Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcynix | Hacker News Reader

If you cross the street "near" a red traffic light, that costs you 5€ in Germany. If you admit that you did it intentionally, the ticket price doubles. Happened to my wife some years ago when walking to a bus stop on the other side of the street. How did the cop know that it was intentional? She remarked that there was no car in sight, neither left nor right, on a straight road in town.

Oh, and what's the definition of "near" you may ask? While in Germany almost everything is regulated in detail, the definition of "near" is up to the cop.

ObJoke: it's midnight somewhere in Europe and no car in sight, but some people are waiting for the traffic light to turn green? You can bet that these are Germans ;-0

View on HN

As many other aspects of the German ethos, this seems to be dying away. I live near Stuttgart, jaywalking is rampant, and nobody cares; in two years, I haven’t seen a traffic cop anywhere except for accident sites.

It was not near crossing, surely :)

But like, German do not actually respect all the posted rules. Nec ver did.

The law in the UK has just changed to explicitly give priority to pedestrians already crossing the road, particularly in the context of a car turning off a main road and finding pedestrians crossing the road.

In Germany pedestrians also always have priority over turning cars when crossing at an intersection, no matter if there is a pedestrian crossing or not.

This is also true in many parts of the US, including California.

Genuinely curious — is there some jurisdiction where the law is "if the pedestrian is in the wrong it's fine to go over them"?

I was interpreting GP as talking about "who is supposed to go first" not "Can I run them over intentionally."

The latter is not allowed anywhere in the US. However, I have seen cops giving a pedestrian a ticket for crossing right next to a giant "No Crossing" sign as they were being loaded into an ambulance. At that particular section of the street the assumption was that the driver did not intentionally hit the pedestrian as there was a blind corner.

Also, I don't know if you saw the footage from a few years back of the self-driving-car hitting the pedestrian in Arizona while the safety driver was on their phone? Without the dash-cam, the driver likely would not have been found at fault, as the cops are likely to believe a driver that says they didn't see a pedestrian crossing in the dark at night until too late.

ah, fair point

I really wanted to test this idea last weekend at a crowded festival in a town center. I had been waiting for a spot since parking was basically impossible to find. As I was halfway into the spot, a woman ran up and placed herself an inch from my front bumper while calling her friend four blocks away to tell them she had a spot. I was still blocking the travel lane partially and she refused to move even when I closed that inch down to mere millimeters. I may have even tapped her slightly.

If I hadn't been 1500 miles from home I would have gladly continued moving forward at idle speed or just left my car where it was and gone on my way but any legal hassles would have been extra painful having to travel back and fight it. As it was after about 5 minutes of this, a spot opened up two spaces over and I was able to slide over and grab it.

Crosswalks near High Schools tend to be rather bad as well; the other day I saw a teenager start crossing (walking, not running) when there were 3 seconds left on the countdown. Then one of her friends called out to her from behind while she was in the middle of a travel lane that, by this point, has a green light. She stops, turns, and has a good 15s of back-and-forth conversation before completing walking across the street.

Good luck finding a UK driver that knows this, or even a pedestrian! I've had people shout at me for legally crossing a junction while the driver of a vehicle decided I was at fault, because... vehicular mass?

I had a woman literally skid to a stop in front of me to tell me I was running on the “wrong” side of the road. I was running against traffic, and she came from behind, which means that yes, she was actually on the wrong side of the road while delivering her belligerent explanation. Doesn’t have to make sense, I guess.

Pedantic but thats GB, not the UK. NI's highway code is slightly different and didn't introduce that.

I'm regularly finding that people don't seem to understand the "already crossing the road" part. On several occasions I've had people start to cross a few feet in front of me when I'm indicating and have already started turning, causing me to stand on the brakes and risk a shunt from the car behind.

The Highway code states that those waiting to cross also have right of way

> At a junction you should give way to pedestrians crossing or waiting to cross a road into which or from which you are turning

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/introduction#ru...

In NL (IIRC, it's been twenty years since I've had to learn the laws of the road): crossing pedestrians on city streets have priority over cars, except within 30 meters of a crosswalk. The rationale being, if a crosswalk is that close a pedestrian can reasonably be expected to detour and take the official path. However, elderly people/people with disabilities have priority everywhere.

In the case you're describing, a car turning off a main road encountering crossing pedestrians, isn't considered a special case in NL: straight traffic always has priority over turning traffic, and if a car encounters pedestrians while turning that implies the pedestrians were going straight ahead so they already had priority by default.

"I was not interested to look for any car in sight because I would like to save 5€ for the case of being caught"

While I "jailwalk" pretty much all the time (in Europe), nighttime is when I am the most reluctant to do so. Poor visibility and higher chance of meeting a drunk driver.

hm interesting.. I didn't know that it was illegal. I've been living many years in Germany and always jaywalked, or more precisely always looked at the car traffic typically ignoring the traffic lights (as it's common everywhere else in the world outside EU+US).

And I've never been fined, while I'm sure it already happened the police had seen me. But I will admit that Germans are happily waiting while there is no car in sight - until they see people crossing by red, and then they join ...

I think Germany is the only country in the world that has fines as low as 5€. Also parking your car without paying the parking fee can be ridiculously cheap as 15€.

There is value in a society that upholds norms even if you don't agree with them, even if nobody is watching. I will wait in a ghost city for a green light, ridicule away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...

While I too agree with norms in general, there is such a thing as common sense.

And common sense might tell you that waiting at a lone traffic light in the outskirts of a town in the early morning, sun rising, no car in sight for some hundred meters in each direction, does not add value to society?

It adds reliability, unconscious adherence to rules, a reduction of friction. I don't want people to jdrive in pedestrian only zones, just because nobody is up and about. Chaos is a mental taxation, ditracting from endavour.

I'd say waiting for the traffic light to turn green when there is no traffic nearby adds friction rather than reduces it.

There is no chaos to jaywalking because jaywalking should be the default. Only in non-pedestrian cities is jaywalking taxing.

I come from a city where people jaywalk(Stockholm). Jaywalking makes the city extremely walkable, and quite frankly I suspect it was designed with jaywalking in mind. It is obvious when someone is not from Stockholm - they wait for the signal.

I don't get the ease of jaywalking in many other large cities I've been - Zürich comes close. In the UK, even crossing at a green light feels dangerous.

I've seen this at night in Finland as well, looking out of my hotel window at a snow covered street. Not a car in sight (or even tyre tracks in the snow) but still there were people waiting to cross.

> How did the cop know that it was intentional? She remarked that there was no car in sight, neither left nor right, on a straight road in town.

Not to be nitpicky, but if that were the case, wouldn't she have seen the cop?

Cops don't have to be in cars

No, it was a motorcycle cop, parked besides some trees, standing sideways and not in the direction where she was headed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com