‘Jay’ was, back then, a word that roughly meant ‘fool’ ‘idiot’ ‘knave’ ‘hill billy’ ‘loud mouth’ … something like that.
It literally means ‘idiot walking’ or ‘walking like an idiot’.
They made cars, and decided to tell us we were (and are) all idiots for doing basically the most human thing there is, walking around an environment, as we have been, for literal 10s of thousands of years.
It was also a slur against Irish people.
Ah, wonderful, hadn’t heard of that, but that is entirely believable.
Not only that, but they tried to restrict movement in an open public space. Which is hilariously bad, because you have the right to freedom of travel. There are restriction on travel even in publicly owned spaces, like government buildings and military bases, etc, and even operating heavy machinery (automobiles) on roads, but it’s hard to argue that we should restrict ambulatory movement in an otherwise open public space, and not have it deemed unconstitutional.
America is so inventive!!
You must have removed that stupid law a long time ago right.
Right?
(In France it’s always the motorists fault versus a pedestrian. ALWAYS.).
The city I used to live in years ago had to install blaring pa systems on all of their city busses to announce turn signals. Yes, u would walk through downtown and hear the ripta bus screaming “left turn, left turn” on repeat because so many pedestrians can’t be bothered to look up from their phone and the city busses kept hitting idiots with zero situational awareness to the point people demand the city do something about it. The best part is that didn’t stop people from walking out in front of busses because half the time they have earphones in and can’t get their face out of their reels on their phones. When you are the slow and vulnerable one you really should be watching out for things that can squash you!
Also the word “accident.” A collision caused by negligence is not an accident.
fun fact : in my industry (firefighting) we have started to move to calling them “mvcs” (mot veh collisions) and not mva (mot veh accidents) for, i assume, that reason. i welcome it!
Driving instructors have been specifically not using the term accident (and calling out students who do use it) for decades where I live.
People would be quite surprised to know how many things like this have happened in the last hundred years from both business and government. If you want an eye opener read Propaganda by Edward Bernays.
The documentary Century of the Self is also educational if you want an overview of Bernays’ life and crimes against humanity. (Adam Curtis is such a good filmmaker.)
Of sauce fame?
Sadly no.
The US is also in an fairly select minority with having laws around where you can cross the road as pedestrian.
Probably because they don’t need laws about people, on foot, traveling. It’s part of the constitution that you have freedom for traveling.
They don’t need extra laws to say that yes, you can travel by foot, in a publicly owned space that doesn’t otherwise have laws restricting or prohibiting access to that space, like a military base or something would have…
Operating heavy machinery (automobiles) in the space is generally regulated, by law, and you need a little document to certify that you call legally operate a motor vehicle on public roads, but beyond that, your freedom of movement is otherwise unhindered.
It very quickly becomes a constitutional argument, so even places with laws on the books about jaywalking, have all largely been nullified by freedom of movement enshrined in the constitution; they’re unlawful, and unable to be enforced in any meaningful way.
Long story short: there aren’t anti-jaywalking laws because they don’t require them. Allowing “jaywalking” is a right allowed for by freedom of movement, which is part of the constitution.
Freedom of movement is freedom of movement between States.
It has nothing to do with walking in the middle of the road.
This is the weirdest version of the sovereign citizen argument I’ve ever heard.
The USA needs the “Verkehrsberuhigter Bereich or Living Street” traffic rule for city center areas packed with restaurants, pubs, and stores. Better yet, close the street to motor vehicles.
The USA has over 19000 sections of road tagged as Living Street in OpenStreetMap. Greater Seattle
Also, the word was “Jay"walking was because being called a” jay" is was an insult. It’s like a slow person if I remember correctly.
“Jay” was a term for a country person who moved to the city. Like “hick” or “yokel”. They called it jaywalking because jays would visit the city and wander across the street without checking for traffic first. Because they weren’t used to the road being busy out in the country. So it became a fairly common thing for traffic to get held up because some yokel casually wandered across the street while looking at billboards and shop signs, instead of looking at the traffic. Thus, jaywalking.
According to wiki, The term jay-walking originated in the United States as a derivation of the phrase Jay-driver, referring to people who drove horse-drawn carriages and automobiles on the wrong side of the road. You are right about the “jay” part which is a derogatory term referring to the stereotype of unsophisticated country people.
I remember asking a cop in my country if it was okay to “jaywalk”. He looked at me like I was fucking stupid and said no ofcourse not, after which I said “ah okay it’s just that I read that it’s illegal in America”. He responded by saying “well this isn’t America is it”.
Kinda goes to show how america centric the Internet is, and how idiotic some of America’s laws are
It makes no sense what you are writing. Was your intend to say “of course it is (okay to jaywalk)”?
Soo … It’s also illegal in your country if I’m understanding your comment correctly?
Not surprised at all. I don’t even need to check it out because I know they deliberately inhibited public transportation to increase profits.
One of the most surprising thing in old timey movies is that streets were truly mixed-use spaces, people walked there, rode horses, sold things from carts, etc. I guess that was possible because horses and horse-drawn carts were slower than cars, plus horses would generally try to avoid crashing into something, even without orders from their rider or driver.
I always thought that a “street” and a “road” were synonyms, until I heard the term “stroad” from Not Just Bikes. It turns out that in modern planning, a street is meant as a paved path intended to provide local access to homes, shops, and other things. A road is supposed to be a way to get from A to B. A “stroad” is a derogatory term to refer to a street that has been combined with a road, so you get high speed traffic that wants to travel through an area next to homes and businesses.
Stroads are the worst of both worlds because you end up with people who just want to get through an area dealing with kids playing, cars turning onto and off the path, other drivers slowing down to spot an address, etc. It also sucks for the locals because the way onto their driveway or school has to deal with large volumes of high-speed traffic.
IMO we’re not going back to horses and carts. High speed movement of people is here to stay. But, we really need to use modes of transport that separate people who are passing through on their way somewhere from people who are exercising, playing sports, shopping, hanging out outside their homes, etc.
The best way to do that is public transit, especially light rail and subways which pack a lot of people into a really efficient people-mover. Subways additionally move the people-mover underground to an area where there’s nobody who isn’t trying to travel. Light rails are easier to build, but they have to share the above-ground with people doing other things. But, at least when they’re on rails the only shared space is the rail, and the pedestrians know that as long as they’re not standing on rails they don’t have to worry about the light rail vehicles.
For North America, giving up cars might be too difficult, at least in the short term. But, it seems like in newly built neighbourhoods, the least they should do is make it so every second “street” is pedestrian / bicycle only. Or, maybe allow local vehicles but with an incredibly low speed limit, less than 10 km/h and a rule that they must yield to pedestrians at all times. That way someone can still pull into their driveway but they’ll only drive half a block on the local street to get there.
This might sound stupid, but basically, go to St Denis in RDR2.
Just… walk around, like a yokel, like a jay, lol.
That, then imagine cars as basically horseless buggies, at basically the same speeds as horses or horse drawn buggies.
Everyone either instinctively slows down, or is mandated to, because people are assumed to be able to amble and meander across the street.
Anyone moving faster than approximately 15mph is basicslly just assumed to be either a criminal or in some kind of emergency.
Its also kind of like boats in a marina… you slow to speeds such that you do not produce a wake.
Having high speed thoroughfares going straight through a downtown is literally insane, stroads are a diabolical abomination, as is the entirety of low density design that places the car as primary, above the human.
What is it, hitch hikers guide to the galaxy, or another of douglas adam’s stories, where alien observers assume automobiles are the dominant form of life on the planet, that humans are just odd parasites that simply tend to enter and exit from them at times?
At this point, I would genuinely prefer the literal horseshit of horses in cities, over the much, much grander scale of horseshit imposed on us by car centric paradigms for personal transport.
Remember that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. The laws of physics do not bend to your feelings, keep that in mind when deciding to cross a busy road.
Oh wow, first time seeing this on Lemmy! Been seeing this exact post on Reddit for over a decade though.
Did you know Snoop Dogg sold weed to Cameron Diaz in high school or Steve Buscemi was a volunteer firefighter on 9/11
Let me tell you something about LOTR and Vigga Mortensen and the kicking of a helmet …
They did surgery on a grape
I suppose commuting and grapes are related.
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Most jaywalking is fine, but there are instances in which it’s legit dangerous.
This is a law that’s only as good as how it’s enforced by the pigs.
To be fair. It is illegal to walk access highways in Europe too. But it’s not a generic law.
But in Europe there are usually pedestrian footpaths to lead you around or over it. In the US walking is simply not considering an option at all.
Also the highway is usually fenced in, making it clear that in this case you’re not supposed to be there.
If it’s an access-limited highway, sure. In the US, a highway is a road, street, or parkway or pedestrian or bicyclist facility; there are broader definitions abroad.
To be fair, sometimes my own negligence combined with bad luck almost got me sandwiched…
