anyone that didn’t know better. I watched those tickets escalate into detainment and occasionally searches and arrests if they argued with the officer about it.
Edit: of course if you had a car, you could just drive across the street to the store. No problem with that!
What you describe is really common, and it uses “jaywalking” as a weapon to target minorities and those in low-income neighbourhoods.
On the podcast “The War on Cars”, this topic came up with examples showing how jaywalking becomes an excuse to target blacks.
Crazy… I’ve always suspected it was some kind of targeted BS. They spend money to pay a cop to sit there all day and ticket broke people with $150 fees, when they could paint a ped crosswalk and make the store easy to access. It felt designed to be actively hostile to pedestrians. And of course there’s always tenats moving in and out, constant source of new ppl that didn’t know how strict they are.
How about a bicycle, would crossing the street with a bicycle be legal?
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I do, but in reality, It doesn’t seem to matter what cyclists do or wear. If someone driving a car (or large SUV) isn’t paying attention, they won’t see you.
In countries where cycling is taken seriously, their lights are not bright (to meet standards) and you don’t see anyone in high-viz gear.
Blaming cyclists for something a motorist failed to do seems to be a uniquely North American thing. Even the way our news gets reported seems to always word things in a way that puts the cyclist (the victim) in the wrong.
Blaming cyclists for something a motorist failed to do seems to be a uniquely North American thing.
I can tell you that it’s also very much a thing in many parts of Europe.
Argh. Was it always like that, or is this recent?
