![]() Today we would call them “traffic calming,” but in 1922 they were just routine municipal engineering. #VIRGINIA ISSUES DOMINATE AD WARS DRIVERS#Street design techniques that slow drivers down were common. California should stop ticketing jaywalking. If people sometimes jaywalk to reach their destination, that’s a design flaw rather than a human flaw. Opinion Editorial: Trying to cross the street shouldn’t be a crime Speed was the lethal factor, so speed - not walking - had to be curtailed. Pedestrians were entitled to the safe and convenient use of city streets, so almost everyone blamed fast drivers. By the conventional wisdom of that era, the fault was obvious. In cities, most of the people killed in traffic were pedestrians, many of them children. A century ago, as automobiles proliferated on city streets, the numbers of pedestrians killed rose steeply. The grim status quo is the legacy of a revolution we have mostly forgotten. The risks fall disproportionately on low-income people and people of color. In 2007 pedestrians accounted for 11% of all traffic deaths in 2021 their share was 17%. In 2021 more than 7,000 pedestrians were killed on the nation’s streets and roads. Walking in America is dangerous, and the risks have been growing. It follows similar initiatives elsewhere, notably in Virginia, where jaywalking ceased to be a primary offense in 2021. Like the removal of an old monument or the renaming of a building, the law signals new possibilities. Yet the new law is still a remarkable acknowledgment that we need a future in which walking is accommodated, not deterred, and convenient, not constrained. It leaves plenty of room for police discretion to ticket unsafe walking, and it doesn’t challenge cars’ domination of city streets. California’s new Freedom to Walk Act does not exactly decriminalize jaywalking. ![]()
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