Before jaywalking, cars were demonized as rampant killers in USA. There were efforts to ban them in cities entirely. Certain interests didn't want that, so 'jay

Before jaywalking, cars were demonized as rampant killers in USA. There were efforts to ban them in cities entirely. Certain interests didn't want that, so 'jaywalking' was invented - suddenly cars were not the invader in the pedestrian's street, it was the other way around--peds were now interlopers unless explicitly instructed by car infrastructure. This led to cars going faster in urban environments, with more infrastructure for cars while pedestrians got smaller and smaller slices of the street to use. This series of events is a huge cause of the current state of high pedestrian deaths by traffic. Legalizing pedestrianism is one move in a larger strategy to unroll the mistakes of the past and reclaim the most valuable parts of our cities for humans once again.