I've never understood this attitude to crossing the road. In every European country, you simply cross the road if you can get across to the other side safely. If there is a signal, you can use it to stop the cars. The middle of the road seems like it would be a much safer place to cross than at intersections in many instances as there wouldn't be people turning unexpectedly.
There was a study of traffic savvy animals (feline and canine mainly) some years ago who roam freely, gps trackers were attached and they would predominately cross roads only away from intersections, for the reason you cited.
Why watch four or so directions when you could only watch two?
I think the study had a name like the secret life of pets, except that's a recent cartoon movie, so may have been the hidden/secret lives of dogs. I searched but can't find it, though I'm relatively sure it was on US 60 Minutes at some point.
Just to state the "obvious": the reason people cross at intersections is because that is one place on the road where there are stop lights! Well, usually. It's banking off of existing stops for cars.
It's funny to think about how the grid layout of cities like NYC mean that it's too tempting to just put crosswalks at intersections since there are so many of them, but in other cities you often have crosswalks away from intersections as well. Some of them have lights associated with them.
The fact of the matter is that no matter how careful a pedestrian tries to be, given how roads tend to be often used by cars if you don't want to wait around for 10 minutes having cars yield in one way or another is important. But given how dangerous intersections are in general, I wonder how much safer it would be to just paint a lot of crosswalks _everywhere_ and apply the whole "you have to stop if someone looks like they're crossing" logic.
There's all sorts of ways to make crossings safer. One can raise crosswalks, add bulb-outs to intersections to give cars better sightlines in an intersection and slow them down, push most pedestrian collision liability to the driver, add traffic lights, place Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons/HAWK signals, etc etc. There's a lot of fascinating resources on this stuff.
In the US the problem is that most traffic engineers and local politicians are skeptical that anyone will do anything but drive. When proposing pedestrian-oriented changes most local politicians and engineers will place vehicle throughput above pedestrian safety.
EDIT: I don't mean "will place vehicle throughput above pedestrian safety" in a conspiratorial way. I mean legitimately, they'll balk at slowing down car trip times or having to field angry motorist resident complaints to help save pedestrian lives. Many of them genuinely don't think that people walk unless they have no other option (perceived homeless, mentally ill, disabled, etc.) or are out for sightseeing.
I found that Germans in Berlin got quite annoyed at me, an American, when I’d cross an empty road against the signal. They’d point at the “red man” and scold me. It was quite amusing coming from Boston where jaywalking is out of control.
The only situation where Germans would generally scold someone for crossing at a red light is when a small child is present. There is a widespread norm not to cross in that case, because children are considered less capable of making the judgement call and should rely on the lights, so it's bad to act as an example to the contrary. This makes sense to me. In other situations, it is considered mostly acceptable in my experience.
Not German, but I've stopped and I increasingly get angry when people cross at red lights on busy (from the pedestrian side) streets that don't have lots of car traffic. This is because I see it almost daily: someone looks, makes the determination that there's no car close and it's safe for them to cross. Then, 3 distracted people DON'T look and just see the person who started to cross, and start crossing themselves thinking it must be green or safe. And then a chain of people jaywalking WITHOUT looking starts and at some point a car approaches and it's no longer safe to cross.
So I've stopped jaywalking when somewhere where others could distractedly follow me, and I give angry glances at people who do. Sure, it's not my responsability to make sure others aren't distracted, but since I am aware of how people really are and I can avoid causing issues by just following the established signals, knowing I'm not responsible is not going to make me feel much better if someone gets run over following me.
What you said would make sense, but normally it was just me and a bunch of adults. I’d be the only person crossing while they stared at me. This was a few years back so maybe things have changed recently?
A lot of Berliners will cross against the red man but not if children are present, because it sets a bad example. Were the scolds parents with their kids in tow?
Boston has uniquely crazy walkers. I know because I was one of them. The narrow winding streets and masshole drivers turn the city into an entertaining game of frogger.
I live near a four way stop intersection where my wonderful neighbors and visitors usually don’t use turn signals and often don’t yield right of way. So I just cross in the middle of the road away from both intersections because the car behavior there is so much more predictable, even though I don’t have right of way.
I would 100% support some kind of automated system for issuing tickets for people who don’t use turn signals at intersections, similar to red light cams. I would even pay to install them myself if the price were reasonable
That's not my experience - too many drivers that are turning right will roll through intersections, looking in the other direction to check for oncoming traffic.
Additionally impatient drivers often pull up into the crosswalk, forcing you into the intersection.
(Please don't do this, it will not get you to your destination any faster, it just creates danger and confusion. Especially for cyclists and wheelchair users.)
While this is a problem, there is also the problem of drivers not having sufficient visibility from behind the crosswalk due to parked cars or bushes or trees, forcing drivers to encroach in the crosswalk at some point.
Why do you need visibility left or right to come to a stop at a red light directly in front of you? :)
When the light changes, or you're in the right turning lane, sure you need to go over the crosswalk, but that's not what I'm talking about.
Once a driver was even gently sliding into the crosswalk, looking at their phone, while I was directly in front of them. They looked up and made eye contact with me, and I watched them realize with horror that I was there. (I was fine)
In the US, you can usually make a right turn on red light if there are no oncoming vehicles.
So you stop at the stop bar, before the crosswalk. No one is walking in cross walk, so you inch into crosswalk to see if there are cars, and then you might see a line of cars, and by the time they are gone, someone might want to walk across in the crosswalk, but your car is in it.
Obviously, one can simply not turn right on red, but that is not how most people drive.
This problem is actually unavoidable at intersections with stop signs on one road but not the other road, which is where I encounter it most. There, drivers have no choice but to encroach into crosswalk to see.
Highlighting some parts of my previous comment you may have missed:
> When the light changes, or you're in the right turning lane, sure you need to go over the crosswalk, but that's not what I'm talking about.
I routinely are drivers going straight or left pull into the crosswalk. It may be more visible/memorable to me because I do a lot of walking, so they're often in my way. I don't know your situation, but if you're mostly driving, it may not be visible to you (because you're not at the front of the queue) or memorable (because it doesn't cause you to change your route).
I see people do crazy things all the time just out of impatience. People even fully enter the intersection sometimes (when they're going straight and have a red, and people turning currently have a green arrow), it's nuts. And then people will pull up behind them, locking them in. So if someone ran a light, there would be no way to avoid a collision. (Obviously you shouldn't run lights either, but people do.)
My philosophy is that any complex system can suffer at most 2 faults without a failure (as a rule of thumb). So when people push the boundaries like this, they're expending the buffer we need to avoid collisions caused by honest mistakes. If someone pulls into the intersection, someone pulls behind them, and virtually anything else goes wrong, there will be a collision.
I'm British? If you mean have I left the UK, yes. I've been a lot of different places and what I mean is that the idea that it should be illegal to cross the road even when there are not any cars is a bizarre US thing.
You should visit Berlin, Vienna, or anywhere in Japan.
Though Japanese culture is not likely to tell you directly that you shouldn't cross against the light. You will see the natives wait very patiently at an empty intersection waiting for their turn to walk.
You may also want to visit New York or Vietnam a place where people cross between moving traffic.
The US and Europe are very large. There is no federal US law about Jay walking and lumping it all together because a few places are strict about it is odd. It's like thinking all drivers in Europe drive on the left side of the road because you only visited London.
I’ve not visited Berlin (though I have spent time in other parts of Germany). I would find it hard to imagine that a person would get in trouble with the law for crossing in the middle of a small street or other very normal behaviour. I’d make a distinction between “crossing at a red signal” and jaywalking (crossing where there is no signal). There are certainly places in Europe I’ve been where the former would be frowned upon, but nowhere where the latter is.
New York is kinda the example of the weirdness I’m getting at. People do cross wherever they want to, but it’s illegal and people do get ticketed for it.
I noticed that in Japan (specifically, Kyoto, where I lived) that people would wait for the light to turn green … but, if I made the first move and crossed on red, most of the other folks waiting would happily follow.
It reminds everyone that just because you can observe a behavior like obeying a rule, does not mean you can make assumptions about the cause of the behavior.
Maybe they respect rules, or maybe they simply herd and don't like to stand out.
Or "you can't make assumptions" means who knows maybe something else entirely like it just never ocurred to anyone.
Or maybe "don't like standing out" is yet another merely a behavior with a presumed cause. Maybe they avoid standing out, but not because they don't like it, but because it's penalized. And so on.
I've spent years in both Paris and London, and agree with you. Sure there are roads & times when you'd be an idiot to try to cross through traffic, but unless you're only there as a tourist for a few days then it's pretty easy to figure out what's safe and what isn't in both places.
> You should be suicidal to try and cross the street outside of crossing in cities like London
Have you ever been? This isn’t true at all. Obviously not at rush hour or on a busy road, but apart from that walking in and across the road is very common.
