I’m reading my email one insomniac night when I see this Quora question: Why is jaywalking a crime in the US but not in the UK? One lengthy response from a guy named Tom Chambers:
Because jaywalking is a crime invented by the car industry in the early 20th century. It wasn’t the legislative response to an inevitable problem, but essentially a publicity campaign to increase car use in the US.
Prior to jaywalking becoming a popular term and crime, pedestrians were assumed to have the right to the road. If there was an accident, popular opinion and the media would be on the side of the pedestrian and assume the fault of the driver.
The motor industry recognised that this was an impediment to driving and set out to make the street a place for cars not people. They lobbied for various laws to prevent people from crossing other than at a designated point, but people were so against this that it failed to be effectively enforced.
What worked much better was public ridicule.
The American love affair with cars was no accident, confirmed Scientific American. “Schools helped train new generations of children to avoid the streets when the American Automobile Association (AAA) became the top supplier of safety curriculum for U.S. schools in the 1920s,” As a result, there is a deep-seated bias in transportation decision making that can be traced “all the way back to the dawn of the automotive era.”
But the deal wasn’t sealed until 1961, and one can blame, or credit, Groucho Marx:
It was on Sunday night [October 22] when NBC aired a program called “Merrily We Roll Along”—promoted as “the story of America’s love affair with the automobile.” During the show, host Groucho Marx introduced the “love affair” metaphor to millions of viewers, casting cars as “the new girl in town.” To make this love work, Marx explained, Americans were willing to overcome intrusive regulations, endure awful traffic jams, and if necessary, redesign entire cities.
“We don’t always know how to get along with her, but you certainly can’t get along without her,” said Marx. “And if that isn’t marriage, I don’t know what is.”
[The show] was less a story about America’s existing love affair with the car than the invention of that very idea. The show’s sponsor, DuPont, had an obvious interest: it owned 23 percent of General Motors at the time. [It was] a “masterstroke of public relations” manufactured by the car industry to counter the likes of… critics who, at the dawn of the interstate highway era, questioned the wisdom of dedicating every inch of urban street space to personal vehicles.
This perhaps explains why people choose cars, even when mass transit would serve them better. But the American love affair with the motor car may be running on empty, with “baby boomers… giving up the suburbs for communities with more travel choices, [and] younger adults… delaying getting a driver’s license and, when they do, they are not buying cars or using them as much. Instead, they are embracing new forms of ‘collaborative consumption’ – sharing vehicles through car-share and bike-share programmes.”
Personally, I think this is a terrific trend. Now if I can only walk across the street, or ride my bike without possibly getting killed…
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Note: I have been nominated by my buddy Lisa over at Peripheral Perceptions to participate in the Five Photos, Five Stories meme, which simply says I should post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or a short paragraph and each day nominate another blogger for the challenge.
The problem is that almost all my posts are stories and have pictures. So I’m cheating and writing only one new post. And I’m nominating YOU!
