In a Car-Culture Clash, It’s the Los Angeles Police vs. Pedestrians

I've visited LA recently (I stayed a week to see if I might live there) and I can tell you that many of those types actually live and work in Santa Monica which is quite bike and ped friendly.

I have a friend who is working on a startup there ( http://www.homehero.org/ ) out of one of the coworking spaces. He bikes to work.

Startups clustered first in the aggressively car-centric suburbs of Silicon Valley and in large part remain there. Even the YC offices are a long slog from Caltrain, on foot through big streets clogged with cars and parking lots. If Mountain View can attract startups why can't LA? I don't even agree with these jaywalking fines but there seem to be at least as many car lovers among my startup friends as my writer pals. (More, actually, when you factor in all the friends who live in NY.)

The real "startup" hub in the Los Angeles area seems to be in Santa Monica, far from downtown LA, where the crackdown in the article seems to be taking place, and outside the jurisdiction of LAPD. It's home of many startups, near UCLA and home of at least one incubator (Mucker Lab).

I've worked in Santa Monica during my time here and it's surprisingly bike and pedestrian friendly (as are most of the beach cities). I don't currently work at a startup, but the my current employer has indoor bike rakes that are well used as did my previous (startup) employer. Startups chose this part of town over downtown LA, or other parts of town for many reasons, in spite of high rents for office space. They do so for many reasons, but I have a feeling that one is the ability for folks to get to work in a variety of ways, including on foot or by bike.

I confess to being baffled by these quotes: Are these not the law?

In every province in which I've lived, the rules for stop signs are simple: First in, first out. In case of multiple simultaneous arrivals, vehicle on the right has right of way. Only pathological case is a multi-road intersection with perfectly equal spacing between roads, e.g., four-way intersection of two perpendicular roads - the drivers have to sort something out, but it's such a rare case it's not worth solving.

That regulation works just as well for large intersections when then the lights are out: As you arrive, take note of who else is already there - you have right of way when they are all gone, everyone else has to wait for you.

That regulation is observed in Ontario, NB, NS, PEI, and, to a lesser or greater extent, Quebec (highway regs are provincial, but we're pretty consistent on many sensible points).

Likewise, pedestrians have absolute right of way wherever they are permitted to be. That is less observed, especially in bigger cities in Ontario and especially in Quebec, but is strictly observed in the Maritimes: Popup from between parked cars in Wolfville - or even Saint John, on many streets - and traffic halts for you.

Moreover, the same deference can also be seen in Boston, which is a very walkable city. Although jaywalking is very common in Boston. New Orleans is a completely different city--only a small section of it has significant pedestrian traffic, and that section is often closed off to cars, anyway.

[1] http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=veh&gr...

I think there's a blog article from Raymond Chen where he notes how the LA concert hall building is totally designed for people arriving from the underground parking lot, and claims that the minimum number of parking slots required for such a building by regulations in LA are higher than the maximum permitted by regulations in NYC...

1. http://www.td.gov.hk/en/transport_in_hong_kong/pedestrianisa...

Did you know that if you don't have a driver's license and you kill a little kid on the way to school, the maximum penalty is a $500 fine and 30 days in jail [1]? If you ever want to murder anyone, the message is clear: do it in New York, with your car.

[1] http://www.streetsblog.org/2013/12/20/unlicensed-truck-drive...

New taxes is popular too, but if you live in a city that has legal issues with creating new taxes they suddenly institute new "fees".

As more cities drown in their budgets you can expect more of this behavior from some cities. Not all of them will go down this road, but many will.

You can expect, and we've already seen much of this, new ideas of generating revenue such as fines, fees, and/or taxes. All at the expense of the people that these revenues are supposed to somehow help.

I've gotten tickets here, but one was on the freeway from CHP, and the other was in Burbank (which is a different city and police department). In Burbank the officer was explicitly waiting for someone to do what I did, which kind of annoyed me.

But in Los Angeles itself, LAPD has left me completely alone. I joke that unless you're actively stabbing someone in front of them, they have better things to do.

Parking is another matter. There's a parking enforcement department, and they are quite aggressive, 24 hours a day.

There was a a period about 8 years ago when the LAPD and CHP waged an aggressive campaign against automobile drivers that failed to yield the right of way to pedestrians (including jaywalkers). Going after pedestrians (that are actually using crossswalks, but are just entering them after the don't walk countdown starts), seems like a shift in policy against pedestrians. The greater threat by far to life and well-being for citizens here are drivers that don't yield to pedestrians.

Of course, pursuing that sort of policy would be to the benefit of the majority of Los Angelusians, and the LAPD's general purpose is not to do anything of the kind.

And therein lies the problem. There is a subset of American pedestrians who, because the law says they have the right of way, believe that the laws of physics also do not apply to them either. I have personally witnessed, too many times to count, a pedestrian approaching a crosswalk across a busy, four lane road, who continues, fast paced, without slowing the slightest, towards, into, and across, the crosswalk, without so much as even a glance left or right to check where the oncoming traffic happens to be. I.e., they just step out in front of cars (4 lanes worth) moving 35MPH, with no regard for how much distance there is between a cars hood and their spot in the crosswalk.

The only thing that saves them from getting killed is the random positioning of cars such that they don't actually step in front of a car with only 20 feet left before impact, and the fact that the drivers with 100 feet of space left nearly skid to a stop because of the fool that forget what his/her mother taught them: "Always look both ways before crossing the street".

Sadly, this total lack of common sense seems to infest about 20% of the pedestrian population, and is a major factor contributing to the accident rate. Because quite simply, if you are not in front of a moving car, you can't possibly be hit.