Look both ways and check the local rule book
Canadian cities take wildly disparate approaches to ticketing jaywalking pedestrians; fines range from $5 to almost $700
Long Nguyen always looks both ways before he crosses the street. When he dashed towards his Montreal office one Thursday morning in October, he didn’t see any oncoming cars, but also didn’t see the cop who was watching him.
Nguyen was surprised to be slapped with a jaywalking ticket for crossing Rachel St. E. midblock, near St. Laurent Blvd. He paid a fine of $15, plus fees and surcharges, for a total of $42, despite insisting he didn’t do anything unsafe.
“I don’t think it should be a ticket. Maybe a warning,” argued Nguyen, a 31-year-old web developer, who said it was “silly” for police to give out citations for jaywalking.
But Nguyen should consider himself lucky he doesn’t live in Nova Scotia, where the provincial legislature recently voted to raise the fine for jaywalking from $410 to $697.50. If he lived in Toronto, the penalty would have been between $35 and $90. In Vancouver, crossing unlawfully would have cost him about $100.
In fact, interviews the Star conducted with police departments across the country show that Canadian cit- ies take wildly disparate approaches to ticketing jaywalking pedestrians.
In Montreal last year, police gave out a whopping 22,708 tickets to pedestrians for offences that included jaywalking (generally defined as crossing midblock) as well as entering crosswalks when they didn’t have the right-of-way.
By contrast, the Halifax Regional Police dispensed just 55 jaywalking tickets last year. In Edmonton, the number was 654.
Because some pedestrians break traffic rules all the time, Staff Sgt. Paul Stacey, head of the Calgary Police Service traffic division, said that the number of tickets police give out depends on a department’s priorities.
“If I were to send all my officers downtown right now and start writing jaywalking tickets, we could probably write an awful lot,” he said. In 2014, the Calgary police handed out 608 citations to pedestrians. “We tend to focus on some of the bigger issues.”
Const. Craig Brister, a spokesperson for the Toronto police, said ticketing pedestrians can play an important role in preventing accidents.
“Pedestrians walk out — they just expect a car is going to stop. Their head is buried in their phone, they’re not even watching where they’re going,” he said.
“Whether it’s the pedestrian’s fault or not, we don’t still don’t want to see people getting injured. That’s why we try to encourage people to pay attention to what’s going on.”
But Dylan Reid, a spokesperson for pedestrian advocacy group Walk Toronto, said there’s no correlation between road safety and how many tickets police hand out to pedestrians. He cited a June report from Toronto’s medical officer of health, which examined vehicle-pedestrian injuries between 2008 and 2012 and found that in 67 per cent of cases, the person who was struck had the rightof-way. “Most pedestrians who are jaywalking aren’t actually putting themselves or others in danger,” Reid said.
He argued that the most effective way to prevent pedestrian injuries is to lower speed limits, educate drivers and design safer streets, which includes brighter lighting and more clearly marked crossings.
Not all pedestrians object to police cracking down on two-footed scofflaws. One morning two months ago, Kiel Coyle didn’t feel like waiting for the light to change in front of the Mackenzie King transitway stop in Ottawa. He crossed against the light and was caught up in a police pedestrian blitz, but he had no quarrel with the fine, which came to $50 with surcharges.
“It’s important to uphold the law,” he said. “There are lots of people who do jaywalk at that crossing without any regard to even looking at the traffic that’s coming. There have been some really close calls.”
He paid the ticket, but had it framed — a testament, he said, to his “life of crime.”