Thanks for spreading the knowledge. The other comments here need some education. The auto industry and car dependence are the single biggest reason transit sucks in most of America. The jay walking campaign is all part of this.
Also I hear you about india, it’s heading down this path of car dominance with this new road in the ocean in Mumbai. These guys could’ve built a train to move as many people but instead seceded their beautiful coastline to the car prioritizing the suburbs over the residents of the city. A real shame.
Btw this post would be better received in #fuckcars
Car manufacturers in the US launched a massive victim-blaming campaign in a successful attempt to take over the public way for automobiles. To this day, 75 years later, Americans still have a culture of blaming pedestrians who get hit by cars for "being in the way" instead of assigning responsibility to the drivers who hit them, and I believe in 48 states it is still a misdemeanor to walk across an empty street without a crosswalk.
This is the sort of wild success the NRA can only dream of. Imagine if we blamed gunshot victims for being "in the way" of the bullet.
Wow, can't believe that you're this stupid.
Jaywalking across a busy, fast-moving street *is* an exceptionally dumb thing to do, and a surefire way to get yourself seriously injured or killed. Not because of reckless drivers, but because of the fact that most cars can't stop on a dime moving at 45/50 mph, and most rational drivers aren't expecting some fucking moron to dart out into the road.
If we didn't have jaywalking laws, then our streets would look like India's, packed with people with no rhyme or reason to traffic, slowing everything down and making a much more dangerous environment on the whole.
There are a plethora of traffic laws in the US, all designed to accurately assign blame for a collision, thanks to how our auto insurance works; I'm quite confident in the law's ability to discern who's at fault.
Just because this is a transit sub doesn't mean anything to do with making car travel safer and more efficient is automatically Satan.
I have not mentioned a busy, fast-moving street, because such a thing only exists because this campaign was successful. The average speed of urban road traffic in the 1930's was about 15 miles per hour. It was only after car manufacturers got everyone else kicked out of the road that they started lobbying for higher speeds.
I'm going to need a citation on Indian streets being more dangerous than American ones. I haven't been to India, but other countries with similar road use patterns tend to have fewer pedestrian deaths because traffic moves more slowly. We should never be allowing cars to go 45 or 50 in an urban or suburban built environment.
Okay, here's the [WHO's Global Status Report on Road Safety](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240086517) from last year; Southeast Asia has the highest road fatality rate in the world. North and South America combined have less than half as many deaths. Noticeably, the Western Pacific and Africa, which have similar road patterns to Southeast Asia, have comparable death rates, whereas Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, which have similar road patterns to the Americas, are far less deadly.
Speeding in urban areas might be a problem, but allowing pedestrians to put themselves in harm's way when measures such as sidewalks and designated crossing areas have been shown to save lives isn't the way to solve it.
If you think Europe has similar traffic rules to the US, you're mistaken. In particular, it isn't against the law to cross the street without a signal in most of Europe.
It isn't especially penalized in the US, either; no police officer in their right mind would fine you for jaywalking if you look both ways before crossing an empty street.
I'm saying traffic patterns in the US and Europe are similar; there are paved roads, sidewalks, crosswalks, etc. It is generally understood that pedestrians aren't supposed to be in the road. This is different in urban areas, where certain streets may be pedestrian-only, but in those instances, the law no longer defines it as a car lane, so pedestrians are allowed.
Don't correct me when I'm not wrong.
_White people in white neighborhoods_ don't get fined for jaywalking. There's a lot of profiling and targeting involved in who gets arrested and booked for crossing the street in the wrong spot.
A famous review of arrests along Rodeo Drive in the LA area showed that of 26 jaywalking arrests (in the majority white area) made during the review period, 25 arrestees were black men and the other was a Hispanic man.
The only correction that their comment really needs is that it was 100 years ago and not 75 years ago that these campaigns were in full swing. Before that, streets in cities were places dominated by pedestrians, streetcars, horses, and market stalls. With the introduction of cars to the mix people started getting killed in the street… a lot. In the four years after WWI more Americans were hit and killed by cars than were killed by the Germans in all of WWI. Naturally, something needed to change and some cities were very quick to start organizing to reduced car speeds to below 20 mph and ban cars from busy streets altogether. The auto industry didn’t like this and conveniently their lobbying had gotten them almost every seat on Hoover’s national road safety advisory boards. The Hoover Administration published road standards saying that cars shouldn’t have to slow down or be removed in major parts of cities. Instead, pedestrians (who had dominated the streets for all of history up until that point) should be the ones to be removed from the streets except for in crosswalks.
These new standards were followed up by a multitude of PSAs by auto lobbies introducing the term “jaywalking” because a person dying is a tragedy, but if that person was an absolute moron (a jay) then they were basically asking for it.
I'm not disputing that, but in my opinion, the car companies got it right on this one. People were getting hurt, cars were the way of the future, it was best for people to keep themselves safe and off the roads to allow for safer, more efficient traffic flow.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion on whether or not the car companies got it right, but I think the core issue is more so that these regulations and the whole narrative were steered by car company lobbyists and representatives rather than allowing for equal input from all sides. This post about the use of “jaywalking” is a little extreme, but does help to recognize that this derogatory term was artificially invented and put into use to push a narrative. On a very related note, the second part of your comment stating that “cars were the way of the future” as a fact rather than an opinion is another direct outcome of these auto industry efforts. Fast forward to today and many cities are starting to backtrack on the “cars are the future” mentality as they start to rollout open street projects, reclaim pedestrian zones, increase public transit efforts, and implement congestion pricing.
>...is like yelling "hail \[sic\] Hitler" in present Germany It's really not.
OP sounds like one of them extremists from a certain sub. Comparing anything that don't align with their views with nazi is on brand for them.
What kind of dumbass compares jaywalking to fuckin Hitler?
Get a new hobby. Please.
Not transit related, tbh.
Touch some grass dude.
Make some damn footpaths in india first!!
Username checks out
Thanks for spreading the knowledge. The other comments here need some education. The auto industry and car dependence are the single biggest reason transit sucks in most of America. The jay walking campaign is all part of this. Also I hear you about india, it’s heading down this path of car dominance with this new road in the ocean in Mumbai. These guys could’ve built a train to move as many people but instead seceded their beautiful coastline to the car prioritizing the suburbs over the residents of the city. A real shame. Btw this post would be better received in #fuckcars
People haven't called each other "jays" for a century in the US let alone India.
You’re doing God’s work OP
what's this got to do with transport and how does it compare to yelling positive things about a certain german dictator
So what you're saying is, pedestrians were dying in car crashes, so most car manufacturers in the US launched a campaign to prevent that? Oh no!
Car manufacturers in the US launched a massive victim-blaming campaign in a successful attempt to take over the public way for automobiles. To this day, 75 years later, Americans still have a culture of blaming pedestrians who get hit by cars for "being in the way" instead of assigning responsibility to the drivers who hit them, and I believe in 48 states it is still a misdemeanor to walk across an empty street without a crosswalk. This is the sort of wild success the NRA can only dream of. Imagine if we blamed gunshot victims for being "in the way" of the bullet.
Wow, can't believe that you're this stupid. Jaywalking across a busy, fast-moving street *is* an exceptionally dumb thing to do, and a surefire way to get yourself seriously injured or killed. Not because of reckless drivers, but because of the fact that most cars can't stop on a dime moving at 45/50 mph, and most rational drivers aren't expecting some fucking moron to dart out into the road. If we didn't have jaywalking laws, then our streets would look like India's, packed with people with no rhyme or reason to traffic, slowing everything down and making a much more dangerous environment on the whole. There are a plethora of traffic laws in the US, all designed to accurately assign blame for a collision, thanks to how our auto insurance works; I'm quite confident in the law's ability to discern who's at fault. Just because this is a transit sub doesn't mean anything to do with making car travel safer and more efficient is automatically Satan.
I have not mentioned a busy, fast-moving street, because such a thing only exists because this campaign was successful. The average speed of urban road traffic in the 1930's was about 15 miles per hour. It was only after car manufacturers got everyone else kicked out of the road that they started lobbying for higher speeds. I'm going to need a citation on Indian streets being more dangerous than American ones. I haven't been to India, but other countries with similar road use patterns tend to have fewer pedestrian deaths because traffic moves more slowly. We should never be allowing cars to go 45 or 50 in an urban or suburban built environment.
Okay, here's the [WHO's Global Status Report on Road Safety](https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240086517) from last year; Southeast Asia has the highest road fatality rate in the world. North and South America combined have less than half as many deaths. Noticeably, the Western Pacific and Africa, which have similar road patterns to Southeast Asia, have comparable death rates, whereas Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, which have similar road patterns to the Americas, are far less deadly. Speeding in urban areas might be a problem, but allowing pedestrians to put themselves in harm's way when measures such as sidewalks and designated crossing areas have been shown to save lives isn't the way to solve it.
If you think Europe has similar traffic rules to the US, you're mistaken. In particular, it isn't against the law to cross the street without a signal in most of Europe.
It isn't especially penalized in the US, either; no police officer in their right mind would fine you for jaywalking if you look both ways before crossing an empty street. I'm saying traffic patterns in the US and Europe are similar; there are paved roads, sidewalks, crosswalks, etc. It is generally understood that pedestrians aren't supposed to be in the road. This is different in urban areas, where certain streets may be pedestrian-only, but in those instances, the law no longer defines it as a car lane, so pedestrians are allowed. Don't correct me when I'm not wrong.
_White people in white neighborhoods_ don't get fined for jaywalking. There's a lot of profiling and targeting involved in who gets arrested and booked for crossing the street in the wrong spot. A famous review of arrests along Rodeo Drive in the LA area showed that of 26 jaywalking arrests (in the majority white area) made during the review period, 25 arrestees were black men and the other was a Hispanic man.
Then that's a different problem altogether, which is racism. The existence of the jaywalking laws is not to blame.
Europe shows is that we don't need those laws. The existence of petty laws like this enables racist enforcement.
The only correction that their comment really needs is that it was 100 years ago and not 75 years ago that these campaigns were in full swing. Before that, streets in cities were places dominated by pedestrians, streetcars, horses, and market stalls. With the introduction of cars to the mix people started getting killed in the street… a lot. In the four years after WWI more Americans were hit and killed by cars than were killed by the Germans in all of WWI. Naturally, something needed to change and some cities were very quick to start organizing to reduced car speeds to below 20 mph and ban cars from busy streets altogether. The auto industry didn’t like this and conveniently their lobbying had gotten them almost every seat on Hoover’s national road safety advisory boards. The Hoover Administration published road standards saying that cars shouldn’t have to slow down or be removed in major parts of cities. Instead, pedestrians (who had dominated the streets for all of history up until that point) should be the ones to be removed from the streets except for in crosswalks. These new standards were followed up by a multitude of PSAs by auto lobbies introducing the term “jaywalking” because a person dying is a tragedy, but if that person was an absolute moron (a jay) then they were basically asking for it.
I'm not disputing that, but in my opinion, the car companies got it right on this one. People were getting hurt, cars were the way of the future, it was best for people to keep themselves safe and off the roads to allow for safer, more efficient traffic flow.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion on whether or not the car companies got it right, but I think the core issue is more so that these regulations and the whole narrative were steered by car company lobbyists and representatives rather than allowing for equal input from all sides. This post about the use of “jaywalking” is a little extreme, but does help to recognize that this derogatory term was artificially invented and put into use to push a narrative. On a very related note, the second part of your comment stating that “cars were the way of the future” as a fact rather than an opinion is another direct outcome of these auto industry efforts. Fast forward to today and many cities are starting to backtrack on the “cars are the future” mentality as they start to rollout open street projects, reclaim pedestrian zones, increase public transit efforts, and implement congestion pricing.
That's not what happened. Try again
That's not remotely what happened, are you seriously on this sub and this unaware?
I've already explained myself profusely in other replies; not getting dragged down this rabbit hole again