Jaywalking: The crime that isn’t one

Last month, the Governors Highway Safety Administration (GHSA) released preliminary data on traffic fatalities; it found a 20% increase in the number of U.S. pedestrian deaths in the first half of 2020 even with fewer people walking and driving due to COVID-19. This comes on top of a 46% jump in pedestrians killed on U.S. roads in the past decade.

And I fear things will get worse for bi-peds in the future. That’s why I’m calling for an end to jaywalking laws and restoring pedestrians to their rightful place atop the hierarchy of street users. (Disclosure: my firm helped prepare the GHSA report.)

Jaywalking laws are part of a century-long series of assaults on walking that may get worse in the future. Walkers, mostly people of color, continue to be stopped and arrested for jaywalking. Recently a man jaywalking in the Bronx was locked up in ICE detention for 15 months. Last month the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in California released a video of a Black man shot to death by police who stopped him for jaywalking.

But we have to enforce jaywalking laws to protect the public and keep streets orderly, right? Wrong. Jaywalking laws do not improve traffic safety, and there’s evidence that pedestrian casualties are higher where the laws are strictly enforced. The historic raison d’être of these laws is to move cars faster, then blame the walker when struck by a car.

A little history. Bipeds, that’s us, have walked in any direction we wanted at any time we wanted for 6 million years. Sure, early humans would shy from known predator lairs.

As we started using horses for transport, and then trains, we would get out of the way upon hearing hoofbeats or train whistles. Then, in the early 20th century, something bizarre happened.

Travel back in time with me to 1910. You cross when you want to cross looking out for horses, streetcars and those newfangled automobiles. Now, imagine someone saying “we will shine a colored light at you and you must stop; when we shine a different color you may go. And when you walk, you must ‘hug’ the buildings and cross only at intersections at 90-degree angles.”

I can imagine a real New Yorker from back then saying, “Ay, I’m walkin’ here.”

But it wasn’t just New York. As Peter Norton wrote in “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City,” “In the early days of the automobile it was the driver’s job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them.”

But it doesn’t work. A Smart Growth America study found that seven out of the top 10 most dangerous metro areas for peds are in Florida, with Orlando topping worst, Palm Bay fourth, and Daytona Beach fifth. They are all tough on jaywalkers. The top walking cities, New York, Chicago and Boston, fall respectively at No. 93, 83 and #97 on the danger index and are comparatively lenient.

Los Angeles historically issued far more jaywalking tickets than NYC and sees dramatically better compliance yet has a significantly higher pedestrian fatality rate. In absolute numbers 127 pedestrians died in LA in 2018 after being struck by vehicles while NYC, with far more walkers, saw 114 deaths.

A widely known engineer in traffic safety circles, the late Hans Monderman, radically challenged traffic engineering principles by getting rid of most traffic signals, signs and pavement markings in parts of several Dutch cities allowing people, cars, bike riders and others to negotiate sharing the space with each other as humans did until the early 20th century. The result: Drivers slowed down and crashes declined. Cities around the world are now adopting the “shared street” concept, throwing jaywalking and other traffic “safety” rules out to pasture.

Here in the U.S. we seem to be doing all we can to increase pedestrian casualties. Heavier and taller vehicles turn leg injuries into far more serious chest and head injuries. Technology, which always promises safety may be distracting drivers and pedestrians from each other.

Whereas sidewalks were at least the 20th-century sanctuary for walkers, a half-dozen states now permit robots to travel on sidewalks. In Pennsylvania, robot “pedestrians” can weigh up to 550 pounds and drive up to 12 mph. A person hit by one of these would suffer the equivalent of being struck by two NFL linebackers at full-speed while helmet and pad-less.

Autonomous vehicle (AV) manufacturers are concluding they likely won’t solve the pedestrian “problem.” A Princeton team proposes that pedestrians wear radar reflectors so that AVs can “see” them.

My solution: get rid of jaywalking laws, design more streets for walking, slow traffic through design and once again declare pedestrians kings and queens of the road.