“Everybody jaywalks,” said Arthur Pingery, a 27-year-old composer while sitting in Tiny’s Giant Sandwich shop around the corner from one of Manhattan’s three deadliest intersections—Essex and Delancey. “If you waited for every light, it would take forever to get around.” So agreed the press during the city’s last attempt to curb jaywalking, under former Mayor Rudolph Guiliani. The city’s newspapers were replete with dark omens of overflowing corners and millions of lost work hours. But Guiliani was responding to a spate of pedestrian accidents on Queens Boulevard that led the Daily News to brand the wide, fast thoroughfare the “Boulevard of Death.” In response to these deaths, together with the more than 200 pedestrians killed in traffic accidents in the city every year, up went the big signs and out went a bunch of pink summonses. But, well, New-Yorkers just kept jaywalking.

“Jaywalking,” said Michael Smith, a founding member of the pedestrian advocacy group Right of Way, “is a culturally continuous” phenomenon. New York City evolved initially as a pedestrian environment, and although vehicles seemingly have expropriated the streets since then, the underlying culture remains. Furthermore, said Smith, jaywalking isn’t the problem, cars are.

“Jaywalking is very secondary” as a cause for pedestrian accidents, said Smith. “Jaywalking can actually be safer than crossing with the light.” A spin off of the walking and cycling advocacy group Transportation Alternatives—which Smith said had gotten a little too cozy with the local bureaucracy—Right of Way is known also by its more aggressive name Cars Suck! and posits that cars have stolen the streets from pedestrians and cyclists and that every year hundreds of drivers go unprosecuted for killing pedestrians. Indeed, a right of Way report completed in the spring of 1999, which analyzed some 1000 pedestrian deaths between 1994 and 1997, concluded that “aggressive turning through crosswalks is the single biggest known cause of pedestrian deaths.” Pedestrians cross at the same time that cars turn, and people get hit. “Obeying the law is really quite unsafe as it turns out,” Smith said playfully. Perhaps, but to fully parse Smith’s suggestion that jaywalking is safer than crossing at a walk, one would have to look at the relative rather than the absolute numbers of those who jaywalk and get hit, versus those who cross at walks with the light and get hit, a seemingly impossible task (let me know if you find anything.) Nonetheless, Smith said, the germane finding of the report was that the fault of pedestrian accidents lies with the driver almost 90 percent of the time.

Unfortunately, said Smith, “It’s a zero-sum game.” The only way to reduce the number of accidents and their fatality rate, he said, is to reduce the speed of vehicles—a politically impossible solution. Keith Kalb, a spokesperson for the NYC Department of Transportation, agreed that the problem is somewhat inexorable. “There will always be a conflict of interest between pedestrian and automobile traffic.”

The city rarely enforces jaywalking laws because as a community affairs officer from the 32nd precinct in Harlem said, it isn’t that big a deal. “It’s just such a small offense.” Nonetheless, community affairs officer Evans at the 26th precinct on the Upper Westside, citing a larger than average number of pedestrian accidents in December, said that if the numbers remain high, “pretty soon, we’re going to have to enforce” the jaywalking laws. But Smith said that wouldn’t solve anything.

The important variable, he said, is vehicle speed. The relationship between vehicle speed and pedestrian fatality is exponential in nature, meaning that a small increase in speed results in an ever-greater probability of fatality. The city has continuously evolved to be more vehicle friendly—with features such as curved corners, wide streets and oblique intersections that allow for greater vehicle speed, said Smith. As a result, he added, “we’ve painted ourselves into a corner—paved ourselves into a corner, rather.”

Ethan Kent, a product manager at the Project for Public Spaces, a non-profit organization that studies and helps communities design and manage public places, goes so far as to suggest that jaywalking should be the goal—well, when practical at least. “On smaller streets, you almost want to design it so that people can jaywalk.”
User-friendly streets where you’re supposed to jaywalk? Probably not anytime soon, said Michael Smith, but he said if it happens anywhere, it will happen in the Big Apple because New York is still a pedestrian city at its heart, or, uh, core.

In the meantime, some food for thought: Jaywalking is not a crime per se. Several city and state laws, however, do describe a litany of precise jaywalking infractions—all of which are essentially reducible to obstructing traffic. The most severe penalty carries a fine of $100 and 15 days in jail, with each subsequent offense doubling the allowable punishment in some cases. But Tony Diaz, the clerk in charge of the summons division for Manhattan Criminal Court said that such strict penalties are almost never enforced. Try $10, if anything, as was the result for most of the jaywalking summonses issued on Queens Boulevard during the city’s last crackdown. Be careful when crossing the intersections of Essex and Delancey, Park Avenue at East 33rd Street, and 7th Avenue at 145th Street; they were tied for the highest number of pedestrian fatalities in 2003, according to the NYC Department of Transportation.