In the US, pedestrian signals do NOT signal when it’s safe to cross. Cars almost always have a green in the same direction, meaning they can turn into you. I almost get run over once a month because of this.
The road markings were black and white stripes, which mean "cars must always stop for pedestrians crossing here" where I live (UK). The description above chimes with my experience. Who does have priority when the light is red but cars are still turning right?
In the end, I went back and had the nasty coffee in the university. It seemed to dangerous to try to cross.
Edit: this is different in different states? It was in North Carolina for reference.
Also, as a note, college campuses are some of the worst places for cars and pedestrians to have to interact. The students seem to ignore the rules of the road regardless of whether they are pedestrians or drivers.
OTOH, especially at a busy intersection, if you're just standing on the sidewalk looking confused, a driver looking to make a turn is probably going to just shrug and turn right through the crosswalk. Some drivers will doubtless be overly aggressive or inattentive. But a random driver is also not going to sit there forever waiting for you to make up your mind about whether to cross or not.
In your case if there was no indicator light. Then you could go for it when the traffic was going in the same direction as you or when clear from the other direction.
The general rule of thumb is from any corner you can cross. That does not mean you get to stop traffic to do so. Though it seems much more common now for people to just cross wherever they want in the area I live in. They seem surprised when I honk at them. It shakes them out of them looking down at their phone while randomly walking around. You may have 'right of way' but the driver does not always see you in time. Be safe.
Maybe roll down your window and say something instead of blaring your horn at people who aren’t encased in a car. Although I am not sure why you think you have a right to teach strangers a lesson.
Jaywalking is dangerous, especially on busy streets. And I admit to my fair amount jaywalking when I worked in downtown Chicago.
The horn is primarily about expressing anger but about imminent danger. A pedestrian steps out, from limitted visibility between cars, into traffic they deserve to be honked at. Not because of anger, but because they are putting themselves and others at undue risk.
That said, I don't think Ive ever personally seen someone respond to a horn in a fashion to avoid an accident. Twice last year, I was involved in accidents caused by someone else changing into my lane. Both times I saw it coming, laid on the horn and braked, but they kept coming faster than I could stop.
One, I couldnt avoid at all. We were in a construction zone, and the car next to me just kept coming over. I saw it coming, but had no where to go. No shoulder, just a concrete K-rail with about 6 inches of wiggle room. Side swiped me at about 55 mph. Entire driver's side was fuckedd up. Couldnt even open my door. Also managed to fuck up some of the passenger side as I did everything I could to get out of the way. (little bit of fender damage, cut both tires and scraped up a wheel)
The second one was I was in a left turn lane and the dude tried to force is way in. I didnt even see his signal until it was too late. Again, laid on the horn and brake, still mamaged to put his rear door into my passenger side front quarter panel.
Had a third actual miss earlier this year. Was driving in the 2nd from left lane in a rain storm, doing around 80mph on the highway. Car in the left lane, without signaling, starts coming over. Again, slam on the brakes and the horn, asshole keeps coming. Went from 80 to 60 in about a second or so, nearly getting rearended in the process. My car also started going sideways. In a lesser car, I probably would have lost it, but mine is pretty stable. Soon as I let hard off the brake, it recovered easily.
Point is, everyone assumes if someone is honking they're road raging at you, and some surely use it that way, but it's primarily about signaling imminent danger, and you should really take note (and probably return to your lane until you can figure out what the danger is by checking your blind spots, etc).
It's one person out of hundreds of thousands who visit each day. And the comment is downvoted.
> Although I am not sure why you think it is OK for that 1 dude to hold up about 40 other people
This is a perfect illustration of the US's driving-first culture. Let's do some math here. 40 people / 1.7 people per car average [1] = ~23.529 or 24 cars (which may be the case if it's rush hour, but probably not if it's not). If this is a 3 way intersection, and each of the cars is evenly distributed between directions (which I realize is incorrect, of course), then there are ~7.843 or 8 cars per side. Assuming an (informally weighted) average car size of 174 in. per car [2], with 2 ft of distance between each car, then the block length is a minimum of 1406 ft. Given that the average person walks at 4.6 ft/s [3], this distance would take 5.09 min. to traverse, just to get to your well lit next block. The average US commute is 26.1 min [4], which means just getting to the next block to cross at the well lit intersection would be 1/5 of the average commute, let alone the time most people are willing to tolerate to go to the grocery or pharmacy.
Obviously there are a lot of assumptions in this calculation, but it really goes a long way to showing how little American car-first culture thinks of pedestrian infrastructure, attractiveness, and travel times. "Just" walking over to the next, well-lit block, immediately makes a pedestrian trip for chores non-viable for anyone that values their time. To me, there also seems an in-built disdain for the time and safety of the pedestrian, and those attitudes do nothing but make it more difficult for Americans to do anything without their cars.
[1]: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tpm/guidance/avo_factors.pdf
[2]: https://www.reference.com/world-view/average-length-car-2e85...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferred_walking_speed
[4]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/study-states-with-the-longes...
That's not what horns are for. You seem to think it's a punitive device, and I certainly would interpret it similarly to you aiming the muzzle of a gun at my chest.
Granted, I'll agree that's a dumb situation to cross the street, but your actions make it even worse.
To be clear, I mean that if everyone did what you do, going around rationalizing how people "get the horn" when they upset you rather than when your car is in legitimate imminent danger of a collision, we're mainly accomplishing two things:
1. Making driving more aggressive as a whole, associating all these little driving interactions with BLARING CAR HORN SOUNDS
2. Cheapening the meaning of the car horn for when it actually matters
The horn isn't a tool for letting out your aggression. Try screaming obscenities loudly in your car or something else fun like that.
For evidence that people don't know state/local laws, ask a group of people in the US when they are permitted to u turn. It varies widely, mostly in insignificant ways.
1. There is a pedestrian signal that says to NOT cross, or
2. The traffic signal going in the direction the pedestrian is walking is red.
So if the light is green and the pedestrian signal does not say to not cross, then the pedestrian has the right of way over any cars turning. However, as with anything traffic related, that doesn't mean that a pedestrian can intentionally create an unsafe situation (e.g., start crossing the street as a car is turning).
So does that mean a person is allowed to intentionally create an unsafe situation by maneuvering their 2 ton+ vehicle into a crosswalk when a pedestrian is approaching it
It isn't every car by any means, but enough cars that pedestrians need to assume that drivers are incompetent until given evidence otherwise.
(This is not to imply that severe injury and death are appropriate "punishments" for walking inattentively, merely that the pedestrians have large incentive to modulate their behavior, while drivers do not.)
Strange, because most likely the majority of drivers also walk at least a short distance around the same cities they drive into.
In the US in particular, eyballing the number of cars and the number of pedestrians in images of places like New York etc that I've seen, it's very hard to believe that there's a clear line separating all those people walking about from all those people who drive cars, other than the specific time of day they do one or the other.
So you'd think that being careful around pedestrians should come naturally to most drivers, if nothing else because they'd want other drivers to be careful around them as pedestrians also.
You sound like a non-American. Let me give you some advice: take everything you've ever seen about NYC, and file that in a different place in your brain's filing system away from your file labeled "America". It does not represent America in any way when talking about cars, walkability, culture, or really anything else really. It's a place that's totally unique in the world. For some reason, too many non-Americans see movies set in NYC and think that all of America is just like this, and it isn't at all.
(Personally, I wish it was more representative of America in terms of walkability, but it just isn't.)
But it certainly seems true in busier areas with less pedestrian traffic such as mini malls. Especially when pulling out of parking lots.
This is pretty limited to urban areas, in my experience. In more suburban and rural parts of the country, people are much more cautious and obedient to traffic signals and rights of way. Of course there are exceptions in both cases, but running red lights, turning into pedestrians/cyclists/etc is much more prominent in major cities. As an urban pedestrian, I just have to keep my head on a swivel because there's a good chance that the taxi/Uber across from me is going to run the light that just turned red so he can make his left turn instead of waiting for his signal.
Right-on-red is a huge problem in areas where pedestrians want to cross. If memory serves, the UK does not allow turns on red. That makes more sense to me.
On my walk to work, I have to cross one 8-lane suburban street. 4 thru lanes, plus several turn lanes in each direction. The radius of the corners is smooth. Stop lines are far back from the actual apex of the corner. So, cars can easily roll through corners at 40mph. They do this when I have a walk signal because they either have their own green, or they're turning on red and only looking for oncoming traffic (to their left) and not for pedestrians (to their right).
I have to cross a fairly wide, busy road to get to work. I wish it had a scramble with no-turn-on-red signage. That would make my commute massively safer.
This is where you are mistaken. In the US, cars are obligated to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk while turning, even with a green light. The pedestrian signal indicates pedestrians have the right of way. Of course, drivers may illegally fail to yield, but whether a driver obeys the law is a different matter than what the law says.