Jaywalking: What, So What, What To Do

Article Table of Contents

• What Is “Jaywalking”
• What Wikipedia Says ‘Jaywalking’ Is
• Anarchist Calisthenics as the Antidote to Jaywalking Propaganda
• My Jaywalking Exploits
• Additional Sources

What Is “Jaywalking” #

authors note: This feels very draft-y. There’s two distinct perspectives I note in my mind, as I write this. Some people might “believe in jaywalking” and view non-car-users as an underclass, and act in such a way that makes this belief manifestly obvious. Other people maybe know something feels off about walking across streets, and might ‘simply’ be wondering why American streets ‘feel so dangerous’. I feel friction in my mind as I hold both of those.

There’s two components to jaywalking.

First, a “legal definition” might be:

To ‘jaywalk’ is be to cross into or across a street, outside of a ‘signalized intersection’¹, outside of an ‘appropriate time’, especially in a way that impedes the existing passage of a vehicle.

The second component:

“Jaywalking” is a legal fiction invented by supremacists in america, who wanted to prevent cars from getting banned in cities in the 1920s as cars/car drivers were causing chaos and death. “the pedestrian should not have been jaywalking” has been used reliably to as a figleaf for road engineers (and others) allowing dangerously-designed roads to keep killing people.

As a bonus, ‘jaywalking’ is super convenient for deputized slave patrols to hassle non-white people, who often-enough would cross roads, thus ‘police encounters’ could be coerced.

If you ‘jaywalk’ in the presence of a police officer, you might get got.²

If you ‘jaywalk’ in the presence of a car, you might be killed.

Of course, in the vast majority of time and space, including today, ‘jaywalking’ is also called ‘crossing(using) the street’. If you can get out of your mind the idea of jaywalking and can instead see streets in their historic function, the below diagram will ring intuitively true:

source: Driven To Excess: Impacts of Motor Vehicles on the Quality of Life of Residents of Three Streets in Bristol UK

An ethical read of streets says “they’re available to everyone”, and just because someone is not currently in a car or moving in a way directly parallel or perpendicular to the street doesn’t mean that person needs to give enormous social deference to the presence of a different person in a vehicle.

It could be noted that lots of the individualized supremacist driving is a result of terrible systems that normalize/indicate-the-correctness-of that kind of driving. I do take issue with the people, but mostly with the engineers and people who claim special authority and expertise. Please see my piece on bollards for more of the same.

If you’re a person of the global majority, or perceivably poor, you’re vastly more likely to have an encounter with violence-dealing, coercive people.

“Jaywalking” is a propagandist slur that supports the norms of the oppressor class. It is a slur, castigating both an economic and social norm, created by the auto industry in conjunction with white politically powerful government officials to solve a problem the car industry was facing - their products kept causing people to die, and were at risk of getting banned in cities!

The ‘social innovation’ of this jaywalking was a huge step forward for american policing.

Here’s how to view “laws” and “claims of authority”:

Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army.

Because American Police got their start as “deputizing the slave patrols”³, jaywalking gave another HUGE realm for social control. Now police could justify assaulting someone as ‘enforcing jaywalking laws’.

In 1991, two police officers stopped Tupac Shakur for jaywalking. He said he was knocked unconscious during his arrest, and sued the city of Oakland for 10 million dollars [he ultimately got a few thousand dollars, a total slap in the face]. His lawyer says many of the police brutality cases he’s worked on started with jaywalking stops.

from the This is Criminal podcast Episode 267: Right of way

What Wikipedia Says ‘Jaywalking’ Is #

Here’s how Wikipedia explains the concept:

Jaywalking is the act of pedestrians walking in or crossing a roadway if that act contravenes traffic regulations. The term originated in the United States as a derivation of the phrase “jay-drivers”. the word jay meaning ‘a greenhorn, or rube’[, a ‘country bumpkin’], ‘jay drivers’ being people who drove horse-drawn carriages and automobiles on the wrong side of the road.

“Jaywalking” was coined as the automobile arrived in the street in the context of the conflict between pedestrian and automobiles (also then known as horseless carriages), more specifically the nascent automobile industry.

Jaywalking laws vary widely by jurisdiction. In many countries such as the United Kingdom, the word is not generally used and, with the exception of certain high-speed roads, there are no laws limiting how pedestrians can use public highways. This has caused confusion among British people visiting countries with less freedom, with the BBC reporting on a case where a man from the UK was arrested in the U.S. city of Atlanta for crossing the road.

Automobile interests in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City:

The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a “jay walker,” in Kansas City.

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1917. The word was promoted by pro-automobile interests in the 1920s, according to historian and alternative transportation advocate Peter D. Norton. Today, in the US, the word is often used synonymously with its current legal definition, crossing the street illegally.

Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

American traffic planners, if they had an ethical bone in their body, would see ‘jaywalking’ as an environmental sign that better infrastructure is needed to meet the needs of a group of people moving about a geography, safely and smoothly. Jaywalking is more akin to desire paths than a crime, unless you want to maintain social control over certain people with violence.

Roads in America are built as often to accomplish the goal of walls as anything else. So a Jaywalking law says something like the following, to people of the global majority:

please respect our intent of placing a wall across this community/neighborhood/junction, and if you don’t we’ll ruin your life.

Maybe I’ll do a follow-up post on how to recognize in the environment that a wall was built for a road, and upgraded repeatedly to better accomplish the goals of severing a community. It’s screamingly obvious, once you know what to look for. City engineers cannot be held responsible for the deaths they oversee and bring about, and this is unforgivable. An abuse that deserves open condemnation and ridicule and contempt for as long as it’s in place.

Anarchist Calisthenics as the Antidote to Jaywalking Propaganda #

This is a hot take, perhaps.

‘law and order’ is the rallying cry of the oppressor class. There’s a quote that went big, created during a streamed dnd campaign:

Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army. (source: dnd/dimension20, reddit meme)

So, how to not participate in the domination?

Exercise anarchist calisthenics and jaywalk, yourself, and enlist friends and others in your scheme as often as possible.⁴

The whole piece is great, 2050 words.

The place you’re most likely to be struck (and killed!) by a vehicle, while crossing roads outside of a four-wheeled vehicle, is while using pedestrian infrastructure, while crossing at an ‘approved’ time. Car drivers are sometimes not paying close attention, or they drive like supremacists, or the sight lines are atrocious, and it’s extremely common for right-turning cars to run over pedestrians who are crossing the road.

The ‘pillar’ of the windshield is often obstructing the driver’s view of where pedestrians might be standing, and when drivers are trying to slide into gaps in traffic, they often do not scan conflict areas with their eyes.

It’s vastly safer (in america) to cross a road outside of the established times/places, because you can see/thread gaps in traffic, as needed. If American ‘traffic planners’ or ‘city engineers’ or ‘municipal planners’ were not hell-bent on maintaining oppressive systems set up by actual white supremacists, American roads could be rendered safe in about two weeks.⁵

My Jaywalking Exploits #

If you and I go on a walk together, we’re jaywalking as we’re walking around, and I’ll explain all of this (again) to you.

The legal regime of America is ‘just’ the wet-dream of settler colonialists trying to implement regimes of social control on the colonized populations. Lets not extend dignity or respect to a regime such as this.

Colefax, near Park Ave, in Denver, is atrocious. Cars regularly go 50-60 mph, and vast swaths of it have zero lights or crosswalks or even center signs or cones to separate the lanes going in opposite directions.

There’s a donut shop right across from my house, with no pedestrian crossing, so I ‘jaywalk’ across the street all the time, and when I go to Cheesman Park or the Botanic Gardens. Here’s what some of my activity data looks like. This isn’t all just walking, most of the activity is technically me on my scooter. Maybe I’ll make the difference distinguishable by color some day.

The green boxes show where there is zero road-crossing infrastructure, the red lines are where I’ve ridden my scooter or walked across Colefax. It’s very dangerous and un-fun to cross or ride along on my scooter, too.

I have open contempt for the kinds of people that exert effort to maintain a bad regime, especially when it’s obvious they’re simply trying to maintain emotional comfort. I vomit these people out of my mouth, they are not welcome in my home or around those I love. Unfortunately, I have lots of these kinds of people in my direct, immediate family. (I was raised by white supremacists, grew up around a lot of them, I know them intimately)

Yet we live…

Additional Sources #

• This is Criminal podcast Episode 267: Right of way, about Tupac as a child being abused by police officers, and everyone involved acts like it’s obviously common and banal. That’s just what the police do to black people, this is America, are you really surprised? If you’re pretending surprise I’m assessing you as a witting or unwitting member of the oppressor class. 🤷‍♂️
• Behind the Police a 7-part podcast on Spotify about “policing” in America. remember, southern white people were correctly concerned about ‘slave rebellions’, some southern counties were 15% white, 85% kidnapped, enslaved people of the global majority. Maintaining an adequate regime of social control was a TOP LEVEL CONCERN for white people of the day, which is why they founded “Slave Patrols”. A group of armed men who would harrass and emotionally dominate non-whites. Those white people literally could not feel safe without ensuring a strong regime of physical and emotional control over those non-white people, and that ‘cannot feel safe without control’ thing continues for some white people today. Oh, and plenty of white people today continue to harbor the mental disorder of supremacy.
• Police Union Power, Politics, and Confrontation in the 21st Century: New Challenges, New Issues 2nd Edition This is a book written by police union leaders, talking about how to best accomplish the goals of being a police labor union leader: the police need to keep getting increases in pay, increasing in retirement benefits, and insulation from abusing their victims, the book is full of principles of organizing and agitating to extract whatever concessions are needed from the political folk.
• Anarchist Calisthenics
• The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
• Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men.
• Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
• The Most Dangerous Superstition an interesting book about how the concept of ‘authority’ is best viewed as ‘the most dangerous superstition’. People all the times do to others things they never would do unless some ‘authority’ instructed them to do it.
• Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities If cities were built by reasonable people, instead of people hell-bent on ethnic cleansing, Alain Bertaud’s lense of Urban Economics is the correct approach.
• The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing
• I made a one-minute video about ‘jaywalking’ in Denver, and then I made a 4 minute video about the same topic. basically, ‘if you [a driver] are having an unpleasant interaction with a non-driver, the non-driver likely also wishes they were not there and this represents systemic failure not individual failure of you or the carless driver you are beefing with’.
• the police do not owe a specific duty to provide police services to specific citizens based on the public duty doctrine, Warren v DC, 1981 In case you didn’t know, the idea ‘to protect and to serve’ is pure marketing. The police go to great effort to make it really clear that they own no specific duty, to any particular person, to actually protect or to serve that person. you can see why the marketing is useful, though. If they all said “to abuse and enslave” on the side of their vehicles, that would hit a bit too close to home, even though if you look at how police spend their time, the latter is vastly more common than the former.
• Jaywalking should really be viewed with the same lense as a desire path
• A federal highway administration brochure blaming pedestrians, over and over again, for their own deaths (among other things) Would you believe the federal highway administration exerts hilariously little influence or ‘control over’ municipal streets departments, relative to what all parties might sometimes allow you to mis-apprehend?
• City of Denver’s utterly banal guidelines to itself about it’s uncarred drivers how to ‘legalize vehicular manslaughter’ for as little as $2000: “Section 42-4-803. Crossing at other than crosswalks: (1)….Every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway.”

It’s de-dignifying if I keep adding sources as if to “prove” my case. I’m simply noting that the regime of propaganda around ‘jaywalking’ is strong. Did you know that the most likely place to die on a road, as a carless driver, is crossing the road in an intersection, while the signal is instructing you to go?

Here’s a good-enough explanation of the concept:

The data shows that the majority of the time pedestrians are hit, they’re in the crosswalk crossing with the signal, which blows the “irresponsible pedestrian” narrative which is sometimes present in discussion of this topic right out of the water.

source: r/chicago, map of cars striking pedestrians and cyclists