Being a long time pedestrian in LA (I moved here from New York, old habits die hard), I can say that we definitely have a jaywalking problem but it isn’t people entering crosswalks on the blinking red. What LA does suffer from are people who cross streets willy nilly in the dead freaking center of the block when there’s a crosswalk half a block, or maybe at most one or two blocks away. They “wait” for traffic but often traffic stops for them and allows them to pass. I’ve watched this, baffled, every single day I’ve lived here. Yet when I try to cross at crosswalks, like I’m supposed to, I have to gain eye contact with drivers to keep them from plowing over me when they’re right turning or left turning against the light (in both cases I often have to shout “Hey!” or wave my arms to get their attention, especially the left turners which puts me in the center of the crosswalk with nowhere to go to escape their hail mary pedal-to-the-metal turn into me).
We do, admittedly, have a large homeless and senior citizen population, both of which consistently walk at snail speed through crosswalks to where they seem to always be in the middle when the light turns green again. But the average pedestrian here is in no way going “against” traffic when they cross at crosswalks. In fact, isn’t it the law that cars have to stay completely out of crosswalks if there are pedestrians present? Why is it then that there is always a car that’s rolled casually into a crosswalk and camped out there waiting for a right turn when I need to walk into it? And then this practice conditions drivers to enter crosswalks without care, regardless of what the pedestrian light says.
Also, pedestrian lights here are nuts: they’re green for a literal handful of seconds before beginning epic 15-30 second countdowns, when crossing easily takes about 5-10 counts. It’s inane to treat a red flashing pedestrian light like a traffic yellow light, which lasts all of 1-2 seconds. They’re not the same, even if currently the law thinks they are.
