Jaywalking Laws Need To Be Abolished

Charles T. Brown and Angie Schmitt are two of the top experts on pedestrian safety in the country, who think “it is time for cities to consider decriminalizing jaywalking or eliminating the infraction altogether. ” Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition could not agree more. Just last week a group of peaceful protesters were walking in the street front of the site of a recent police shooting when the organizer of the protest was arrested for being in the street. There was no traffic to obstruct, the group of people was relatively small, and the people didn’t present a danger to themselves or the community. While this wasn’t technically “jaywalking”, the crime was simply being in the street, so the police enforced the law which stopped the protest. Thankfully there were no serious injuries in this case.

For those who follow this blog, you know that this topic has been covered extensively, describing jaywalking as “fake” here, explaining the weaponization of jaywalking here, why it’s a crime here, and the history of jaywalking here.

The subject never gets old – partly because it’s origin surprises everyone who learns about it, and critically because jaywalking been used in the extreme to target Black people (mostly men and boys) who are unjustifiably arrested and killed.

This ProPublica story, “Walking While Black”, was presented at an event in 2017 by Charles Brown at Rutgers University, which I was fortunate to attend. The study reveals the numbers which attest to the outrageous percentages of Blacks being stopped for “jaywalking” in Jacksonville, Florida. These statistics are not unusual in cities all over the US.

It’s time to get rid of jaywalking laws everywhere and create streets for people, rather than for prioritization of automotive traffic. It’s time to reallocate police responsibilities, to examine and restructure traffic enforcement by police, and for a complete reevaluation of policing culture.

9 Reasons to Eliminate Jaywalking Laws Now

They’ve rarely protected pedestrians, and their enforcement is racially biased. Two street safety experts say there are better ways to curb traffic violence.

Angie Schmitt and Charles T. Brown October 16, 2020

1. Jaywalking is a made-up thing by auto companies to deflect blame when drivers hit pedestrians.

Although jaywalking is foundational to the way we think about streets and access today, it is a relatively young concept. As University of Virginia historian Peter Norton explains in his book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, the notion of “jaywalking” — “jay” being an early 20th century term for someone stupid or unsophisticated — was introduced by a group of auto industry-aligned groups in the 1930s. Prior to the emergence of cars in cities, no such concept existed; pedestrians had free rein in public right-of-ways. But as city streets became sites of increasing carnage in the early days of America’s auto era — about 200,000 Americans (many of them children) were killed by cars in the 1920s — automakers sought regulations that would shift blame away from drivers.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-16/jaywalking-laws-don-t-make-streets-safer

February 22, 2020February 22, 2020

Jaywalking Is Fake

The history of “jaywalking” – a calculated plan to make way for more cars by marginalizing all other road users. People walking across unmarked intersections or even walking across a street between blocks is not a crime (as long as the person does not literally block the flow of traffic) but it’s considered illegal almost everywhere. It wasn’t always a crime…drivers were the menace until the industry highjacked our brains and our language.

Here’s a fun video from Adam Ruins Everything! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFn7MiJz_s

Turns Out Jaywalking Is A Fake Crime Designed By The Car Industry To Make More People Drive

Cleo Egnal

Updated September 15, 2017

Using money, clever marketing campaigns (which had a lot to do with why we called it ‘jaywalking’), and stories about dead children, car companies were able to pressure cities into putting the onus on pedestrians to not get hit, rather than on drivers for not running over pedestrians.

A History Lesson: The Auto Industry Has Brainwashed Us

Here’s fascinating history on how we’ve been brainwashed, explained in Peter Norton’s book, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “In ad after ad during the Super Bowl, auto companies… have long promised us nirvana. And we’ve blindly shilled out our life savings” to buy, insure, maintain and park cars. The 1920s program at Harvard taught “the first generation of traffic engineers to prioritize traffic lights for faster driving and more difficult walking.”

We need to use language and educate to make sure messages like “biking is normal,” “walkability,” and “good transportation choices” become better understood and more widely accepted over the next decade.

The conversation continues about scooters, “…as a transportation choice – and other micro mobility vehicles are not a novelty, and we should give everything we can to helping them succeed.”

To take back our streets, remember how we lost them to cars

By Paul Mackie – October 9, 2015

Ford Motor’s “Road of Tomorrow” from the 1939 World Fair

Streets are now thoroughly car-centric, and the idea of people-centered streets remains a difficult concept for most people to grasp. These groups recognized they needed to shift the perceived cause of collisions away from drivers and onto pedestrians. Under the name Motordom, the interest groups were quoted in a 1922 edition of Engineering News-Record that they would lead the effort in a “revision of our concept of what a city street is for.”

A 1937 anti-jaywalking ad from the Federal Art Project. Source

The Beauty And Frustration of Riding A Bike In The City-A Graphic Story

This charming and thought-provoking graphic story illustrates the beauty of riding a bike in the city, and also the frustration and danger – and asks whether motorist entitlement making us question our confidence in the human race. In this case the bike rider arrives at a happy ending.

Drivers display behaviors on the road that indicate that they feel entitled, but in a weird way it’s not the fault of drivers themselves. The titans of the auto and oil and gas industries have made a concerted effort since the 1920s to brainwash the populace, when the first affordable cars rolled off the assembly line, making them affordable and available to almost everyone, and cities built roads that accommodated cars, and marginalized people.

In the interest of promoting car culture the industry has deliberately co-opted our vernacular to take responsibility away from drivers, using words like “accident”, which is a rare, pre-ordained and unavoidable incident, rather than “crash”, which all vehicle related incidents are. “Jaywalking” is a completely made up word intended to marginalize, and even criminalize walkers. The term “parking”, which now is only applied to parking vehicles, is originally a West Germanic word, pre-4c., meaning “fencing”, in Medieval Latin, “enclosure, park“, in old French, as well as Italian parco, Spanish parque, etc. We even use a driving license as the main form of ID in the US.

Asbury Park, like many cities in the US is working on changing car culture with incremental infrastructure improvements, improving mass transit, adding micro-mobility options, and making it less convenient to drive in the city, and more desirable and safer to ride a bike and walk.

‘Motorists undercut any confidence you ever had in the human race’: New York cycling – a cartoon

Marcellus Hall is a New York-based illustrator

The Illustrated City: Despite its traffic, for cyclists, Manhattan is a contained sprawl that unfolds like a pop-up book, its history evident everywhere

See the story:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/sep/20/motorists-undercut-any-confidence-you-ever-had-in-the-human-race-new-york-cycling-a-cartoon

August 8, 2019August 8, 2019

The Auto Industry Has Co-Opted Our Language

The automotive industry has co-opted our language and we’re just becoming aware of the calculated plan. We’re people driving vehicles, and we’re also people riding bikes, and walking – and yes, riding scooters too. But guess who gets the benefit of language that absolves them of responsibility in injuries and fatalities? It’s NOT an accident.

We don’t say “plane accident.” We shouldn’t say “car accident” either.

AUTOMAKERS TRIED TO SHAPE NEWS COVERAGE OF CRASHES — BY CALLING THEM ACCIDENTS

In response to the emerging public backlash against cars (which were, at the time, largely owned and driven by the wealthy), automakers and other industry groups pushed for a new set of laws that kept pedestrians off the streets, except at crosswalks.

To get people to follow these laws, they tried to shape news coverage of crashes. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic collision, and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for crashes to pedestrians — and almost always used the word “accident.”

Read how we’ve been brainwashed:

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/8995151/crash-not-accident

September 8, 2018August 31, 2018

Mid-block Crosswalk

*Editor’s note: jaywalking is fake. In addition, in NJ it is not illegal to cross mid-block as long as the pedestrian is not obstructing oncoming traffic. So mid-block pedestrian crosswalks should be unnecessary, but drivers and pedestrians do not know the law.

South Street is getting ‘midblock’ crosswalks to make it safer for pedestrians

However, there are no plans to install the traffic-calming measures elsewhere — yet.

Max Marin Aug 29, 2018

“In a city where the mentality is often “cars over everything,” the freshly painted crosswalk stripes on South Street halfway between Ninth and 10th are an unusual but welcome sight.

The markings form a midblock crosswalk — a clunky phrase, but simple enough concept in urban design. They facilitate road-crossing in areas where corner crosswalks just don’t cut it. In this particular case, the thinking went, people have been jaywalking * across this stretch near Delhi Street to get to Whole Foods for the nearly two decades of the grocery store’s existence, so why not alert oncoming drivers and guarantee safer passage for pedestrians?”

Jaywalking Was Invented To Make Way For Cars

Streets were once considered public spaces, places for people, but have become dominated by cars, and streets designed for speedy traffic flow. Now people are marginalized, called “pedestrians” and those walking outside of painted lines are demonized as “jaywalkers”, and blamed if they are injured or killed.

THE WEAPONIZATION OF JAYWALKING

by John Bennett July 11, 2018

“Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as ‘jaywalkers’.”