I think there may be a misunderstanding. The concept of jaywalking is nuts to me, and many Europeans. The USA has made it illegal to… walk? In the Netherlands, we don’t even have a word for this. It’s just walking. Traffic participation while not in a car.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a documentary. Ignore the cartoons. Oil companies bought up and paved over our trolleys in the 1920s and invented jaywalking to prioritize cars. It was a way to punish and imprison poor people, and likely, considering the rest of the history of this country, was predominantly enforced on people of color
Absolutely, oil and car companies. And they were behind the push for highway bypasses (conveniently running through immigrant and PoC neighborhoods) and suburbs (many of them redlined and outright racial exclusionary.
Surely there’s some sort of “you can’t just jump out in the middle of traffic” law though? That’s basically what our jaywalking laws “do” (in the limited cases where they’re enforced).
There are of course the exceptions where someone gets a bit power trippy.
There’s just a general “don’t do absurdly dangerous traffic things” law that regulates that you can’t skateboard on the highway and such. Do people need a law to tell them that they can’t throw themselves into traffic? And does it work?
I think there may be a misunderstanding. The concept of jaywalking is nuts to me, and many Europeans. The USA has made it illegal to… walk? In the Netherlands, we don’t even have a word for this. It’s just walking. Traffic participation while not in a car.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a documentary. Ignore the cartoons. Oil companies bought up and paved over our trolleys in the 1920s and invented jaywalking to prioritize cars. It was a way to punish and imprison poor people, and likely, considering the rest of the history of this country, was predominantly enforced on people of color
Absolutely, oil and car companies. And they were behind the push for highway bypasses (conveniently running through immigrant and PoC neighborhoods) and suburbs (many of them redlined and outright racial exclusionary.
Surely there’s some sort of “you can’t just jump out in the middle of traffic” law though? That’s basically what our jaywalking laws “do” (in the limited cases where they’re enforced).
There are of course the exceptions where someone gets a bit power trippy.
There’s just a general “don’t do absurdly dangerous traffic things” law that regulates that you can’t skateboard on the highway and such. Do people need a law to tell them that they can’t throw themselves into traffic? And does it work?