this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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I think there may be a misunderstanding. The concept of jaywalking is nuts to me, and many Europeans. The USA has made it illegal to… walk? In the Netherlands, we don’t even have a word for this. It’s just walking. Traffic participation while not in a car.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a documentary. Ignore the cartoons. Oil companies bought up and paved over our trolleys in the 1920s and invented jaywalking to prioritize cars. It was a way to punish and imprison poor people, and likely, considering the rest of the history of this country, was predominantly enforced on people of color
Absolutely, oil and car companies. And they were behind the push for highway bypasses (conveniently running through immigrant and PoC neighborhoods) and suburbs (many of them redlined and outright racial exclusionary.
It depends on the place and the cop that is present, but jaywalking isn't often enforced. It's a law to try to protect people from crossing the street and getting injured by cars that may not see them crossing. Instead of crossing anywhere, they are supposed to cross at a specific area where cars already are supposed to stop. Since jaywalking is against the law (even if it isn't enforced well), it will stop some people from crossing the street in the middle of a road, and it may save a few lives. It's kinda dumb, but if it helps a few people, I have no problem with it.
Surely there's some sort of "you can't just jump out in the middle of traffic" law though? That's basically what our jaywalking laws "do" (in the limited cases where they're enforced).
There are of course the exceptions where someone gets a bit power trippy.
There’s just a general “don’t do absurdly dangerous traffic things” law that regulates that you can’t skateboard on the highway and such. Do people need a law to tell them that they can’t throw themselves into traffic? And does it work?
I mean, it's also illegal to try and kill yourself, or do various other dangerous stuff. So... Maybe?
Plus, it's not so much about the pedestrian safety as it is keeping traffic moving by stopping pedestrians from just walking out in front of cars wherever they please. I'm not sure how that precedent is set, since I assume most other countries also give pedestrians the right of way (in the places they're supposed to cross).