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I think you've misunderstood the law you've quoted. It's not about "crossing without checking", it's about the pedestrian "yield[ing] the right of way to all ve

I think you've misunderstood the law you've quoted. It's not about "crossing without checking", it's about the pedestrian "yield[ing] the right of way to all vehicles". It's hard to imagine from a modern perspective, but until laws like this were passed roads were not, as today, universally perceived as places for cars to drive. In cities in much of the developing world the pre-jaywalking regime remains: road users with cars, carts, bikes, trucks, or on foot instead are in a delicate and complex (and often dangerous) dance of theory-of-mind and courtesy (or a game of chicken, depending). The "right-of-way" dominated way of thinking about roads is hard to argue with when you look at most roadways in the developed world (cars zooming around on multiple lanes with few pedestrians in sight). But the idea that every pedestrian must yield right of way to every car is much more questionable in dense cities like NYC, on small, residential streets, where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B.

lelanthran 3y ago
> where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B. That's a very simplistic view - it was never questionable and no one was "given preference". It was simply a practical decision in order to allow cars to use the road. The car took a few seconds to stop from even a pedestrians walking speed. The pedestrian takes a few hundred milliseconds to stop from a walking speed. Giving the pedestrian the right of way would simply result in a lot of dead pedestrians. It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield. The physics didn't allow your preference, and that turned out to be an incredibly good thing as the automobile was one of the biggest drivers of trade and industry the world over. We all benefited, yourself included, from having those early laws on the books.
- munk-a 3y ago
  > It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield. Alternative no-brainer - the new entrant to street traffic that doesn't have the handling or control to safely co-habitate the street with existing users shouldn't be allowed onto streets. They should instead be restricted to specific and limited long distance routes that actually take advantage of their ability to travel many miles an hour on an artificial fuel source - with an allowance within streets to allow emergency vehicles of course. In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town.
  - Affric 3y ago
    Car-brain be strong. You gotta give it to the auto-makers. Probably the greatest propagandists of the modern world. The fact is that cars make places suck. They are dangerous to other road users, the roads built for them create dangerous microclimates, monopolise what was once shared infrastructure, and they enable evils such as the supermarket. Cars are like guns in the states but worse.
    - lelandbatey 3y ago
      I think you may have misinterpreted what the person above you said. I think the person above you is actually not as car brained as you think. I read their suggestion not as "everyone should use a car to get everywhere" but instead as: > Cars can't safely be on streets with pedestrians, so we probably shouldn't allow cars onto roads where pedestrians could walk. Instead the only place where cars should be allowed are roads meant for long-distance driving, like interstates, as that's the environment where a cars advantages shine. Once off of an interstate, you gotta park that car in a dedicated car-storage facility and then walk or use public transit to get around. If you want to drive a car, then "walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town."
      - thfuran 3y ago
        They were referring to the GP and generally agreeing with the person they replied to.
    - currymj 3y ago
      you lost me with the supermarket... lots of people in NYC walk or take the subway to supermarkets that have little/no parking... people like a big store where all the food is in one place.
      - Affric 3y ago
        Here supermarkets are associated with large car parks.
- fwip 3y ago
  I'm seeing here a lot of conflation between "street" and "road." In historical usage, a road is the surface you drive on, and a street is a pathway with buildings on either side. In people-centric culture, a street is a place for people. This is the way streets worked for millenia. Horses and horse-drawn carriages were usually allowed on the street as well, which are more dangerous than a person. In car-centric culture, a street is simply a kind of road, and all roads are the primary domain of cars. There is no logical reason that this must be so - cars could, for instance, only have right-of-way on non-street roads, like highways. Also, your assertion that cars (even old cars) cannot travel at a low enough speed to have a safe stopping distance around pedestrians is simply not true. Even a collision between a pedestrian and a car at "walking speed" (if the car completely failed to notice the pedestrian) rarely results in a fatality. Which you can easily look up yourself, but the numbers I'm seeing are less than 1% fatality rate for collisions below 10mph.
chrisco255 3y ago
Of course not, but the same right-of-way concept applied to horse and buggies sharing the same street and streetcars on rails, not to mention railroads, which certainly zoomed by pedestrians in many urban areas. If you want it back to the old way of chaos on the streets, then you'll have to admit that horses would regularly shit all over the street and pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as they crossed busy roads of buggies, streetcars and early autos zipping around with no lanes or traffic lights. The modern system evolved because it made sense given the demand load and traffic. Cars have to follow rules, too, and have to stop at intersections, yield at crosswalks, obey speed limits, etc.
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  > "pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as they crossed busy roads of buggies, streetcars and early autos zipping around with no lanes or traffic lights." In the old days if an early auto hit you and killed you, it would be the driver's fault. Pedestrians were pushing back on cars because they were so deadly; from the article: "The November 23, 1924, cover of the New York Times shows a common representation of cars during the era — as killing machines. (New York Times)". It was automakers who deliberately propagandised and lobbied to shift public perception of blame from the person in control of the heavy machinery in a public place, to victim blame the pedestrian. > "The modern system evolved because it made sense" No, it evolved because it was profitable (to the automakers) and beneficial to the rich (more likely car owners) and powerful (white / preferred a country residence and a drive into town, but didn't like a streetcar letting poor black people out to the suburbs). Automakers colluded to tear up Los Angeles' electric streetcar network - the largest on the planet - and scrap it. They were found guilty in court and fined ... $1. That's not because it made sense, that's to make people more dependent on their products. > "Cars have to follow rules, too, and have to stop at intersections, yield at crosswalks, obey speed limits, etc." Yet they still put out fumes which affect the residents of the area they drive through, while not affecting the driver inside the car. These fumes kill a 9/11 equivalent of people every 9 months in the UK[1]. They put out noise pollution which worsens the education and health of those around and the noise pollution effects kills someone in Denmark every day or two[2], but the driver is insulated from it. They could have had to be routed around pedestrian areas, living areas, and yield to pedestrians at all times, mandatory park and ride on the edge of urban areas with bus and tram and metro transit in the pedestrianised centers - which would have made sense in various ways and been beneficial for the majority, but inconvenient for the wealthier minority of car drivers. Cars don't obey speed limits in a lot of situations; people drive some combination of the speed others are driving, what they think they can get away with, or what feels safe for the design style of the road. The USA is up to a 9/11 of car accident deaths every two weeks.[3] Compare the response to that, to the nationwide implementation of the TSA and changes to air travel after 9/11. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17704116 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17704116 [2] https://www.brainfacts.org/Thinking-Sensing-and-Behaving/Diet-and-Lifestyle/2018/Noise-Pollution-Isnt-Just-Annoying-Its-Bad-for-Your-Health-062718 https://www.brainfacts.org/Thinking-Sensing-and-Behaving/Die... [2] https://forcetechnology.com/en/articles/traffic-noise-dangerous-health-what-to-do-about-it https://forcetechnology.com/en/articles/traffic-noise-danger... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
tpmoney 3y ago
In any shared transportation space, you need rules for right of way. When two modes of transport want to occupy the same exact space, someone has to be given a priority for the space at any given time. Almost all right of way rules require that the smaller and/or more maneuverable vehicle gives right of way to larger less maneuverable vehicles. Examples of this: Trains have right of way, always. On water, jet skis must give way to boats which must give way to larger boats which must give way to ships. Every rule I've seen on cycling requires pedestrians to give right of way to bicycles. And more generally they almost always require the vehicle most able to prevent a collision to yield right of way to all other vehicles. Cars turning across or into traffic must yield to oncoming traffic. Cars making U-turns must yield to cars turning into traffic (to my understanding because a U turn crosses 2 directions of traffic, where a turning into traffic crosses 1). A car making a turn at a stop must yield to pedestrians already in or entering the road, because a stopped car merely needs to stay stopped to avoid a collision while a moving pedestrian must stop moving and clear the way first. Designated crosswalks by their very existence imply "this is an area you should be especially aware of pedestrians", which by nature makes it easier for a driver to avoid causing a collisions. If cross walks have been provided, it only makes sense to require pedestrians to use them if they want prioritized right of way.
- _dain_ 3y ago
  This is not how it works in the UK. There is no such thing as "right of way" on a road in the way you have described it. It does not refer to any kind of legal priority of one kind of road user over another. You will sometimes hear irate motorists complaining "you can't do that, I had the right of way!" but it doesn't mean what they think. The "right of way" simply means that the public has a right to use the way, by whatever lawful means -- on foot, on a bike, on a horse, etc. So, "having the right of way" is the tautology that you happen to physically occupy some chunk of public highway; it has no bearing on whether you were in the right. If the term meant what people thought, motorists would never have the right of way, since driving is not a right, but requires a license, and the ability to travel on public highways in cars is a creation of statute, not common law. Recent revisions of the Highway Code put about a hierarchy of road users, but opposite to the one you have put across. Smaller, slower, more vulnerable road users have priority over larger and faster vehicles. >Designated crosswalks by their very existence imply "this is an area you should be especially aware of pedestrians", which by nature makes it easier for a driver to avoid causing a collisions. If cross walks have been provided, it only makes sense to require pedestrians to use them if they want prioritized right of way. This begs the question. You only need specially designated areas where pedestrians might be, if it is otherwise dangerous for pedestrians to cross the road. Why build roads to be dangerous to pedestrians in the first place? Why should pedestrians have their freedoms curtailed because of the actions of motorists? In the UK, pedestrians are not required to use zebra crossings, nor are they even required to obey a red light at a pelican crossing (it is merely advisory). Britons have the absolute freedom to cross the road wherever and whenever they please, so long as it's not on a motorway. You are simply allowed to use your own common sense and situational awareness. And we have far fewer traffic fatalities than North America, so maybe we are doing something right. >Every rule I've seen on cycling requires pedestrians to give right of way to bicycles. As a cyclist I find this idea appalling. What you are describing sounds like the Law of the Jungle.
zarzavat 3y ago
The UK has never had such a law (except on motorways), yet pedestrians know to stay off the roads because it is dangerous. In those developing countries the reason that there is chaos is because traffic rules are not enforced. When traffic rules are enforced vehicle speeds increase such that pedestrians avoid roads by their own volition.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
Been to Tbilisi recently, there is such strong preference for cars in the center, pedestrians need to walk ~10 min on average to find a crossing and then wait ~10 min for the green light.

lelanthran 3y ago

> where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B. That's a very simplistic view - it was never questionable and no one was "given preference". It was simply a practical decision in order to allow cars to use the road. The car took a few seconds to stop from even a pedestrians walking speed. The pedestrian takes a few hundred milliseconds to stop from a walking speed. Giving the pedestrian the right of way would simply result in a lot of dead pedestrians. It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield. The physics didn't allow your preference, and that turned out to be an incredibly good thing as the automobile was one of the biggest drivers of trade and industry the world over. We all benefited, yourself included, from having those early laws on the books.

munk-a 3y ago
> It's a no-brainer that the party to yield should be the one who can yield. Alternative no-brainer - the new entrant to street traffic that doesn't have the handling or control to safely co-habitate the street with existing users shouldn't be allowed onto streets. They should instead be restricted to specific and limited long distance routes that actually take advantage of their ability to travel many miles an hour on an artificial fuel source - with an allowance within streets to allow emergency vehicles of course. In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town.
- Affric 3y ago
  Car-brain be strong. You gotta give it to the auto-makers. Probably the greatest propagandists of the modern world. The fact is that cars make places suck. They are dangerous to other road users, the roads built for them create dangerous microclimates, monopolise what was once shared infrastructure, and they enable evils such as the supermarket. Cars are like guns in the states but worse.
  - lelandbatey 3y ago
    I think you may have misinterpreted what the person above you said. I think the person above you is actually not as car brained as you think. I read their suggestion not as "everyone should use a car to get everywhere" but instead as: > Cars can't safely be on streets with pedestrians, so we probably shouldn't allow cars onto roads where pedestrians could walk. Instead the only place where cars should be allowed are roads meant for long-distance driving, like interstates, as that's the environment where a cars advantages shine. Once off of an interstate, you gotta park that car in a dedicated car-storage facility and then walk or use public transit to get around. If you want to drive a car, then "walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town."
    - thfuran 3y ago
      They were referring to the GP and generally agreeing with the person they replied to.
  - currymj 3y ago
    you lost me with the supermarket... lots of people in NYC walk or take the subway to supermarkets that have little/no parking... people like a big store where all the food is in one place.
    - Affric 3y ago
      Here supermarkets are associated with large car parks.
fwip 3y ago
I'm seeing here a lot of conflation between "street" and "road." In historical usage, a road is the surface you drive on, and a street is a pathway with buildings on either side. In people-centric culture, a street is a place for people. This is the way streets worked for millenia. Horses and horse-drawn carriages were usually allowed on the street as well, which are more dangerous than a person. In car-centric culture, a street is simply a kind of road, and all roads are the primary domain of cars. There is no logical reason that this must be so - cars could, for instance, only have right-of-way on non-street roads, like highways. Also, your assertion that cars (even old cars) cannot travel at a low enough speed to have a safe stopping distance around pedestrians is simply not true. Even a collision between a pedestrian and a car at "walking speed" (if the car completely failed to notice the pedestrian) rarely results in a fatality. Which you can easily look up yourself, but the numbers I'm seeing are less than 1% fatality rate for collisions below 10mph.

chrisco255 3y ago

Of course not, but the same right-of-way concept applied to horse and buggies sharing the same street and streetcars on rails, not to mention railroads, which certainly zoomed by pedestrians in many urban areas. If you want it back to the old way of chaos on the streets, then you'll have to admit that horses would regularly shit all over the street and pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as they crossed busy roads of buggies, streetcars and early autos zipping around with no lanes or traffic lights. The modern system evolved because it made sense given the demand load and traffic. Cars have to follow rules, too, and have to stop at intersections, yield at crosswalks, obey speed limits, etc.

jodrellblank 3y ago
> "pedestrians would have to be far more careful in another sense as they crossed busy roads of buggies, streetcars and early autos zipping around with no lanes or traffic lights." In the old days if an early auto hit you and killed you, it would be the driver's fault. Pedestrians were pushing back on cars because they were so deadly; from the article: "The November 23, 1924, cover of the New York Times shows a common representation of cars during the era — as killing machines. (New York Times)". It was automakers who deliberately propagandised and lobbied to shift public perception of blame from the person in control of the heavy machinery in a public place, to victim blame the pedestrian. > "The modern system evolved because it made sense" No, it evolved because it was profitable (to the automakers) and beneficial to the rich (more likely car owners) and powerful (white / preferred a country residence and a drive into town, but didn't like a streetcar letting poor black people out to the suburbs). Automakers colluded to tear up Los Angeles' electric streetcar network - the largest on the planet - and scrap it. They were found guilty in court and fined ... $1. That's not because it made sense, that's to make people more dependent on their products. > "Cars have to follow rules, too, and have to stop at intersections, yield at crosswalks, obey speed limits, etc." Yet they still put out fumes which affect the residents of the area they drive through, while not affecting the driver inside the car. These fumes kill a 9/11 equivalent of people every 9 months in the UK[1]. They put out noise pollution which worsens the education and health of those around and the noise pollution effects kills someone in Denmark every day or two[2], but the driver is insulated from it. They could have had to be routed around pedestrian areas, living areas, and yield to pedestrians at all times, mandatory park and ride on the edge of urban areas with bus and tram and metro transit in the pedestrianised centers - which would have made sense in various ways and been beneficial for the majority, but inconvenient for the wealthier minority of car drivers. Cars don't obey speed limits in a lot of situations; people drive some combination of the speed others are driving, what they think they can get away with, or what feels safe for the design style of the road. The USA is up to a 9/11 of car accident deaths every two weeks.[3] Compare the response to that, to the nationwide implementation of the TSA and changes to air travel after 9/11. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17704116 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17704116 [2] https://www.brainfacts.org/Thinking-Sensing-and-Behaving/Diet-and-Lifestyle/2018/Noise-Pollution-Isnt-Just-Annoying-Its-Bad-for-Your-Health-062718 https://www.brainfacts.org/Thinking-Sensing-and-Behaving/Die... [2] https://forcetechnology.com/en/articles/traffic-noise-dangerous-health-what-to-do-about-it https://forcetechnology.com/en/articles/traffic-noise-danger... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

tpmoney 3y ago

In any shared transportation space, you need rules for right of way. When two modes of transport want to occupy the same exact space, someone has to be given a priority for the space at any given time. Almost all right of way rules require that the smaller and/or more maneuverable vehicle gives right of way to larger less maneuverable vehicles. Examples of this: Trains have right of way, always. On water, jet skis must give way to boats which must give way to larger boats which must give way to ships. Every rule I've seen on cycling requires pedestrians to give right of way to bicycles. And more generally they almost always require the vehicle most able to prevent a collision to yield right of way to all other vehicles. Cars turning across or into traffic must yield to oncoming traffic. Cars making U-turns must yield to cars turning into traffic (to my understanding because a U turn crosses 2 directions of traffic, where a turning into traffic crosses 1). A car making a turn at a stop must yield to pedestrians already in or entering the road, because a stopped car merely needs to stay stopped to avoid a collision while a moving pedestrian must stop moving and clear the way first. Designated crosswalks by their very existence imply "this is an area you should be especially aware of pedestrians", which by nature makes it easier for a driver to avoid causing a collisions. If cross walks have been provided, it only makes sense to require pedestrians to use them if they want prioritized right of way.

_dain_ 3y ago
This is not how it works in the UK. There is no such thing as "right of way" on a road in the way you have described it. It does not refer to any kind of legal priority of one kind of road user over another. You will sometimes hear irate motorists complaining "you can't do that, I had the right of way!" but it doesn't mean what they think. The "right of way" simply means that the public has a right to use the way, by whatever lawful means -- on foot, on a bike, on a horse, etc. So, "having the right of way" is the tautology that you happen to physically occupy some chunk of public highway; it has no bearing on whether you were in the right. If the term meant what people thought, motorists would never have the right of way, since driving is not a right, but requires a license, and the ability to travel on public highways in cars is a creation of statute, not common law. Recent revisions of the Highway Code put about a hierarchy of road users, but opposite to the one you have put across. Smaller, slower, more vulnerable road users have priority over larger and faster vehicles. >Designated crosswalks by their very existence imply "this is an area you should be especially aware of pedestrians", which by nature makes it easier for a driver to avoid causing a collisions. If cross walks have been provided, it only makes sense to require pedestrians to use them if they want prioritized right of way. This begs the question. You only need specially designated areas where pedestrians might be, if it is otherwise dangerous for pedestrians to cross the road. Why build roads to be dangerous to pedestrians in the first place? Why should pedestrians have their freedoms curtailed because of the actions of motorists? In the UK, pedestrians are not required to use zebra crossings, nor are they even required to obey a red light at a pelican crossing (it is merely advisory). Britons have the absolute freedom to cross the road wherever and whenever they please, so long as it's not on a motorway. You are simply allowed to use your own common sense and situational awareness. And we have far fewer traffic fatalities than North America, so maybe we are doing something right. >Every rule I've seen on cycling requires pedestrians to give right of way to bicycles. As a cyclist I find this idea appalling. What you are describing sounds like the Law of the Jungle.

zarzavat 3y ago

The UK has never had such a law (except on motorways), yet pedestrians know to stay off the roads because it is dangerous. In those developing countries the reason that there is chaos is because traffic rules are not enforced. When traffic rules are enforced vehicle speeds increase such that pedestrians avoid roads by their own volition.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

Been to Tbilisi recently, there is such strong preference for cars in the center, pedestrians need to walk ~10 min on average to find a crossing and then wait ~10 min for the green light.