Thanks…good explanation. Also as one who drives quite a bit I really should have mulled a little better: something about the Internet I tell ya: “get offended first…think later.”
Sometimes as a driver my mentality can be ‘clear a path people! I don’t want to kill you…but here I come.’
Yet when I’m on foot I think ‘go ahead and run me over sucker: I’ve got health insurance, life insurance and a good lawyer: I’m Walkin’ Here!’
It’s like the immovable object vs. irresistible force: somethings gotta give.
Everyday I see people crazier than me, on the road and in the streets, which is both alarming…and slightly reassuring. Look both ways!
I’d have a bit more sympathy if so many crosswalks weren’t designed as deathtraps - I’d rather jaywalk and stay safe (but maybe pay a fine) rather than get killed by some lunatic. Crossings are often intentionally placed in locations that put pedestrians at the mercy of drivers - most places allow through traffic while the ok-to-cross light is up! Combined with crosswalks almost always being placed where the most dangerous vehicles will be careening into it from behind you…
I’ve had enough close calls that there are certain crosswalks I will outright avoid (and it’s usually in places that have no other or equally dangerous crosswalks nearby), and I very much disapprove of laws and designers that work together to make life difficult and more dangerous for pedestrians.
I find parking lot traffic far more dangerous these days than the streets. The streets have rules; parking lots don’t seem to have any and that’s a very dangerous combinations of pedestrians and drivers simultaneously not paying attention. I tracked down who ever was playing the role of “manager” at Whole Foods just before Thanksgiving to complain about how close some woman came to mowing me over, driving much too fast and texting all the way. She never looked up all the way to the street. By Christmas, the store had a rent-a-cop directing both car and foot traffic out front. I’m guessing several folks walked into the store over the holidays with eyes widely dilated with fear and anger to find the manager and tell them of the near misses out in the parking lot in front of their store. When I saw they had hired a traffic cop, I stood on the corner and thanked the cop for doing the job. I felt safer both as a pedestrian, and then as a driver.
When I see my coworkers (we’re spread across the country) they’re always amazed by my brazen Boston ways as I’ll step out (safely) into the road without a second thought regardless of the lights/signs/whatever. I’ve had people sit me down and lecture me about safety before, but I’m always just like, “You’ve obviously never lived in Boston…”.
I’d say people that insist on using their cars to go to large urban downtown areas are the ones making the situation worse. It’s interesting that L.A. chooses to so egregiously punish good behavior (walking) while pretty much reinforcing bad behavior in favoring car culture. People will always jaywalk, just as drivers will always speed, run lights/signs, etc etc. but pedestrians feel less a need to do this when infrastructure, and policy making is more forward thinking and people-friendly.
Here is this optimal pedestrian trip, as defined by drivers:
First walk a block. When you get to the light, even if there is no traffic in half a mile and the light is green in your direction, come to a sudden halt and press the crosswalk button, because the crosswalk light is off here by default. Wait a minute for the light to change red in your direction. (This gives cars some time to build up.)
Wait another minute for the light to change back to green, hurry quickly across the intersection, half waving at drivers now waiting to turn, so they know that you know that walking is kind of naughty. They have places they have to be! Waiting as many as five seconds is out of the question, for a driver. When back on the sidewalk, if there is one, resume walking at a normal pace.
In this stuttering manner of walking, stopping, and sprinting block by block, make your way to your destination, trying not to think about what the city would resemble if pedestrians’ time were as important as drivers’…
I used to go to a college with a strip mall accross the street with a bunch of different stores plus a pizza place and a Rexall pharmacy/grocery store at the one end of the campus and basically a series of shopping complexes with all kinds of stuff including real grocery stores and such at the other. What I always thought was weird and annoying, considering how many students needed to cross every day, was that both lights were the longest lights I have ever waited for in my life on top of which, they had buttons as a placebo rather than actually functioning. I believe this is why people tended to jaywalk four lanes of traffic to cross, and, I imagine, why I’ve seen a police cruiser flick his lights on to run the light, presumably the cop had important business in the pizza place.
FWIW, I’ve never been to LA. But the situation looks to me like this: You’re a traffic cop. Fewer people are driving cars, but you still need to make quota. What do you do? Answer: bust “jaywalkers”.
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.
Oddly enough, here (Toronto), I got a ticket for crossing against a red light (on a Sunday morning, with no moving cars in sight… although granted, I missed the parked police car that decided to get me). I was annoyed, and looked it up. Again, here (and possibly more other places), apparently it’s perfectly legal to cross the street non-crosswalk, mid-block (so long as ‘appropriate care’ is taken that you’re not impeding traffic), but it’s always illegal to cross at a corner when the light’s red, even if it’s perfectly safe to do so and a car would have to be violating the laws of physics to hit you.
Yeah, this is the mix-up in priority and impact on traffic safety (and pedestrian safety) that I think local law makers have gotten horribly wrong. Now we have people pushing strollers through mid-block traffic without a care and the guy trying to cross in a crosswalk either fending off cars when the light is green or getting a ticket when it’s red but clear.
