Are Anti-Jaywalking Laws Fascist?

Rand

I have had my own experience with red light crossing fascism in Southern California.

When I first moved there in 1980 I lived in Van Nuys near the corner of Sepulveda and Saticoy. One morning at about 6:45 am (sunday morning) without a car in sight, except for a cop car at almost the limit of sight, I crossed against a light returning from picking up a Sunday morning paper. I was up the street about to turn into my apartment complex when the cop car swung in and two cops got out asking me for my ID.

Since this was at 6:45 on a sunday morning in the year 1980 I did not have my ID on me. So the two cops followed me to my apartment, came into my apartment with me, and waited until I got my ID. Well they then gave me a figging ticket for jaywalking. At this time I was getting ready to move back east and so I just forgot about a stupid jaywaking ticket.

Well about a year later I moved back to Southern California and was living about 30 miles away in Thousand Oaks. There was a traffic accident where a motorcycle ran under my car and there was a police report. A couple of days later I am at work and get a call to come to the reception desk. Two cops are there and ask to speak to me outside. Being young and stupid and not realizing that I did not have to go outside with them, I went and I was immediately arrested, handcuffed, and put into the back of the police car.

Being the dumb kid from Alabama I was at first shocked, then infuriated by this stupid crap and cussed the cops all the way back to the station, questioning their manhood and the reasoning behind spending scarce police resources on such a stupid thing. After getting bailed out and spending about $200 dollars, I was again a free person.

It ingrained in me a disdain and hatred of LA cops and a few years later it was this same group of idiots from the same station that beat up Rodney King.

When I am in Southern California I watch for the lights now when I am crossing a street.

I think the biggest difference is that you're less likely to kill someone if you hit them when you're a pedestrian compared to when you drive a car. Hence much stricter rules make sense for cars. It makes sense at least to me personally and I adhere to it as a driver: I don't drive against a red light or red turn sign even if there were no people or other cars around (If it's an emergency, then it's another thing...).

We have ticketing for red light walking too but I think I've only heard rumors of someone getting one in the eighties.

How to fit the traffic anarchists of New York City (cue Dustin Hoffman, "I'm walking here!") into the thesis?

New Yorkers are the arbiters. They decree what The Rules are, and the yokels (=non-New-Yorkers) absolutely must follow them on pain of pain, but they themselves are not in any way bound. They make the rules. They don't obey them; that's for rubes.

Regards,
Ric

A few years ago there was a Seattle comedy troupe with a TV show called "Almost Live". It consisted of some stand-up comedy, and a lot of taped clips. One of them was "The Fugitive in Seattle".

Dr. Richard Kimball comes to Seattle in pursuit of the One-armed Man. He jaywalks, and a cop draws his pistol. Dr. Kimball says "I didn't kill my wife!" The cop replies "I don't care! Don't jaywalk!"

A more effective sign was put up in a store in the University District. It read: "If you jaywalk, you're in play!" There was no jaywalking at that corner of the U District.

I live in Canada and know all about waiting for the light to turn green so I can walk across the street - at 12 midnight with no car in sight. The RCMP's main job is to catch cars speeding (they can't seem to catch murderers or thieves, though).

Which made Scotland such a surprise: I only saw policemen once, and they weren't worried about speeding cars. And lemme tell you, cars really move in that country of narrow roads; very terrifying to this Canadian. My cousin checked, though, and found that Scotland's accident rate is about the same as Canada's.

Canada is truly a country full of soft fascists. They see this stance as morally virtuous, a way of being superior to you gun-totin' warmongers south of the border.

I grew up in L.A. and San Diego, and I sometimes jaywalk but I never cross against the light. I think it may have more to do with history, civic culture, and upbringing than anything else. Here's my hypothesis:

Kids learn the essentials of survival from their parents. In Southern California, where the civic culture came into being with (and as a result of) the automobile, parents have taught their three-year-olds "Don't you dare cross the street without an adult!" and then later later "Always cross at the corner, in the crosswalk, with the light!" as part of basic survival; this has gone on for as long as their city or town has existed as anything other than a land developer's dream. And we kids had enough real-life examples of what could happen if we disobeyed to drive the message home.

Back East the roads came first. In horse-and-buggy days, crossing the street wasn't a big deal -- it was easy to see/hear and avoid a horse. (From what photographs and accounts I've seen, roads Back East didn't even need or use stop signs or rules like "keep to the right" until at least a decade after cars came along.) So parents Back East don't ingrain street-crossing survival rules into their kids reflexes, because their parents never did, because it was never an important part of civic culture.

We have other reflexes and rules that people Back East don't have, too. In Southern California, pedestrians always have the right of way. Always. (Think of that as the other half of the social compact under which pedestrians always cross with the light.) And the whole concept of "gridlock" was alien to us for a long time until enough people from the East Coast came out and mucked things up -- it only takes one driver willing to stop in an intersection to screw things up for everyone. Why did it take so long for the rest of the country to realize that it might be OK to turn right on a red light after stopping to make sure the road is clear? And don't get me started about Boston drivers ...

I think the deal behind West Coast enforcement of jaywalking ordinances and the East Coast laugh-in-your-face attitude that pedestrians can do any wrong comes down to this.

Now obviously a car can be a very dangerous object used in the wrong way, and the fundamental law is that a motorist must never run anyone over, even if the pedestrian is in the wrong.

But the East Coast ethic, as I see it is that pedestrians will swarm the streets if there are enough of them, and it is tough for any motorist caught behind those swarms, but motorists, on the other hand, will play chicken with peds thinking about entering crosswalks and claim the right of way given a chance.

The East Coast ethic is the Sergeant Friday just-the-facts-maam version of law abiding. At least this used to be the case in LA when pedestrians were rare, but a motorist will stop at a crosswalk if there is even a hint that a pedestrian wants to cross. The flip side of this automotive gallantry that is unheard of back East is that pedestrians just plain don't jay walk.

So it is a social-contract thing. In the East you have a kind of every man for himself arrangement, and in the West, you have motorists extending every grant or right of way and courtesy to pedestrians combined with pedestrians assidously taking only the legal right of way granted to them.

Here in Madison, the cops started a crackdown on motorists not honoring right-of-way to pedestrian crosswalks, and when it was announced in the paper they were handing out tickets, I almost got rear-ended and sure got honked and cussed out a couple times for trying to do the California thing in my car. But it occurred to me, shouldn't the cops also hand out tickets for jay walking if they are handing out tickets to the motorists? I am not trying to be snarky that if motorists get tickets peds deserve them too. I am just appealing to a reciprocal social contract to effect the smooth flow of pedestrian and motor traffic. Otherwise our rampant jaywalking UW students will claim the roads and no cars will get through.

It has been nearly 30 years that I knew someone who go a jaywalking ticket in Seattle and was mad as a hornet about the whole thing. The best (or worst) part depending on your point of view is that she had to go to "Pedestrian School." California has "Traffic School" for getting tickets off you driving record, and Seattle, apparently had "Pedestrian School" for the jaywalkers. So my friend goes to Pedestrian School, which is run by a cop, who tells everyone that they are not going to get run over jaywalking, because that is when you are looking both ways for cops, but when crossing with the light, when you are not on guard.

Like you, I had long considered Walk/Don't Walk lights to advisory. I suppose I must have known there was a theoretical possibility of a ticket behind them, but I never knew anyone who actually got a ticket for crossing against the light. The worst I ever heard of was a scolding from a school crossing guard.

Then I went to the University of Southern California.

Apparently, there is a special Don't Walk SWAT team set up by the LAPD, because, at the end of my first week there, not only had I gotten a ticket (let me tell ya, I was literally stunned silent), but half the people I knew had gotten tickets.

I talked to the R.A., and he assured me that LAPD always did this the first few weeks of the semester.

Welcome to L.A.!

After reading Mr. Wingo's tale of woe, it occurred to me that he might profit from taking the advice in this video.

That was funny. Fortunately my last tangling with the law like that was a very long time ago.

As mentioned, it's a social contract thing, and part of it is to keep traffic moving. The lights are often timed, and if you're driving the right speed, you don't have to stop every light... unless some jackass is strolling across the street or goes rolling around the corner on a red light, because there "weren't any cars".

In the Bay Area, there is no social contract. Nobody pays any attention to the lights.

My great-grandmother used to talk about when they first replaced traffic cops with traffic lights. Everybody wondered why somebody would obey without a cop there. In China, it's still that way. Personal vehicles are a new phenomenon, and traffic is total anarchy. The fences along the roads are there to keep people from crossing AND to keep people from driving on the sidewalk. They work well for the latter, but not so well for pedestrians.

As a pedestrian, you don't have right of way. You have to either dodge, or make sure there are enough of you to block the road. In Guangzhou, the drivers WILL run you down. You also have to watch out for bikes, motorized bikes, hand carts, pedicabs, etc. Not motorcycles or scooters, because they're outlawed in major urban areas (the central parts of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, though not the outer districts, or small cities with only a couple million people).

The students at MIT, as are the students at their West Coast rival Caltech, are known for their high-tech pranks.

But there is a legend that some wags at Harvard had a good laugh at the expense of MIT. Anyone here know about that broad crosswalk across "Mass Av" in front of the iconic MIT domed building? Story is that the Harvard students (maybe they were from the Lampoon) changed to pedestrian crossing signal to offer the choices "Walk/Chew."

paul m. comes closest to the explanation.
LA cops ruthlessly enforce the pedestrian right-of-way over motor vehicles. if a pedestrian has so much as one foot off the curb into the roadway--at any place, crosswalk or not-- all traffic is obligated by law to come to a halt. traffic must remain halted until the pedestrian is safely past.
these are serious tickets.
the result is that east-coast style pedestrians, wandering into traffic, can cause rear-enders, traffic jams and all kinds of other problems on a busy street.
to even things out, they go all gestapo on jaywalkers.
if drivers could simply try not to hit pedestrians, but keep moving and and leave the whole business up the ped's dodging skills, as in new york, that would be different.
let us remember that most of these tickets are purely for revenue anyway.

Back when I was a student at Cardozo Law, Mayor Giuliani decided to start enforcing jaywalking laws in New York. Unfortunately for him, the very first person nailed with a ticket was a classmate of mine who worked in the Criminal Law Clinic run by Professor Barry Scheck (of O.J. defense fame). He jumped at the chance to defend her, the case was thrown out in about a second (mistake on the ticket or some such), and that ended the experiment.

Giuliani did a hell of a lot to improve this city, but he didn't really know when to stop.

My great-grandmother used to talk about when they first replaced traffic cops with traffic lights. Everybody wondered why somebody would obey without a cop there.

I once read a magazine account of Arabs on a visit to America in the 1960s. They were incredulous when they visited a supermarket -- all that good stuff just sitting out, with nobody guarding it. The universal reaction was "How can they do that? Why don't people steal it?"

Social contract, folks. Same as with crossing on red lights.

I have lived in New York City, Manhattan, most of my life. In the 50s I played stick ball, roller hockey, and touch football on ordinary through streets. If cars came, even though we were teenagers, we could still summon enough common sense to pause and stand to one side. Now the volume of traffic everywhere in Manhattan makes these kind of street games a rare phenomenon. But there is still hardly a day I don’t jaywalk or walk against the light after looking both ways. I know it is against the law but that makes me actually enjoy it as the only one of the millions of existing Rules, Regulations and Laws the nanny police state cannot enforce. Yet.

Dedrich Knickerbocker II wrote:

I have lived in New York City, Manhattan, most of my life. In the 50s I played stick ball, roller hockey, and touch football on ordinary through streets. If cars came, even though we were teenagers, we could still summon enough common sense to pause and stand to one side. Now the volume of traffic everywhere in Manhattan makes these kind of street games a rare phenomenon.

This supports my original theory. You can't speed on the "aboriginal" streets of Manhattan, so there was never any reason to change the rules that evolved with the growth of the city. In contrast, the western suburbs -- and L.A. is just about all suburbs -- are laid out differently; it's easy to go 35 or 40 mph (even though the speed limit is ostensibly 25). They started out dangerous to pedestrians, and they still are.

I obey laws that make sense, and West Coast traffic laws usually make sense. But don't get me started on metered freeway on-ramps and red light cameras! @#$% social engineering @#$&%!

Traffic rules, like most rules in society, are written for the part of the population that lacks common sense. They're particularly important for people who think they know more than they do. Think about it: how many times have you seen people take action without properly considering the circumstances? That red light in the middle of the night is a clear-cut case where personal judgement is superior to traffic rules, but the use of turn signals at a normally busy intersection isn't so clear cut. Much of the time we would find making the turn safe, but there's a pretty good chance that the signal was installed due to a rash of collisions at that location. Most laws would be unnecessary if people properly understood the first principles, but people are idiots.

Most accidents occur around traffic control devices. Rand touched on this. There has been an empirical study in Norway which demonstrated that traffic control devices can enhance safety, but too many traffic control devices actually create accidents; a sort of Laffer curve for road safety. Too many signs and signals create a complacency on the the part of drivers and pedestrians alike. They drive to the condition of the device and not to the condition of the road environment.

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