The Criminal Act We Call Jaywalking: Part Two of Two

William March 18, 2010 Streets 1 Comment

Tags: Auto-Centric, Car-Centric, Christopher Hume, David Owen, Fighting Traffic, Green Metropolis, Jay-walk, Jaywalk, pedestrian, Peter D. Norton, Safe Streets, The Heart of Our Cities, Tom Vanderbilt, toronto, Vancouver, Victor Gruen, walkability, Woonerfs

Pedestrians in Manhattan eye the traffic warily and consider jaywalking. Thanks to Oleg Dulin for the great Creative Commons photo.

While Christopher Hume’s article was written in response to the crackdowns on jaywalking following this year’s pedestrian deaths in Toronto, Tom Vanderbilt’s article was actually published about two months prior, in a similar response to the American media’s own shellacking of what were referred to as “foolish” and “lackadaisical” jaywalkers. Clearly, the issue is ongoing. As a matter of fact, the issue of pedestrian rights has been ongoing for quite some time now.

In his 1964 book, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis and Cure, Victor Gruen was responding to these very same concerns when he remarked:

“It is felt that by training the members of the human population, by teaching them certain tricks, like walking at ‘green’ and stopping at ‘red,’ by putting them behind fences or chains along curbs, their spirit of individuality and independence can be broken so that they will be willing to submit to the regime of the automotive beings.”

Later, Gruen refers to an “International Conference of Traffic Engineers” he had attended, where it was suggested:

“that people who want to cross the roaming ground of automobiles should wait behind turnstiles and queue up, and should then be allowed, only in small groups, to trickle across. Others went further, and favored complete elimination of sidewalks — which, they presumably hoped, would lead to the elimination of people.”

The auto-centric culture that Gruen repudiated in the 1960s has been around as long as the automobile itself. In fact, the term “jaywalker” didn’t become commonly used until, as Vanderbilt notes, it was “taken up by a coalition of pro-automobile interests in the 1920s.” University professor and author Peter D. Norton writes about this in his book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, stating: “Before the American city could be physically reconstructed to accommodate automobiles, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where cars belong.” “Until then, streets were regarded as public spaces.”

In Vancouver, as my police-officer friend informs me, crossing a street between two intersections is illegal. Thanks to Freedryk on Flickr for the Creative Commons photo.

Today, nearly a hundred years later, the basis for citizenship on North American city streets requires that you enclose yourself within a two-ton steel frame and park your tuches in the driver’s seat. This is why it comes as no surprise when Transport Canada recommends that pedestrians protect themselves from automobile injury by “wearing bright or reflective clothing” and “taking more care in crossing at intersections.” In other words, their advice is that the pedestrian should yield to the motorist in every situation.

As Victor Gruen wrote back in 1964, “coexistence of the human and automotive population does not lie in the taming and training of people.” It’s time that we stop responding with crackdowns on jaywalking, and by saddling pedestrians not only with all of the blame but also with full responsibility for creating a safer environment. Instead, it’s time that we plan our cities to be more pedestrian friendly. There is no doubt, in this auto-centric era, that we need to look out for pedestrians’ rights. After all, according to Christopher Hume, the majority of the pedestrians who died earlier this year in Toronto weren’t even breaking the law.