Short Stuff: Jaywalking

Jaywalking is a crime. Sort of. But why? Learn all about this weird law today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, I'm welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck, and Jerry's even here. Dave's not no, and
even knows where Dave is right now. But Jerry's here
and that's good. And this is short stuff about jaywalking.
J Yeah, I think I want to start this out
by saying that our mutual friend who shot stuff you
know TV shows the DP, Scott Ippolito, when we lived

(00:26):
in l A together, he got a j walking ticket
one day. Man, that is so Scott. And I was like,
what they do that? And he said they do that.
I could see Scott's face when he actually got a ticket,
and it was sinking in that he was getting a
ticket for jaywalking. It. It's great, great stuff, man. And
I think it wasn't even like crossing against the crosswalk sign.

(00:47):
I think he literally just crossed the street where he
shouldn't have that. Cops like, I don't like I don't
like your face. Yeah, he's got a great face too.
Supposedly That's the thing too that we'll we'll talk about later,
that jaywalking is not um equitably doled out among the
different different types of people in the United States, which
is sucky, but at the same time, Chuck Um, we

(01:10):
should probably start at the beginning of jaywalking because jaywalking
hasn't always been around, because cars haven't always been around,
and jaywalking doesn't really exist without the context of cars.
Because thanks to a really interesting Vox article that we found, um,
it turns out the automobile industry is behind the creation

(01:32):
and criminalization of the concept of jaywalking. Before it was
just here's the street, ere a pedestrian, which means you
basically on the street, go ahead and cross wherever you want. Yeah.
So shout out to Box and our old pals from
how Stuff Works dot com for this stuff. What I
couldn't derive from the Vox article, Well, let's just go

(01:52):
ahead and say this. The term jay back then was
a name if you were like a rube or a
nudge or a hick. You be called a j A
lot of times. It was a name for somebody like that.
It was very derogatory. You also wanted jay, I like that,
but people were called ja drivers or they were known

(02:15):
as jay driving. But it seemed like Vox had it
the other way around, and that jay driving came about
after the term jaywalking, and I couldn't figure out which
it was. I couldn't either, but they were so very
close that they were um pretty much created almost at
the same time, but they were both born. It seems

(02:37):
like out of this conflict between automotive drivers car drivers
we might call them today, and pedestrians, people who are
just walking around because, like I was saying before, the
street belonged to everybody and they were like corse drawn
carriages and all that stuff. But for the most part,
people were on foot and the first people who were
driving cars were super rich um uh gad flies basically

(03:03):
like f Scott Fitzgerald types. We're the ones who were
driving automotives at the at first. And so there was
certainly class resentment out of the out of the gate,
but there was also more than anything, resentment for people
who were just zipping through, um the streets that were
crowded with people, including children playing in the street, because
that was a normal thing to do um. And so

(03:24):
there was a tension almost out of the gate between
drivers and pedestrians. Yeah. I mean the drivers essentially, we're like,
get off the road, and the walkers were like, wait
a minute, the roads belonged to us, and they said no,
that's why we started building sidewalks and the walkers were like,
what you want us to walk over there on that
little four foot span When we lived our whole life

(03:46):
in the streets, there's cracks there that I can't step on.
The term ja driving I think it may have been
first though, because this was like the nineteen twenties when
the automobile really started to come on the scene and
started like making a legit claim to the streets. Uh.
And it looks like jay driving was in an actual

(04:08):
newspaper in nineteen o five and the Kansas Junction City
Union and the Kansas City Star talked about jay driving,
So I think that may have been first. And this
was driving on the wrong side of the road. And
then initially jay walking met just being rude on the
sidewalk and like not I don't know if it was
right or left base, but basically walking in a way

(04:29):
that wasn't appropriate on the sidewalk. Yeah, that's the house
stuff works spiel. If you read that Vox article, it's
basically saying that, um, jay walkers were called that for
getting in the way of cars. It was derogatory term
for people who didn't know better stay out of these
new awesome um cars way, and then in response people

(04:49):
called jay like people driving cars jay drivers because they
didn't they it was just a retaliatory term from what
I could tell. So this shall be known henceforth as
the Great House Stuff Works Fox. Yeah, exactly between Jay
how Stuff Works and jay vox. But the long and
the short of it is that once this started to

(05:11):
be a thing, the automobile industry got involved, and their
lobby and their money got involved, and they got together
with local police forces and they started initially like a
shame campaign. Yeah, didn't they to like shame people that
were jaywalking. Yeah. There's apparently the National Automobile Chamber of
Commerce who had the bright idea of creating a free

(05:34):
wire service for local journalists where the journalist would send
in the details of like a of a of a
like a car accidentally a pedestrian hit by a car,
and the the um wire service would send them back
a full article. Go ahead and run it. You can
put your name on it if you want, but it
would put the onus on the pedestrians. It would talk

(05:55):
about how the pedestrian was a dummy for not getting
out of the way of the car. It was the
pedestrians fall and they were like, that was the level
of like underhandedness that this campaign was taking. Yeah, And
as far as the shame campaign, it was literally on
the streets, like they would advise police officers to shout
them down, to blow their whistles at them, and like
call attention to them. There were like legit, you know,

(06:19):
nineteen forties fifties style propaganda posters about jaywalking that they
would put up, and all of a sudden, the pedestrian
was was, you know, persona non grata in the United States. Yeah,
and then in very short order they started making crosswalks,
and then in very short order after that, there were
laws that were past that said this is where the
only place you can cross the street and be within

(06:42):
the letter of the law. And as a result, cars
came to dominate streets for the first time ever pretty
quickly after they were invented and introduced. And I say
we take a break and then talk about those laws
that kind of came up as a result of that
automotive industry lobbying. Let's do it. Well, now we're on

(07:03):
the road, driving in your truck. Want to learn a
thing or two from Josh can Chuck stuff you should know,
all right, all right, So back in Herbert Hoover apparently,

(07:30):
who was the Commerce secretary at the time before he
was president, he wrote up a uniform law that that
guided pedestrian um behavior in the hopes that everybody would
just adopt this law and it would make sense. But
instead a patchwork of not just state laws but municipal
laws arose. So depending on where you are in the country,

(07:53):
the law is going to be radically different from somewhere
else in the country about whether you're in the writer
or the long for getting hit by that car. Yeah,
I mean that's still this thing today, Like it depends
on what city you're in, and this is you know,
like you said, even sometimes small towns and municipalities, I'll
do it up to big cities there are like in

(08:15):
New York, it's people jaywalk. That's the only way you
can get anywhere in New York is if you just
kind of do your own thing. And I've never seen
anyone get busted for it. It seems like that it's
acceptable to do there. Um. In Los Angeles, it's weird,
like people will will stop and if there's no cars coming,
they will sit there. They will stand there and wait

(08:36):
at a crosswalk crosswalk until it turns. Um. It's much
less pedestrian friendly than New York is, obviously, But depending
on where you are, it's either a faux pot to
do it or it's downright illegal. Uh. If you're talking
right of way, it's anybody's guests sometimes who technically legally
has the right of way. Uh. There's an old saying

(08:58):
that the right of way is something you give, not take.
Especially when you're in a car and someone's walking. I
think you should always sort of be nice and defer
to the person walking right, don't you think? Yeah, of course,
I mean. And the overall the overall points of this
is that if you're driving a car, you're not really
in any sort of danger of being harmed yourself if

(09:19):
you get in an accident with the pedestrian. But a
pedestrian is in a lot of danger for getting hit
by a car. And so you, as the operator of
the car, have a responsibility to look out for pedestrians.
And then conversely, you as a pedestrian, just for out
of a sense of self preservation, have a responsibility not
just walk in front of cars and presume they're going

(09:40):
to stop. Yeah, because here's a stat three percent of
traffic incidents involved pedestrians, but fourteen percent of traffic deaths
are pedestrians, and I think seventy of those fatalities are
outside of intersections, just people crossing the street or whatever
wherever they want. Yeah, so that the National Highway Transportation

(10:03):
Safety Administration put together a publication called Pedestrians Safety Enforcement
Operations and You Colan and how to Guide. I added
the and you part, okay, and um. They basically it's
instructs cops to just go ahead and cite um, everybody,
cite the driver and the pedestrian if there's any kind

(10:23):
of accident. But they recommend um really bringing the hammer
down on drivers because they're the ones who who are
going to cause the most damage. So they really need
to be taught to be on the lookout for pedestrians,
even if the car has the right of way. The
This House Stuff Works article makes a really great point, Um,
regardless of any local laws of who's right or who's wrong,

(10:46):
if you're a driver and you hit a pedestrian, it
doesn't matter whether you're in the right or wrong. You
just hit somebody and maybe seriously injured or maybe even
killed them, and that's a life changing event. So forget
the laws. Just look out for pedestrians at all times.
Maybe if you actually do hit somebody, you can look
into local laws to see what the deal is or
have your lawyer do it. But up to that point,

(11:07):
you should be looking out for pedestrians. And if you're
a pedestrians, you should never, ever, in a million years,
ever be looking at your cell phone when you stop
off of a curb and cross the street. It is
one of the dumbest, most easily avoidable things that you
can do, and yet it happens everywhere. Yeah there, I
mean there are towns that have and cities have I

(11:27):
think distracted pedestrian laws on the books for stuff just
like that, right, Yeah, And I also want to put
in two cents for um enforcing distracted driver's laws. Like
just seeing people driving around looking at their phone is
it makes me crazy. It makes my my blood boil,
Like if blood could boil, I would say it literally

(11:47):
makes my blood boil. Speeding down the highway just staring
into their lap, Oh my god, unbelievable. Yeah, or like
they'll drop down all of a sudden from eighty to
like sixty because they're checking their phone now and they're
not really paying attention. But yeah, no matter how you're
doing it, it's it's just wrong, wrong, wrong, You're wrong,
You're wrong. Yeah. I used to give a nice little

(12:08):
friendly tap at someone in front of me at a
red light, head and gone yet on the horn, the horn.
I say, you know, I'm not the bumper. But now
when I see the head down and there on the phone,
I just I lay on it. I don't care. Yeah,
I'm with you. Uh. I got one more quick story,
if I may to illustrate yielding to pedestrians. It was
Christmas Eve this year and I was coming down McClendon

(12:30):
through the neighborhoods of Atlanta toward Candler Park, and there's
kind of a funky pedestrian crossing there that's a little
it's not very intuitive, and there was a legit elderly couple,
like maybe in their eighties, even sort of like should
I go? Should I not? And they shouldn't have, but
I could tell that they were confused, so I stopped
and they started to go, and a guy coming from
the other direction laid on his horn and was like

(12:54):
screaming and pointing up at the sign saying they shouldn't
be walking. As he went by on Christmas Eve, this
elderly couple, and he was like, it didn't look like
some young jerk, he was like some middle aged guy.
I think he had a normal middle aged passenger. Like
you look out for them, Yeah, they're the worst. Actually, yeah,
those are the ones you have to look out for
the most. Oh, it just made me so mad. I

(13:16):
couldn't believe that this guy just blew through there, Like
what it would have cost him to just let this
whole couple pass. I know, and you see that so much.
Everybody's so keyed up these days, but it seems like
middle are the most keyed up of all its stuff.
You know, it's a time to be keyed up, which
also means it's a time to be kinder than ever.
You know. Yeah, that's good advice. Ch alrighty, I'm done

(13:38):
half the soapbox. I've got one more thing. Apparently there
was a two twelve study um that looked at how
jaywalking is enforced among races, and depending on the town
you're in, Uh, you're much likelier to be cited for
jaywalking if you're a person or color of color Champagne
or Band of Illinois is the one that's usually trotted

(13:59):
out as a UM as the the shameful UM poster
child for this. But the people back in two thousand
twelve who were cited for jaywalking we're black, despite only
twelve point four percent of the population of Champagne or Band,
Illinois being black. And it's not just them. There's like

(14:20):
this happens in towns all over the country. But it's um.
It's like bad enough to get a ticket for jaywalking,
but if if it's not being doled out evenly, then
that is even worse. You know, agreed, be careful out there,
be nice to people. That's all I got. I think
that's good. Well, then, uh, that means everybody's short stuff
is out. Stuff you should Know is a production of

(14:44):
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