Tom Vanderbiltfeb, writing in the New York Times:
“If tough love will not make pedestrians safer, what will? The answer is: better walking infrastructure, slower car speeds and more pedestrians. But it’s easier to write off the problem as one of jaywalkers.
Nowadays, the word connotes an amorphous urban nuisance. In fact, the term once referred to country bumpkins (“jays”), who came to the city and perambulated in a way that amused and exasperated savvy urban bipeds. As the historian Peter Norton has documented, the word was then overhauled in the early part of the 20th century. A coalition of pro-automobile interests Mr. Norton calls “motordom” succeeded in shifting the focus of street safety from curbing the actions of rogue drivers to curbing rogue walkers. The pedestrian pushback was shortlived: An attempt to popularize the term “jay driver” was left behind in a cloud of exhaust.
Sure, we may call an errant driver, per the comedian George Carlin, an “idiot” or a “maniac,” but there is no word to tar an entire class of negligent motorists. This is because of the extent to which driving has been normalized for most Americans: We constantly see the world through what has been called the “windshield view.”
Those humans in Los Angeles who began walking a second or two after the light was blinking were, after all, violating the “Vehicle Code.” Note that cars, apparently, do not violate a “Human Code.””
A safe pedestrian tipping point is based on the number of pedestrians -- a feedback loop.
