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.
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.
> "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.
One of the reasons the Dutch transportation system is so radically different is because there was strong backlash to rising child deaths from motor vehicles - aka Stop de Kindermoord.
In the Netherlands in many residential areas, the streets are primarily for walking and bicycling; drivers must yield to everything else, because they are the greatest danger on the road. There's extensive, comprehensive separated cycling infrastructure. There's a presumption of fault, not innocence, if you hit a cyclist or pedestrian with your car.
In the US, guns have only recently overtaken motor vehicle related deaths (which have been declining) as the top killers of children.
Unfortunately, the Dutch are weaponized against cycling infrastructure elsewhere. "Well, you can't have bicycles in the streets until you have comprehensively education of children in how to cycle", for example (despite plenty of evidence that, around the world, cyclists do not break traffic laws more than drivers.) Or defeatist nonsense like "there's no point to legal protections for cyclists in the street, we must only work for separated infrastructure."
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.
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.
>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.
Should we take this to mean that pedestrians may enter the flow of traffic willy nilly and drivers will always be found at fault in a collision? I assume not.
To me what I've been able to find sounds an awful lot like pedestrians are required to exercise due caution, and like basically less strictly worded versions of most US laws. Like for example from these rules https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/rules-for-pedes...:
"D If traffic is coming, let it pass. Look all around again and listen. Do not cross until there is a safe gap in the traffic and you are certain that there is plenty of time. Remember, even if traffic is a long way off, it may be approaching very quickly."
Or rule 8:
"If you have started crossing and traffic wants to turn into the road, you have priority and they should give way (see Rules H2 and 170)."
Which certainly seems to imply that there are times when the pedestrian does not "have priority"
Or this rule, which sounds an awful lot like the rule quoted from New York: " Where there is a crossing nearby, use it. It is safer to cross using a subway, a footbridge, an island, a zebra, pelican, toucan or puffin crossing, or where there is a crossing point controlled by a police officer, a school crossing patrol or a traffic warden. Otherwise choose a place where you can see clearly in all directions. Try to avoid crossing between parked cars (see Rule 14), on a blind bend, or close to the brow of a hill. Move to a space where drivers and riders can see you clearly. Do not cross the road diagonally."
This one sounds an awful lot to me like cars have "right of way" when the amber light is flashing and a pedestrian has not yet entered the cross walk: "Pelican crossings. These are signal-controlled crossings where flashing amber follows the red ‘Stop’ light. You MUST stop when the red light shows. When the amber light is flashing, you MUST give way to any pedestrians on the crossing. If the amber light is flashing and there are no pedestrians on the crossing, you may proceed with caution."
Even from H2 which is the main new thing I see citing the higher pedestrian priorities has "Pedestrians have priority when on a zebra crossing, on a parallel crossing or at light controlled crossings when they have a green signal.", which again certainly seems to say that when not on such a crossing or crossing against the lights that they do not have priority anymore.
>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?
And yet, the UK is littered with pedestrian crossings. As near as I can tell you have an entire bestiary of different crossing types with different rules and regulations for each. Seems like they should be unnecessary if pedestrians have absolute priority over all other traffic right?
> 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).
"(2)Without prejudice to the generality of subsection (1) above, regulations under that subsection may be made—
(a)prohibiting pedestrian traffic on the carriageway within 100 yards of a crossing, and
"
So that sounds like you absolutely can be compelled by law to use a crossing where one is nearby.
> As a cyclist I find this idea appalling. What you are describing sounds like the Law of the Jungle.
Why? To me it sounds like a law reflecting reality. You could say a pedestrian has the right of way but when a pedestrian tries to occupy the space a bicycle is already or will be within the time that they are unable to safely stop, physics says the pedestrian will lose that fight. That doesn't mean cyclists can ride and just slam through joggers. Everyone is still requires to try to avoid collisions.
It really feels like you have a misunderstanding of what "right of way" means here. This isn't some absolute authority where cyclists may mow down pedestrians in front of them, and cars may mow down cyclists in front of them, and busses may mow down cars and trucks may mow down busses. It's trying to resolve who needs to yield when a collision is likely to occur. As a general rule like I said, the person most able to prevent the collision in the first place is given lower right of way. A car already in a lane has right of way over a car trying to merge into the lane. That isn't carte blanche to simply ram people merging into your lane out of the way, it just means the person wanting to merge has the responsibility to do so safely and not cause a collision, and if they can't merge without causing a collision, they're the one that has to wait.
>Should we take this to mean that pedestrians may enter the flow of traffic willy nilly and drivers will always be found at fault in a collision? I assume not.
Pedestrians may enter the flow of traffic whenever they like, and the law will not punish them. If there is a collision, the driver may or may not be found at fault, it depends entirely on the circumstances.
>To me what I've been able to find sounds an awful lot like pedestrians are required to exercise due caution, and like basically less strictly worded versions of most US laws.
Pedestrians are encouraged to exercise due caution. They are not required to by law. You are confusing a common-sense recommendation with a legal obligation. Drivers should never assume pedestrians will behave as they "should". Pedestrians include children, the elderly, the blind, the deaf, drunk people, the mentally retarded, and so on: people who may not be able to sense, judge, or move in the normally expected way.
You will never be arrested for "reckless walking" in the way you might be arrested for reckless driving.
(You might counter with "pedestrians should not assume drivers will behave as they should" -- quite so! The distinction I am making is: if a pedestrian uses the road carelessly because he thinks drivers will always act properly, this is stupid, but not illegal. If a motorist uses the road carelessly because he assumes pedestrians will always act properly, this is both stupid and illegal.)
The specific thing you are quoting is the Highway Code, which is not law, but a series of guidelines.
>This one sounds an awful lot to me like cars have "right of way" when the amber light is flashing and a pedestrian has not yet entered the cross walk: "Pelican crossings. These are signal-controlled crossings where flashing amber follows the red ‘Stop’ light. You MUST stop when the red light shows. When the amber light is flashing, you MUST give way to any pedestrians on the crossing. If the amber light is flashing and there are no pedestrians on the crossing, you may proceed with caution."
You are incorrect. Cars do not have "the right of way" when the amber light is flashing, because as I said there is no "right of way" to be had, in that sense you describe. A pedestrian may legally step out into the street while the lights are green for cars. It is usually a terribly unwise thing to do, but idiocy is not against the law. Sometimes it's safe, such as when there's a traffic jam. I saw many people doing it this morning during rush hour -- nothing bad happened to them because the risk was objectively low, and they would have nothing to fear from any policeman who happened to see it, because their actions were not against the law.
For cars it is different: cars must stop when the light is red for them. That is a legal requirement and there can be fines or other consequences for breaking it.
>And yet, the UK is littered with pedestrian crossings. As near as I can tell you have an entire bestiary of different crossing types with different rules and regulations for each. Seems like they should be unnecessary if pedestrians have absolute priority over all other traffic right?
You misunderstand. I never said there was no danger -- of course there is danger! Crossings are a necessary evil in many places. As a matter of common sense, they should be used. But as a matter of law, pedestrians are under no obligation to use them. The police cannot fine you for not using them.
>So that sounds like you absolutely can be compelled by law to use a crossing where one is nearby.
This is only on A-roads, and only under specific circumstances, which local authorities must opt into. It is not a blanket ban on crossing the road, like the "jaywalking" concept is. I have hardly ever run into any such marked restrictions.
>Why? To me it sounds like a law reflecting reality. You could say a pedestrian has the right of way but when a pedestrian tries to occupy the space a bicycle is already or will be within the time that they are unable to safely stop, physics says the pedestrian will lose that fight.
This isn't about the laws of physics, it's about the laws of England. Yes, a pedestrian might end up in the hospital if he jumps out in front of me before I have time to brake. But he won't end up in jail. Why is this so hard to understand? You don't need to make something illegal for people to recognize it's a bad idea.
>It really feels like you have a misunderstanding of what "right of way" means here. This isn't some absolute authority where cyclists may mow down pedestrians in front of them, and cars may mow down cyclists in front of them, and busses may mow down cars and trucks may mow down busses. It's trying to resolve who needs to yield when a collision is likely to occur.
>It really feels like you have a misunderstanding of what "right of way" means here. This isn't some absolute authority where cyclists may mow down pedestrians in front of them, and cars may mow down cyclists in front of them, and busses may mow down cars and trucks may mow down busses. It's trying to resolve who needs to yield when a collision is likely to occur. As a general rule like I said, the person most able to prevent the collision in the first place is given lower right of way. A car already in a lane has right of way over a car trying to merge into the lane.
Priority rules for traffic is a different concept to the hierarchy of road users. The former is about on what the road users are doing, the latter is about what the road users are. We have the similar rules about which vehicles need to give way to others when it comes to merging and turning and so on. But a car will always be a car, no matter what lane it is in, and hence the driver has a greater degree of responsibility in circumstances where conflict with pedestrians is likely.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
Up here in Vancouver we have a Costco that's in the middle of downtown and trivially subway accessible - it also has a parking structure and Costco in particular is a rather difficult shop to do on foot... but grocery stores with a wide variety are still useful to make trips on foot to if you only need niche ingredients and can pick up the bulk of your food at veggie markets and butchers.
>In short, walk or take a tram to your parked car if you need to drive it to the next town.
What does that have to do with what I said?
Without allowing vehicles on roads (and the jaywalking laws that came with it), deliveries to the high-density places where people live , or to city centers, would be limited to what can be drawn on a horse and carriage.
Those laws specifically benefited those people who live without cars.
The high-density car-free life you dream of would never have been possible had your "no-brainer" alternative been adopted - you can't transport that much goods, that quickly, and that often, and that reliably with horses alone.
I have no objection to commercial delivery vehicles, mass transit vehicles or emergency vehicles - I solely object to personal vehicles being assumed to have a right to directly access to every store front in a city. If we shifted out cultural view to looking at these vehicles as borrowing the public space of streets - instead of viewing streets as zones prohibited to pedestrians we'd probably all live longer lives without compromising on our deliveries. You can also look at European cities to see how last-mile deliveries to addresses that aren't on car-width roads are handled with cargo and motor bikes.
> You can also look at European cities to see how last-mile deliveries to addresses that aren't on car-width roads are handled with cargo and motor bikes.
High-density living requires much more cargo space than motorbikes can handle.
Just moving into the area alone requires an automobile (you're not moving 3 beds, 5 couches and everything else on cargo bikes). hundreds of thousands of eggs, loaves of bread and litres of milk alone is delivered in a large high-density metro per day. you aren't going to fit 100k cargo bikes into the train station.
My point is not that we need to keep autos, my point is that the high-density living we have now would not have been possible if automobiles were not allowed on roads.
We're lucky that it was allowed, because it enabled a rate of progress that would never have been possible without it.
Global population wasn't at the scale we have right now either. However, London had several million inhabitants in the late nineteenth century, before any cars were around.
>>>> We all benefited, yourself included, from having those early laws on the books.
then reinforced with
>>> The high-density car-free life you dream of would never have been possible
then reinforced, again, with
>> Because technology like the automobile was not around to support the high-density living that we enjoy now.
I thought I was being clear that I was referring to the dense car-free cities we now enjoy, or we expect to have, not overcrowded and unsanitary slums[1].
So you claiming that a dense car-free city is possible is irrelevant to "the car free city we now enjoy", because the car-free cities we now enjoy does not have millions of people living in overcrowded and unsanitary slums.
> While the city grew wealthy as Britain's holdings expanded, 19th-century London was also a city of poverty, where millions lived in overcrowded and unsanitary slums.
Overcrowding and sanitation are orthogonal problems to delivering goods to millions of people in a city. London for example was unsanitary because we didn't even have an understanding of germ theory at the time. People however didn't starve because no trucks where around to stock the shelves.
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.
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.