Comments on: A history of “jaywalking”

By: Seattle police ruffle a lot of jaywalker feathers | New To Seattle

Seattle police ruffle a lot of jaywalker feathers | New To Seattle — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:36:06 +0000

[...] way, the term, generally defined as crossing on foot a street not at an intersection or crosswalk, was coined nearly a century ago to describe “jays,” or rural folk who supposedly didn’t know how to walk safely in the big city. In early usage [...]

By: Stop Jaywalking! | ATX Post

Stop Jaywalking! | ATX Post — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:05:19 +0000

[...] walking against the light. Our keen journalistic instincts first led us to Google and then to an excerpt from a Fighting Traffic. According to author Peter D. Norton: “A ‘jay’ was a hayseed, out of place in the city; [...]

By: Jaywalking and Pedestrian Rights « HARDCorps

Jaywalking and Pedestrian Rights « HARDCorps — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:48:05 +0000

[...] a natural and expected part of urban life. When originally proposed, both the laws and term were considered mildly offensive, and even the New York Times found these laws laughable. Pedestrians refused to follow new laws and [...]

By: Should Jaywalking be a Crime? « Walking in Seattle

Should Jaywalking be a Crime? « Walking in Seattle — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:56:59 +0000

[...] this blog, The Toronto Star reviews the history of jaywalking. Here’s more good insight into how walking across the street has become criminalized as “jaywalking”: The cleverest anti-jaywalking publicity effort was in Detroit in 1922, where the Packard Motor Car [...]

By: What I’m reading today « west north

What I’m reading today « west north — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:36:05 +0000

[...] as Patrick Condon (links to PDF) points out — my own reading of history (relying on Peter Norton here) says otherwise. Auto domination was a conscious political choice made in the 1920s, before [...]

By: Streetsblog » Is Death an Appropriate Penalty for “Jaywalking”?

Streetsblog » Is Death an Appropriate Penalty for “Jaywalking”? — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:20:17 +0000

[...] of the Chicago urbanist blog west north, an excerpt from Peter D. Norton’s 2008 book "Fighting Traffic" offers a lesson in [...]

By: payton

payton — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:09:35 +0000

I'll undoubtedly post further excerpts from this astonishing book (it also examines the invention, and then wholesale reinvention, of traffic engineering as a profession and how it forgot about people), but here's another that shows just how far police attitudes have changed. It's gone to the extent where police, upon finding a dead body, no longer presume fault with, well, the guy wielding the deadly weapon (i.e., driving the car). Page 53: 'Police officials also tended to defend the customary rights of those on foot, and to expect automobiles to defer to them. Since most traffic casualties were pedestrians struck by motor vehicles, the safety problem, in this view, was not to make streets safe for motorists (relatively few of whom were getting injured), but to make them safe from motorists. Police authorities and ordinary "cornermen" (traffic police) tended to blame the motor vehicle and its driver for street casualties. In a [1926] survey of 480 city police chiefs, 72 percent chose "carelessness of the driver" as the leading cause of street casualties. Only 16 percent blamed pedestrians.'