Things to Think About or Read

[geminigirl]

If you haven't read A Letter from Jamiel (which comedienne Margaret Cho published in her blog) you might want to check it out. It's a letter from the son of Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, a powerful anti-choice organization.

You should read this post about intelligent design, from the New Yorker in alibee's journal.

And the local news tonight reported a story (I'll see if I can dig up a link here) where Orange County (that's the county I live in) law enforcement officers are being encouraged to charge parents who jaywalk with children on some of the most dangerous streets with neglect. How do you feel about this?

Comments

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

From a Californian perspective... eh... I'm not crazy about it, but you are in fact putting children in danger by jaywalking with them across dangerous streets. In my experience here, there is rarely a reason other than laziness to jaywalk.

From a Virginian perspective - jaywalking is often the safer choice, and the law is completely insane, and they should be charging all the motorists who aren't careful at pedestrian intersections instead.

I'm not sure which is more applicable.

[geminigirl]

I lived along Route 1 in Virginia, on the opposite end of Fairfax County from you. There were well marked, pedestrian cross walks on a busy, multilane, divided highway. People still jaywalked. It was purely a laziness thing, and a dangerous one to boot. The speed limit was 45, and as usual, people did travel faster than that. I was surprised that there weren't more pedestrian accidents there.

I absolutely agree that motorists who don't pay attention to pedestrian crosswalks should be charged. But as a driver, no matter how much attention I pay, no matter how carefully I follow traffic laws, jaywalkers put me in danger as well as themselves. And I don't like that. As a pedestrian, I try to follow traffic laws, use crosswalks, and cross safely. It isn't that hard to do.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

The further out from DC you get, the less pedestrian friendly it is. If we'd lived one town over, we probably couldn't have gone carless. If we'd stayed another year, we probably would have moved more around where you were.

It actually was safer to jaywalk in many cases, either because of weirdness in light timing or because it was easier to judge breaks in traffic when not dealing with the cluster of cars at the intersection.

Of course, having been raised in a sane area, it took me most of the year we were there to break the habit of not jaywalking :)

[koyote.livejournal.com]

when i see cops sitting at interesctions giving motorists tickets for violating pedestrian right of way, when I see motorists slowing down or stopping to check for pedestrians - especially with a WALK sign, then maybe.

Until then, I took notes, I can prove that jaywalking across 50 in Fairfax is safer than using an intersection. Similar results with most roads in herndon and Reston. So there.

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

I think neglect charges would be a little extreme, but they ought to do *something*. It also kinda depends on what you mean by "jaywalking" -- here in Baltimore, it's not unheard of for people to just sort of saunter out into the street, because they've decided that the best way to get to a place one block down and across the street is to cut across the diagonal. Often, they wind up ambling vaguely though the street, and seem to have no real concept that cars are whizzing by.

I frequently want to leap out of my car and pummel those people, on the grounds that it would serve the community as a whole, but I have yet to actually do so. To me, that's an entirely different sort of offense than someone who crosses someplace other than the corner, but does so in an expeditious manner, and is looking around to make sure he doesn't inconvenience vehicular traffic.