Be honest? Do you jaywalk when you cross the street?
Well, you’re in good historical company. As early as 1915, the New York Times was already publishing letters from people defending a pedestrian’s right to cross where they pleased.
Cars were on the rise in America, and in the early 20th century, the rules of the road were far less standardized. There weren’t even general drivers licenses in NY until 1918. As more cars flooded the streets, pedestrian deaths were increasing too, which was not a good look for the nascent auto industry. So a group of car companies—collectively called motordom-developed a PR campaign to shift the blame from car drivers, to the pedestrians themselves. At the center of that campaign was one especially effective insult: jaywalker.
It wasn’t the cars fault at all, argued the car companies, instead it was unruly pedestrians walking where they weren’t supposed to.
The idea stuck.
By 1938, New York City was testing a new system that feels totally ordinary today: traffic signals just for pedestrians. The city briefly rolled out a sign that alternately said “Walk” and “Wait” in Times Square. It wasn’t totally effective at first, but after a few years, they finally got the system to stick, at least mostly.
In the 50s, New York put its first official anti jaywalking law on the books, and they started rolling a new set of pedestrian traffic signals citywide that used the now-classic ‘Walk’ and ‘Don’t Walk’ commands to tell pedestrians when to go.
But by the early 2000s, NYC decided to change its signals once again. This time to comply with new federal standards specifying the now-ubiquitous walking figure and hand combination. At the time, this standardization was perceived as a loss of unique NYC character, with the New Yorker referring to it as the “Zurichification of our street corners.”
But if you’ve ever stood on a street corner in New York, you know the walk sign doesn’t mean much anyway.
In the end, the city blinked first: jaywalking was decriminalized in 2024.
What do you think? Should pedestrians still be expected to wait their turn?