You have to remember there are also people in the cars who are now put in unnecessary danger by pedestrians jumping out in front of them. The worst part is that they are at the mercy of others to avoid this danger. Even if they see you unexpectedly moving in front of traffic and react in time, the 2-3 cars behind them also have to do the same for everyone to avoid injury. If you jump in front of moving cars, you should be personally liable for any injuries and damages caused by cars trying to avoid you. And this is all avoidable if the pedestrian walks a little further to get to the crosswalk, or waits a little longer for a walk signal.
Why do we make it the pedestrian's job? You want the pedestrian to walk a little further, you want the pedestrian to wait a little longer. Why don't we turn it around and say the car has to wait a little longer if someone wants to cross in front of them?
Cars already do have to wait a little longer for pedestrians to cross - at traffic lights, stop signs, intersections and crosswalks.
Roads are literally built for cars to drive on. Having people on them makes driving far more dangerous, as well as meaning it takes longer to get places, not to mention taking a hit on fuel efficiency.
Should I be able to walk in front of a bus load of people and delay their commute? If we're allowing pedestrians unlimited full access to roads with full right of way all the time, then roads basically become sidewalks which cars are also allowed to inch along at walking speed. So what happens to busses now? Are we ok saying busloads of people now have to move at 3mph across a few miles? Again, I am for converting some downtown roads into pedestrian-only areas, but until we do that, we should treat these roads as roads.
If pedestrians should have right of way everywhere all the time, should a pedestrian be able to walk across a railroad crossing while the barriers are down and a train is approaching? Is the train expected to stop? Of course not, that would be ridiculous, but it's the same argument.
No, at least outside of the US roads were there before the car even existed. They were walked on before anything else. Then cars hijacked them, and now people have so long forgotten in the US that they've started writing laws to strengthen their land-grab as if it was always this way.
> Should I be able to walk in front of a bus load of people and delay their commute?
No I don't think you should be able to unreasonably obstruct the highway. You can't do that no matter what vehicle or no vehicle you're in. But crossing is completely reasonable in my mind.
> No, at least outside of the US roads were there before the car even existed
I mean yes, obviously the concept of a road does literally predate cars. But no roads that modern cars drive on today were built 200 years ago for cattle and wagons to use. Modern city planners built (or re-built) these roads specifically with vehicle traffic in mind (and in some cases maybe bikes). If they didn't want them to support vehicle traffic, they would have built them using different materials and designs.
> No I don't think you should be able to unreasonably obstruct the highway. You can't do that no matter what vehicle or no vehicle you're in. But crossing is completely reasonable in my mind.
This reads like you're saying you think it's completely reasonable to cross the highway even if it obstructs traffic? I could be misinterpreting the connection between your first and last sentences here...
Either way, at the end of the day I think it comes down to the fact that we disagree on what constitutes "unreasonable obstruction". I believe a single pedestrian wanting to slow down dozens of cars so they can cross the street 30 seconds quicker is unreasonable. Even if we're talking about all pedestrians, the aggregate time saved by pedestrians crossing slightly earlier is far outweighed by the time lost by everyone in a car who's now traveling at 5mph instead of 40mph. I believe the current system we have of batching pedestrians crossing using traffic lights is far more efficient overall. The "should there be roads here in the first place" argument is a totally different one however.
> This reads like you're saying you think it's completely reasonable to cross the highway even if it obstructs traffic?
Yeah I do - as a pedestrian. I think you should get across as quickly as you can and shouldn't get in people's way unnecessarily... but yeah morally I think you should have that right as a human being on foot.
Letting cars have priority lets people with wealth and opportunity have priority.
> Letting cars have priority lets people with wealth and opportunity have priority.
I would actually argue the opposite. As the saying goes, "Location, Location, Location." Many of the wealthiest people / most expensive homes are either walking distance to or in the middle of big hubs. The next most expensive places are walking distance to public transport to take them to big hubs. You can get a much cheaper place if you go to somewhere that's an hour's drive outside the city with no public transport (or the only public transport available is by bus), and that's what many people do to cut down on costs.
You've also mentioned that cars probably shouldn't be able to go even as fast as 40kmph when pedestrians could cross... Should we be making all of our highways 30kmph now if we're saying pedestrians should be able to cross them at-will?
No I think UK law already makes an exception for highways (in the sense you mean), so no I don't think people should be able to cross for example three-lane roads purpose built for cars where people are going 70 mph.
This thread has digressed a bit. It was originally about jaywalking in cities. Should it be a named crime to cross a road in the middle of New York City? Come on - no - pedestrians owned those first and should still do.
The reason jaywalking can be a crime is because a pedestrian crossing a road with cars in it in a non-designated location or at a non-designated time runs the real risk of recklessly endangering others.
I know we're just going round in circles here... but why don't we make it the cars' responsibility to stop for pedestrians, instead of the pedestrians' responsibility to stop for cars?
Why are we starting from the point of the default is that it is space for cars rather than people?
Because cars take longer to stop? Well then how about the cars slow down in cities?
Because cars are more dangerous? Well that sounds like a reason to restrict them, not the pedestrians.
It's not one or the other, it's both. There are different types of routes. Some are:
- built for humans to walk on[1]. Cars are not allowed on here at all.
- built for cars to drive on[2]. See the big double yellow lines in the middle? That's how you know this part of the road was designed with cars in mind. However, because we don't have the money to build footbridges over every road, we put a zebra crossing in the middle of it so that pedestrians can cross between the routes that only they are allowed on.
Cars get the right of way on roads because that's what we built them (or in the case of old roads that existed before cars, repurposed/maintain them) for. Just like we built the sidewalks/pavements/footpaths/footbridges/etc for pedestrians (and sometimes cyclists).
Maybe part of the problem here is that you seem to be using "road" to mean "things people go on", when the rest of us are using the word road to mean "the things people drive on", and generally use other words to describe the things we've built specifically for walking on.
But how did the cars end up with the prime space? Look at how much they've got here. The pedestrians are pushed to the side and squeezed. Why do we accept that?
And why do we talk about pedestrians 'crossing the street'? How about instead we call crosswalks an extension of the sidewalk and talk about cars 'crossing the sidewalk'?
How did we let cars get the upper hand on people?
And why is anyone driving through a freaking city in the first place? Unless you're disabled, or delivering physical goods, what on earth are you doing? Get out!
> And why is anyone driving through a freaking city in the first place?
Because I can, and there is literally nothing you can do about it. Heck, sometimes I just get in my car and drive for no reason at all, just because I have the freedom to do so.
People's reasons for driving through a freaking city include 'couldn't be bothered to walk', 'couldn't be bothered to take public transport', and in the case of the person I'm replying to, literally 'sometimes I just get in my car and drive for no reason at all'.
Mostly because tanks aren't optimized for getting normal people from A to B as quickly and efficiently as possible, so we don't build infra for that. Also because approximately zero people have tanks for the aforementioned reasons.
That being said, tanks aren't actually that big, so usually you can drive a tank on the road. Main problem is you need to stick to low speed roads because they don't go very fast.
I'm picturing somebody jumping in front of a fast moving horse wagon and expecting not to get run over now. I guarantee you everyone would have found that expectation equally ridiculous.
Of course, people can and do jaywalk all the time. I'm told it's different in some places but I am pretty sure that someone actually getting issued a ticket for jaywalking in Boston or NYC would practically be a newsworthy event. In actual life, (most) people do behave sensibly. Pedestrians cross empty streets at will and drivers mostly don't run over people who cross in the middle of traffic.
Whether you like it or not, there are cars in most areas of cities and pedestrians (and cyclists) mostly interact with them without too much carnage, in part because there are rules that most people follow most of the time.
By way of context as to the vigorous enforcement of this law, NYC gave out 300 jaywalking tickets last year. That is not a lot.
In fact that's only about 2x the number of pedestrian deaths in NYC last year.
And this is a city where everyone pedestrian or driver will take every inch they can. Any driver who hesitates is going to find an entire group waiting for a light taking the opportunity to just start crossing.
That's a fair point. Here's the new idea then: pedestrians have right of way on any road that was originally built with pedestrians in mind and has not since been updated with cars in mind.
I personally am not in favor of decreasing the efficiency of our entire economy so that pedestrians who think they own the roads can walk wherever they want and expect everyone else to defer to their whims.
Also, you've repeatedly asked the question "why should drivers get any right of way on the roads". Well, for one, I would imagine that the average car operator pays more towards the upkeep of the roads than the average pedestrian.
