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Comment by zjp | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wonder now whether that was the most broken law in history.

I find it comical that it's usually liberal leaning folks that want to use early 1900s interpretation of the law for why it's bogus. Yet they want "regulation" for so many contemporary issues. A true liberal would adapt and move with the times: vehicles are the primary way people move in most parts of the country. The average speed AND acceleration of cars (and the people driving them) is MUCH higher than the days of the Model-T. "Regulating" the coexistence of vehicles and living meat bags seems like common sense, and saying "cars weren't here 120 years ago" is irrelevant.

Nah it's definitely speeding.

oh, that's a good point. There are definitely more drivers globally than there are people in New York and you can break speed limits several times per trip just by floating around the limit +/- 1mph.

Asking pedestrians to cross streets where cars are stopped and they are mostly protected?

How is that broken?

I’m guessing they meant most frequently broken.

But as someone who lives in a country that has never had that law, I’m pretty sure it’s unnecessary.

Thanks - I did not actually consider that interpretation!

Broken as in people not respecting it I assume.

Not broken in terms of design and intent, but broken by people all the time. As in "I broke the law, and the law won"

Because the pedestrians and roads were there before cars.

Criminalizing the behavior was regulatory capture by Big Auto.

It being enforced by police from Connecticut who treat NYC’s minorities like a VR simulation was broken.

Strong recommendations and pointing out the loss in civil suits would have always been totally fine.

Other posters are right, I meant 'most frequently broken'.

It still worked the other way as well.

Come to think of it, laws that are most frequently broken by the general public are also probably deeply broken in their concept or the worldview they were based on.

For instance speeding laws, while making sense on paper, are completely inadequate for the thing they want to improve. Structural changes to either the roads or other infra, the cars, or more deterring power than a slap on the wrist are probably needed in the places where they're routinely broken by normal people.

Lots of ways. Some of them are detailed here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-16/jaywalkin...

Making the pedestrians go the long way prioritises driving, which leads to more people driving, which leads to more traffic, fumes, etc.

But most broken seems like a stretch!

The average person probably violates jaywalking laws multiple times a day. What other law do most people break constantly as just part of day to day life?

Anti-miscegenation laws were a common place one for some time .. arguably some alive today are still a living crime.

Trevor Noah titled a book Born a Crime in reference to his birth in South Africa, similar laws remained in force in many US states until 1967 which means a number of people walking about the US today have an existence that was a crime.

I imagine most Americans violate speeding and other vehicles moving laws far more often than jaywalking. I imagine the majority of Americans haven't actually crossed a street as a pedestrian in the last week.

Why would they? They drive from their home to their job to the parking lot of the grocery store to the drive through pickup line at school for their kids.

I'm one of the more transit/pedestrian/bike people in the group I routinely hang out with and I haven't actually crossed the street as a pedestrian in a few days.

Even if you always drive, parking in large cities is often limited enough that you have to walk a fair bit from where you can find a spot to where you actually need to go.

You might overly be estimating your ideas of what is "urban".

Tons of Americans never have to deal with crossing a street for their parking. They're not parking at some lot around the block and walking. It's all just a sea of pavement. City codes mandate each big box store has dozens of spots per shelf in the store. This on its face seems like a gross overstatement but looking at maps shows the truth of the seas of empty lots surrounding big box stores.

I live in an American town with <8k residents, so I know exactly what you mean.

But many large cities don't have such city codes and have very limited parking as a result, even around large stores etc; especially not in downtown. Which, even if you don't live or work there, is still somewhere people sometimes have to go to for other reasons, from visiting a fancy restaurant to jury summons.

Granted you've misinterpreted the posters point - but I will respond to your perception of his point (which I agree with).

You could easily imagine a world where pedestrians have the right of way on the streets, and cars "request access to the road" in a similar way that pedestrians do. Actually, if this is not easy for you to imagine - it suggests enormous internal bias.

It would kill the utility of cars though, you could never drive faster than maybe 30 miles per hour or you would constantly run people over.

Pedestrians are more nimble than cars, so it kind of makes sense that cars have the right of way. As far as I know, large container ships have right of way over small vessels for the same reason.

>It would kill the utility of cars though, you could never drive faster than maybe 30 miles per hour

That sounds lovely. I would live in that city.

That city is London - well, to an extent. The majority of London roads have a 20mph limit.

A lot of European cities are also 30kmph in residential/central areas, with even 20kmph limits in pedestrianised areas.

Have you ever driven through a downtown urban area? You can't go more than 30mph anyway, even if you wanted to. There is simply too much connections, turns, etc.

And yet, I still disagree that pedestrians should be able to just enter the road willy-nilly. Crosswalks are there for safety because it sets the same expectations for everyone using the road, drivers included, thus creating order and flow that is generally reliable.

This is also the same problem I have with cyclists that think they should be allowed to ride against traffic, ignore stop signs, etc. By not moving with the expected flow, they endanger themselves and creat problems. When I am making a right hand turn, for example, and a cyclist has decided to ride against traffic, I am not compelled to look to my right as I am timing my turn because I am not expecting traffic to be there since a right turn has you crossing zero lanes of traffic and merging with on-coning that would be on your left.

I don't really like our car-centric roads in the US at all, but rules are in place for a reason.

> I am not compelled to look to my right as I am timing my turn because I am not expecting traffic to be there since a right turn has you crossing zero lanes of traffic and merging with on-coning that would be on your left.

Except you may have just passed a cyclist without leaving enough time to turn because you barely registered their presence and are now going to cut them off. Or you stopped at an intersection and they approached on the right because that is where they are supposed to stay by law and you didn't check your blind spot before you started. The first situation can happen with cars where you pass a slow moving car just before an intersection and immediately slow down to turn right, merging back into the lane and cutting off the car. If you have driven any amount of time at all, I am sure you have seen that annoying scenario. The second situation doesn't typically happen with cars because of how right turn lanes are constructed but can (unlawfully) occur when someone (typically a tourist) was in the straight going lane but realized they wanted or needed to turn right.

Dedicated bicycle lanes are meant to make it clear that you are indeed crossing traffic when you turn right because bicycles as slow moving traffic are intended to stay in that area as an exceptional case.

> Except you may have just passed a cyclist without leaving enough time to turn because you barely registered their presence and are now going to cut them off.

> and you didn't check your blind spot before you started.

No amount of legislation or changes in rules will protect from people who aren't paying attention. These changes don't have an impact immediately, but the only way to make them is to do them at one point or another. The people learning to drive in NY now will know that things are different, and in 10-15 years the behaviour will change.

I should clarify that when dedicated bike lanes are present, I absolutely look for cyclists in both directions. Again, setting expectations is important. It's also why we use turn signals.

My reference to cyclists goinh the wrong way takes place in the suburbs where I have lived most, and bikes are not exactly common. On a four lane highway with a speed limit of 55mph, multiple driveways, etc (Not Just Bikes calls them Stroads), a cyclist moving against traffic on a narrow shoulder is not expected. We can preach all day about "paying attention" but we have created a situation that demands high levels of attention from all, but cyclists feel they are exempt from the rules of traffic, making the situation worse in some immature act of defiance.

I like my bike. I ride it as often as possible and travel to places specifically because they have good biking infrastructure. But when I am in a place where therd is none, I ride with traffic, use my hand signals, and assume drivers cannot see me because they have a hundred other things they need to pay attention to, so I put effort into making myself visible and communicating intent.

It's not that hard.

> but cyclists feel they are exempt from the rules of traffic, making the situation worse in some immature act of defiance.

The vast majority of drivers are continuously violating laws. On top of the continuous speeding violation (+10-15 is surely ok?) add the occasional roll through, failures to yield, failure to use a turn signal, speeding in school zones, passing without sufficient distance, running reds, double parking, etc and the police pretty much always can pull over any given automobile driver. This fact is well known: the default state of a driver is one of rule breaking.

Primary attribution fallacy is the contextualization of our own errors or rule violations while attributing those of strangers to character flaws (immature, defiant). You pass drivers doing all of the above things every day, but it is the cyclists you notice because they are different and the other drivers are surely doing the same as you. But you understand the context in which you violate laws or make mistakes.

It is not that hard to understand that everyone is human.

This speed limit, or lower, is pretty common in major European cities. Helps divert investment to things more beneficial to society than individual car ownership, improves transit, cleans up cities, makes for great public spaces.

Yes, I was saying that 30 miles would have to be the limit on every street though, in cities you would probably have to do 10 if everyone could step onto the street at every moment.

We don't need to guess at probabilities.

We can look at the data. Aactual cities where jaywalking isn't a crime; they do not set the speed limit at 10, and it all seems to work fine.

But just because jaywalking isn’t a crime doesn’t mean pedestrians have right of way. Is that the case anywhere? I thought that was the proposal, which is much different than allowing people to cross everywhere, after looking out that there’s no car coming.

reedf1 wrote:

> You could easily imagine a world where pedestrians have the right of way on the streets, and cars "request access to the road" in a similar way that pedestrians do.

Pedestrians have quite broad right of way in the UK - you can't step into moving traffic and expect them to slam on the brakes, but you will see people crossing anywhere and everywhere at any time:

https://www.thewindscreenco.co.uk/help-advice/highway-code-2...

>?It would kill the utility of cars though, you could never drive faster than maybe 30 miles per hour or you would constantly run people over.

In NYC, the speed limit is 25 miles per hour. What's more, there are plans to reduce that to 20mph in a bunch of places.

Moral: Don't drive in NYC.

> utility of cars

Using the right tools at the right place is part of it: cars are useful for some trips, less for others. Trying to solve every transportation problem with a unique solution was IMHO the original sin of this.

> Pedestrians are more nimble

Think kids going to school and elderlies. Having something that work for them requires either putting the burden on cars or removing cars from the picture. One costs a lot more than the other, and in the case you want to keep cars in cities the former is probably more attractive than the latter.

> you could never drive faster than maybe 30 miles per hour or you would constantly run people over.

Wait, when are you driving faster than that in a city anyway? City roads here are mostly restricted to 30kph; travel times didn't significantly increase when this was imposed a while back.

It's NYC, you're not driving over 30 anyway.

That's literally how it works in the UK

Population density of London: 15,000 per square mile

Population density of Manhattan: 78,000 per square mile

(according to wikipedia on both)

I think your trying to imply something, but I cannot tell what. Could you possibly make it explicit?

If you allow pedestrians to cross anywhere at any time with right of way, that can work to a certain density. On the other end of the scale, traffic will be at a standstill due to a constant stream of pedestrians. I don't know exactly where on that scale either of those cities is, but the argument that it works in the UK where the density is 5x less seems flawed.

I've posted in the sibling thread r.e. the density (which I believe you have underestimated by several orders of magnitude), however a stroll around london will show you that, excepting arterial roads, cars always have to deal with pedestrians crossing at any time and place, including between you and the car ahead if you come to a stop, or if there's more than a couple meters between you and the next car. Even busy arterial roads will have to deal with people walking across them if there are large gaps or the traffic is slow or stalled.

I'm struggling to believe London Brigde area and the square mile get 5x less congested than New York. What areas of London and New York are we comparing?

Greater London compared to Manhattan, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London. I don't see what conclusions can be drawn from that comparison, which is why I asked GP to be explicit.

In practice nobody steps out in front of a moving vehicle (for obvious reasons) and most people cross at the crossings most of the time because that makes sense.

In situations where there are a lot of people at the same time, like say a music festival or a sports game finishing, the police tend to manage the flow of people.

I believe you'll find that the London number you mention is the average density of the Greater London Metropolitan Area.

The City of Westminster has a day-time population of around 1 million people, and its area is around 8 sq miles; (doing casual searching).

So on that basis, jaywalking should be prohibited on Manhattan Island, because it's population density is greater than that of London, which we have for some reason decided is the arbiter, but allowed virtually everywhere else in the US, where the population density is less than London?

This comparison makes no sense. If this was in good faith, you'd compare Manhattan and the square mile or westminster.

It was in good faith. Not knowing much about the UK, I took the largest city to be the densest. Seems I was off.

London is the densest, but the comparison was between the central area of one city and the entire area of another, perhaps even including suburbs beyond the formal city limits of the second. When you're leave out enough detail and just post two numbers, you're apt to make such mistakes while posting and thereby post something meaningless.

One good way to avoid posting meaninglessly is to write meaningful sentences and explain your conclusions/inferences explicitly.

However, pedestrians can cross wherever/whenever they think that it's safe to do so anywhere in Britain (Northern Ireland I think has some kind of jaywalking law). It's not just in London or other cities, but remote countrysides too where crossings may not be available. Pedestrians have priority, but it's definitely frowned upon to cause vehicles to have to slow/swerve to avoid a collision.

The Highway Code was recently updated (a few years ago) to make it more explicit that pedestrians crossing a side road junction should have priority over vehicles trying to turn into the side road. However, that's not necessarily followed by all drivers/cyclists etc.

Basically, drivers/cyclists are expected to make all efforts to avoid a collision and will be considered at fault unless it's a scenario where the pedestrian steps into the road without enough time for the driver/cyclist to react and avoid them.

I don't think that's not very comparable. You don't get that many high rise residential buildings in central London, but it gets all the workers anyway. It's not as extreme, but think of Shibuya crossing having 0 population. We'd need some measure of people on the streets instead.

There are also intermediate options, e.g. pedestrians have the right of way if there isn’t a designated pedestrian crossing within sight.

No need to imagine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8

Wow, an intersection like that in the USA would have at least one road rage death per day from violently impatient drivers.

Because it's not 'asking' if it's a law. If you're legislating that people can't just walk across a deserted street where it's most convenient then you have a broken law. Legislate against disrupting traffic if you really need to. Not disrupting traffic? What's the problem?

If the street is empty then it's easy to recognize that. However what will the rule be if there is a car, but far away, or not that far away. It's a slippery slope with a 2 ton SUV driving at 50mph and a person "interpreting" that it's not disrupting it.

Ambiguity will be the problem and it is solved by the rule of "not crossing at all". The lesser of 2 evils.

Cars are already supposed to slow down if they see pedestrians on the street, even if the pedestrian is crossing illegally, same as they are supposed to avoid drivers doing illegal things. It's the police's job to punish illegal behavior, not drivers'.

So, in the situation you describe, the solution is clear: the car has to slow down, and any police officer is supposed to notice that the car had to slow down and issue some citation to the pedestrian for not respecting the right of way. This is exactly how all traffic violations work: if some car is not yielding to you, you don't drive into them, you break to avoid the accident, and hope that the police sees this and issues a citation to the other driver.

Rules for people are not the same as a code for a compiler. You may enact a rule, but people are not guaranteed they will comply with it either because they will brake it or they will forget/ignore it.

If a bad rule is enacted and it kills 100 people per year more, will enforcement of the rule bring back those 100 people?

Rules should take into account the stupid things people will do and that in real life you won't get 100% compliance and enforcement won't get you to 100%. (many real life examples)

Sure, the results have to be measured and the rules adjusted. But a possible result of this rule is exactly that it will make drivers drive more slowly in general, for fear of hitting pedestrians, which would overall reduce accidents, even outside of pedestrian deaths.

> will enforcement of the rule bring back those 100 people?

Yes. Enforcement of the rules, when done properly, does save lives. We have psychology studies that show that judgement/punishment needs to be swift/certain. When that is the case, human behavior is altered (sometimes permanently).

> and that in real life you won't get 100% compliance and enforcement

No one needs 100% compliance. We need something up near 98% or 99%, which is achievable.

> It's a slippery slope with a 2 ton SUV driving at 50mph and a person "interpreting" that it's not disrupting it.

Maybe the problem here is that a 2 ton SUV shouldn't be driven at 50mph when pedestrians are anywhere near. I always find it interesting how the ones advocating for the absolute freedom of owning and driving an SUV everywhere, to carry 70kg of human flesh, are usually also the ones asking for the restriction of the freedom of other users of the public space.

The problem is not how big is the car or any other subject. The problem with any rule that is badly formulated is the ambiguity it creates. In this instance this bad definition can lead to very bad consequences.

Bad rules = ambiguous rules and need for interpretation and that leads to many bad consequences.

There is no ambiguity here, if you don't have the right of way you will be liable if something happens. But "something happening" will likely have to be more than just disrupting an SUV driver going at 50mph by making him slow down a bit.

There are many countries in the world that have such "ambiguous" rules wrt pedestrian crossings. Much of Europe, for example.

Can you cite any specific examples of this being a problem anywhere in practice?

I think jaywalking being technically illegal allows law enforcement to use an expedient to arrest people they want to arrest for other reasons, for example, there is no law that would allow to arrest you for "walking while black", but crossing the street at an unauthorized point? Yeah that works

See a judge doing the right thing:

https://youtu.be/0PUgbArgXJA?si=9-8viC2MM-mIGEFe

We don't need a society that relies only on judges doing the right thing. We need better laws

Crosswalks are typically at intersections - this is NOT where pedestrians are most protected. Often, it's safer to cross in the middle of the road, particularly if it's one way.

When you're at an intersection, there's cars coming from many directions. In addition, from the crosswalks I've seen they don't even stop turning cars - the turning cars have to be looking and stop themselves.

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