Jaywalking: use your brain so you don't lose it

It won't come as a surprise to anyone to hear that I'm a pretty brazen pedestrian. When I'm in a crosswalk, I don't always wait meekly on the curb for cars to stop as they ought to but often don't; many times, I'll step -- with care -- into the crosswalk and bully drivers into yielding to me as the rules of the road require. I have been known to knock on the windows of cars that have stopped in the middle of crosswalks to point out to the driver that he or she is blocking my way, and once or twice, I have used my newspaper to whack the windshield of a car that ignores the crosswalk in order to save a few seconds. I don't necessarily advocate for others doing the same, but it is important to me that users of all modes share the streets, and when I'm on foot, I consider crosswalks my domain.

Still, though, when I'm out and about in and around Boston, I see a lot of incredibly bad pedestrian behavior. Over the weekend, I was driving along the Riverway in Boston around 9PM, and a couple of young guys crossed in front of me. They were in a crosswalk, at a light ... but crossing against the light. In the dark. On a fast-moving street. After screeching (literally) to a halt on the wet pavement, it was all I could do not to jump out of my car and yell at them. No driver wants to hit a pedestrian, and that moment of a close call is terrifying.

One of my mantras about safety is that everyone is 100% responsible for being safe all the time. Stepping into a crosswalk without looking and attending to oncoming cars makes me 100% responsible for the accident, just as the driver who fails to pay attention and yield is also 100% responsible. In that case, the law is on my side, which would, no doubt, make my stay in the hospital exactly the same as if the law weren't on my side.

I also abhor bad pedestrian behavior because I think it makes other users less respectful of pedestrians in general. I'm not going to tell people not to jaywalk -- there are times when the design of a city or roadway makes it nearly impossible not to, and many more times when the design makes it extremely impractical. But do you really trust strangers to care as much about your life as you do? If you're going to jaywalk, do it with care -- for everyone's sake.

What factors lead to this accident?

Last Monday, my colleague Kate came to work with news from near where she lives in Revere of a pedestrian struck and killed. We haven't found the story in the Globe, yet, but here are a couple of small pieces about it:
WHDH
FOX

Obviously, these are pretty sketchy and preliminary, and there's more information to be had, but I have some questions:

Was the pedestrian in a crosswalk? How fast was the car going? What was the speed limit?

The WHDH article includes a quote from a witness:

"Between the car being black, the pedestrian being dressed in black, with the weather being what it is and the poor lighting...it was just a tragic accident," said Keith Donnelly, a witness.

While wearing black at night does reduce one's visibility to cars (at a week-long festival I attend, people who don't make themselves visible at night are called "darkwads"), there are other factors at work in this -- and other -- accidents, and which we often take for granted and forget to consider:

Design speed: We all know what a speed limit is, and we all know we break it at least some of the time. This is because the speed that a section of roadway is engineered to handle gives us cues that tell us we're safe at higher speeds. Studies have shown that drivers recognize and understand the subconscious clues of roadway engineering and limit themselves by design speed rather than posted speed at least some of the time. Is the design speed for this stretch of road appropriate for the pedestrian use it gets?

If the pedestrian was in a crosswalk, how well-signed and -lit is the crosswalk? Especially if this is a fast stretch of road where pedestrians are relatively infrequent, it's important to call attention to crosswalks and make them as visible and noticeable as possible.

If the pedestrian wasn't in a crosswalk, is it because pedestrian needs aren't served here? Where was the nearest crosswalk?

Yes, drivers are responsible for being attentive to other road users, and pedestrians are responsible for the same, but sometimes the deck is stacked against all users. Whenever I read about a pedestrian accident, I want to know if this was one of those times.

Traffic accidents -- both lethal and non -- are a tragedy for us all.

Complete streets in the news

The concept of "complete streets" -- streets and roadways that are designed not primarily for cars and secondarily for everyone else, but designed right off the bat with all users in mind -- is gaining traction and attention throughout the fields of transportation and urban planning around the US and the world.

Yesterday, US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood wrote on his blog a post titled "Report, petition call for safer roadway planning". In it, he cites Transportation for America's recent report, Dangerous by Design.

Bike and pedestrian advocates have been pushing this message for years, and it's pretty darn exciting to see the conversation really moving into the mainstream.

Does your neighborhood contain complete streets?

More on jaywalking

Continuing with the questions and answers that came up during my chat on the Boston Globe last month:

One of the participants in the chat (Kelly) commented:

Also I've noticed, there is no uniform pedestrian system in Boston. In cities like New York, the lights always cycle through pedestrian walk signs. At the intersection of Beacon St. and Park where dozens of pedestrians cross every cycle, you have to push the button, the walk sign will not appear unless you do. Many people aren't used to that-they expect the walk signal to cycle through because that happens automatically at many other intersections.

And another commenter (Michael) said:

Some how In Seattle, pedestrians and motorist obey the laws in a very civil manner which tells me that enforcement is the issue here in MA. People in Seattle will wait for the light to change before walking even if there are no cars in site.

These two comments go together very nicely, and here's why: Michael is arguing that enforcement would solve the problem of jaywalking in Boston, and Kelly is pointing out that other cities have uniform systems for pedestrians.

If you've spent much time walking around Boston, you've probably noticed what Kelly did: sometimes there's a button for you to push to get a WALK and sometimes there isn't. Sometimes when you push the button, it works, and sometimes it appears to do nothing. If there's no button, you really have no idea if you just didn't find the button or if you'll get a WALK or what.

All of this says to people on foot that their needs have not been strongly considered in the design and construction of the city. And if their needs aren't being met, why should they obey the law? I don't think jaywalkers are like bank robbers and going out of their way to break the law. They're just people trying to run errands and get things done over the course of the day.

So then if I'm a person who crosses when it says DON'T WALK but I'm walking with the green light, fine, that's jaywalking, even though it's probably pretty reasonable from a traffic flow and safety perspective in most cases (lots of intersections all over the state, country and world are set up with pedestrians getting the WALK along with the parallel green), but it's a small chip in the block of the habit of obeying laws that pertain to walkers.

So, where does that leave all of us? We want the streets to be safe for drivers, for cyclists, and for walkers. AND we want people in cars, on foot, and on bikes to be able to get their errands done. Does simply enforcing existing laws succeed in doing that?

Walk rather than T!

Getting around Boston by T and on foot? Check out these10 MBTA trips you should walk instead. Our own Wendy Landman helped identify these!

A defense of jaywalking

Monday, Slate published an article by Tom Vanderbilt (of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do fame) titled A defense of jaywalking. In it, Vanderbilt addresses some of the complexities of data available about pedestrian behavior, the history of street-use paradigms, and biases in crash reporting.

This is a great article, and if you're interested in jaywalking, walking in urban areas, or mode-sharing paradigms, I think you'll find it worth reading. Check it out!