California legalizes Jaywalking

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– News covered by Quincy Quarry News with commentary added

What the ….?
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With the New Year come new laws and at first blush a new California law legalizing jaywalking will surely cause at least some to scratch their heads over what looks to be yet another loopy story out of California.

There are, however, rationales as well as precedents for this new law in California.

For example, asserts California State Assembly member Phil Ting, (Democrat, San Francisco) there has long been a walking while black discrimination factor as regards the issuance of jaywalking citations.

“Everybody has the freedom to walk across the street without being worried about being cited or being stopped,  We see that African-Americans are five times more likely to get cited than other individuals.”

Texting drivers are distracted drivers
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Additionally, there are data which suggest so-called “safe jaywalking” and which this new California law was so drafted to facilitate is a viable, however counterintuitive, practice.

Granted, while there are no unarguably definitive studies that endorse safe jaywalking, what research is available strongly suggests as much.

All too often, pedestrians put themselves in danger if they wait for a walk signal instead of crossing the street whenever and wherever it looks to be the safest time and place to cross.

User unfriendly user instructions
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Quincy Quarry’s traffic expert agrees with these sentiments as well as offers up a local example in support of these sentiments: the HAWK Traffic Signal System signaled crosswalks in front of Presidents Place as well as roughly between Craig’s Cafe and the Church of the Presidents.

Anyone who has used these crosswalks has surely found that many drivers do not appear to abide by their HAWK traffic signals and so making crossing the street at these crosswalks into a dangerous amalgam of Frogger and being a target at an amusement park shooting gallery.

Further, such concerns as well as others have been the case elsewhere.

Additionally, one cannot help but suspect that the traffic light signalization along the Hancock Street/Washington Street/Temple Street corridor is programmed in such fashion so as to even further put pedestrians at risk by m*ssholes behind the wheel. 

As such, arguably the best pedestrian safety practice is to only cross a street when things look to be safe rather than strictly abide by the HAWK Traffic Signals or regular traffic signals.

That and stare down m*sshole drivers whenever appropriate.

In other words, all but always.

Not that doing so is likely to mitigate m*sshole drivers’ behavior all that much.

Quincy Police Department headquarters
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And finally, one should keep it in mind that not only has the Commonwealth of Massachusetts long limited the maximum fine for jaywalking to no more than a dollar for first time offenders and no more than two dollars for serial offenders, to the best of Quincy Quarry’s understanding the Quincy police officers are not know for issuing jaywalking tickets.

Then again, neither are local police officers known for issuing traffic tickets for moving violations.

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