To walk or not to walk?
Consider the traffic signal. Whether one chooses to cross the street by car, on foot or aboard one of those silly electric skateboards, green means go; red means stop. It’s beautiful in its simplicity. Or, from the perspective of the sprawling California bureaucracy, it cries out for complication.
Now “WALK” and “DON’T WALK” have been deemed hopelessly binary and pedestrian. Under a bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown this week, anyone crossing a California street will have the benefit of a far more intricate set of legal instructions.
The law will still allow entering a crosswalk when the signal says “WALK,” straightforwardly enough. But that’s where the straightforward bit ends.
As of Jan. 1, pedestrians may also enter a crosswalk if the signal is flashing “DON’T WALK” (or an “approved ‘Upraised Hand’ symbol”) with a countdown — provided they finish before the countdown ends. If the flashing warning doesn’t come with a helpful countdown, however, or if it’s gone from flashing to steady, pedestrians may not begin crossing — though they may finish if they started “during the display of the ‘WALK’ or approved ‘Walking Person’ symbol.”
Convoluted as it sounds, the legislation was necessitated by overzealous law enforcement, improved traffic signal technology and outdated rules.
Current law prohibits entering a crosswalk against even a flashing “DON’T WALK,” a surprise to pedestrians who correctly understand it as an intermediate step before the steady warning preceding a red light. Countdowns — a pedestrian safety measure that proliferated after successful testing in San Francisco — effectively invite crossing during this period by showing how much time pedestrians have.
All of this could have remained academic if police hadn’t begun vigorously enforcing the law despite its conflicts with common sense and improved signals. Thousands of $200 tickets handed out for crossing during green lights in certain Los Angeles neighborhoods prompted City Council members there to call for a legislative remedy. Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco — who joined Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, D-Los Angeles, as an author of the bill — noted that the pedestrian advocacy organization Walk San Francisco provided evidence that jaywalking tickets in his city also fall disproportionately on particular neighborhoods, namely the Mission and the Tenderloin.
So while the old law — don’t walk unless the signal says to — was appealingly simple, it also allowed police to punish thousands of people for crossing the street when they had plenty of time to do so.
Ting acknowledged the complexity of the update but said it was a consequence of the delicate balance between public safety and pedestrian-friendliness, as well as a natural tendency of this sort of legislation. “Read the remainder of the vehicle code,” he said, “and this seems pretty simple.”