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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

It's not just about efficiency, it's also about quality of life. There is a reason that a cop has permission to use his judgement when deciding to write a ticket or not. Because life is better when we don't live under the oppression of draconian rule keepers all the time. Rules are meant to protect people, and as such are often specified in terms of the lowest common denominator, with the understanding that the system doesn't enforce them when they can be reasonably ignored, using good judgement.

Life will be shittier for everyone if an army of self-empowered rule-loving busybodies get to expand their current powers beyond the realm of the HOA.

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Frankly I'd rather just get a ticket when I speed by a traffic camera than rely on the discretion of a random police officer who might just be looking for a pretense to search my vehicle or hassle me in some other way.

Jaywalking, to my ear, is a similarly universal & easy example for this not being universally desirable.

Where I lived in Europe (as an American), jaywalking wasn’t illegal. They didn’t even really consider it weird. After all, you’re just walking.

In fact, if you were in the street and a car hit you, the car driver had to prove that it was unavoidable to miss you, otherwise the driver was at fault.

It was also illegal to intentionally block traffic as a pedestrian unless you were at a crosswalk. But there was no law that made it illegal to cross the street anywhere.

Seems like the best of all worlds. And it’s easy to fully enforce the whole “blocking traffic is illegal” part.

As of the beginning of 2023, jaywalking is no longer a thing in California. The only time a cop can cite you is if you're doing something dangerous. If it's safe for you to cross on a red light, or in the middle of a road not near an intersection, that's legally fine now.

Of course, the loophole is large enough to drive a truck through: if a cop wants to, they can decide you're walking "dangerously" as a pretense to hassle you. And most of the time it'll be the cop's word against yours as to whether or not you were being safe or not, and the courts will always side with the cops absent other evidence.

I always thought jaywalking laws were just stupid. The way I looked at it was always: my parents taught me when I was a kid to look both ways, and only cross if it's safe. To me, that suggests that I should always be allowed to cross if I determine it's safe, regardless of other considerations.

(The history of such laws are quite interesting and -- spoiler alert -- surprise, surprise, they were driven by automakers.)

As someone who walks around San Jose quite a lot, on many roads it is safer to cross in the middle of the block than at the intersections. You only have one or two directions to check, and incoming cars have better visibility than at an intersection. And you don't have the failure mode of the car not stopping for the red light.

Where?

It's probably not universally necessary to jaywalk. However, I am against this on the grounds of logistics. I understand and accept the need to have a license and display an identifier while operating a vehicle, but I think this would be an extreme requirement for people walking around (and possibly unconstitutional in the US?) And without this identifier, how will the system know where to send the citation?

All things being equal though this doesn't even sound inherently bad. If every jaywalking infraction was cited we might democratically re-decide how much we want that law to be on the books.

And indeed, California no longer has strong jaywalking laws on the books. A cop can only cite you for jaywalking if you're crossing dangerously. Crossing on a red light, do-not-walk sign, or at a place where there isn't a crosswalk is no longer automatically considered jaywalking.

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