The Case for Legalizing Jaywalking

Bans hurt poor people and people of color. Cities and states are catching on.

Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

You don’t have to look far to find people who have been ticketed for jaywalking in American cities. Two of my colleagues eagerly shared their stories of being hit with fines during their morning commutes to Mother Jones’ offices. In 2012, when she was an assistant editor, investigations editor Hannah Levintova was fined $200 for “violating the walk signal” in San Francisco. Four years later, crack senior reporter Dan Friedman was jogging across the intersection of 16th and M Streets in Washington, DC, when a police officer ticketed him for violating a “Don’t Walk” signal. (In his defense, Dan insists that the light was yellow.)

If you regularly walk in any American city, you, too, probably have crossed a street against the signal or outside of a designated crosswalk. Sure, one could argue that crosswalks were created as a way to protect pedestrians from potentially dangerous automobiles. But why would transgressing those limits become a petty crime? Thanks to a century-old automobile industry campaign to push pedestrians out of the streets, jaywalking is now, in most places, punishable by a hefty ticket ranging from $68 in Seattle to as much as $250 in New York City.

This could be consigned to the realm of being merely annoying, but in fact, there’s a serious injustice embedded in the process. According to research in several cities, policing pedestrian behavior disproportionately affects low-income people and people of color. Plus, making jaywalking an offense doesn’t keep people safe. Now, a growing number of cities and states are striking these antiquated statutes from their books.

In September, the governor of California—whose biggest city, Los Angeles, is notorious for doling out jaywalking tickets—signed a law putting an end to the practice of ticketing jaywalkers. Last month, a bill to repeal jaywalking laws was introduced in Washington state. And last week, the Denver City Council voted to decriminalize jaywalking in Colorado’s capital.

The notion that pedestrians should be relegated to sidewalks and allowed to cross the street only when a walk sign tells them it’s safe is a relatively new phenomenon. As Peter Norton, an associate professor of history in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, wrote in his 2007 article “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” groups ranging from the Chicago Motor Club and the Automobile Club of Southern California to the National Safety Council and the Boy Scouts began using the word “jaywalker” in the late 1910s and early 1920s to insult pedestrians who had the audacity to enter the roadway outside of intersections. The then-common prefix “jay-,” which meant “hick” or “rube,” implied that people who did such a thing were ignorant countryfolk who didn’t know how to act in a city. As cars increasingly gained dominance, Los Angeles passed the first anti-jaywalking ordinance in 1925, which became a model for other cities across the country. Discrimination soon followed.

“Even long before the automobile, there’s a history of laws that were written without ever mentioning race, but which empowered authorities to exercise a kind of racial enforcement,” Norton explains, citing vagrancy laws in the period after the Civil War as an example. “Jaywalking is that kind [of law] in the sense that basically everybody who walks anywhere ends up at some point crossing a street in a convenient way.”

Now, data from cities across the country show that Black people are routinely cited for jaywalking at higher rates than white people, making their simple act of crossing the street grounds for potentially dangerous police interactions. In 2017, a sweeping investigation by ProPublica and the Florida Times-Union (republished with permission on Mother Jones) found that Black people received 55 percent of pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, despite comprising just 29 percent of the city’s population. Those tickets were also overwhelmingly focused on residents of poor neighborhoods.

The Jacksonville sheriff’s office admitted that enforcement of rules against crossing on a yellow light, crossing outside the crosswalk, or “failing to cross a street at a right angle” were often an excuse to “stop suspicious people and question them for guns and or drugs.” Critics of jaywalking laws say that that’s part of the problem. Ethan Campbell, a research partner of the Transportation Choices Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington state, compares anti-jaywalking laws to bicycle helmet requirements in that they offered a pretense for law enforcement to selectively police people in a “stop-and-frisk style approach.” 

Campbell has been examining dispatch logs and police reports of all sorts of jaywalking stops in Washington state, including those that resulted in warnings rather than citations. He says that he was aware of dozens of jaywalking stops that resulted in the use of force by police officers. “We know that every police contact resulting from a jaywalking stop is potentially putting someone’s life in danger,” he says.

Jaywalking laws also explicitly target “a large fraction of the population” who can’t afford a car, Norton says. “Given that fact, any jaywalking law that’s enforced is already privileging the relatively well-off class.” In addition to punishing economically vulnerable people with fines, jaywalking laws encourage car ownership, whose upfront, insurance, and maintenance costs can further impoverish people already living on limited incomes, Norton says.

Nor would the repeal of jaywalking laws give pedestrians carte blanche to dart into the street. California Gov. Gavin Newson vetoed an initial version of the state’s “Free to Walk Act,” and signed it only once it stipulated that pedestrians could jaywalk when it was safe to do so. Campbell thinks that decriminalizing jaywalking is unlikely to change pedestrian behavior and notes that people have continued to wear bike helmets in Washington even after his county repealed its law requiring them.

Instead of relying on jaywalking laws to keep pedestrians safe, advocates argue for changes to road design. The neighborhoods where police frequently target jaywalkers are often characterized by “pedestrian-hostile infrastructure,” Campbell notes, with long distances between crosswalks and traffic signals that prioritize cars. He adds that a number of other options exist, from narrower streets and speed bumps to slow cars down, to curb extensions to reduce crossing distance, and refuge islands and flashing beacons to make street crossing safer. Norton suggests relaxing zoning rules so that community destinations like grocery stores can be accessible on foot to people in residential neighborhoods.

While Norton acknowledges that the latest legislative changes alone will not end car culture, and that most people in the country are not sympathetic to people walking outside of crosswalks, he’s heartened by the trend of overturning jaywalking laws. “The trend had been going the other way for so long,” he says, “that I feared that people had forgotten that walking is normal.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate