I take the existence of such signs as strong evidence that the intersection is dangerous. They seem to be added to cover the asses of the city/state/etc., not because they are effective.

Yes, is that even a real question? A pedestrian with a walk signal should be able to cross without looking for traffic. They shouldn't need to anticipate that the car approaching a red light is going to just roll into the crosswalk without stopping.

I don't think pedestrians are generally aware if a street is one-way or not.

While this kind of crossing doesn't seem to make sense for a small town, my own experience of crossing the road with a valid crosslight in the US shows me just how much contempt there is for pedestrians there. In a three-month visit, there was twice I was crossing the road with valid lights and had to stop walking or I'd literally walk into the side of a car cutting me off while turning. There were a fair few lesser experiences, but those two were pretty clear-cut examples of pedestrian contempt.

Traffic lights in combination with a pedestrian crossing proper (a zebra crossing) seem to be rather rare, at least in Europe. Thus most crossing points of pedestrian would, in absence of traffic lights, not give them the right of way, because crossing traffic generally does not have the right of way. Traffic crossing from something other than a street never has the right of way.

So I don't see at all how "lights are in gross contrast to the rights of pedestrians".

You would never finish crossing then. Lots of times there are cars traveling in the lanes that are approaching the intersection, and you have no way of knowing if they are paying attention or not to the traffic lights.

At low speeds, you can eyeball them sufficiently decreasing their speed and confirm they are stopping, but at high speeds, it is impossible to tell.

Pedestrians should not be allowed to walk anywhere they want, but the penalty for an infraction should not be death.

This doesn't make sense. Crossing pedestrians go across the road, so if you are driving on a lane next to the sidewalk, then you could only go in first gear hovering the brakes, because any pedestrian on the sidewalk could start to cross the road in ~one second or less and would have right of way. Basically all streets would be zebra crossings. Obviously not how it works.

These stats are not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to compare injuries per incident: number of vehicle-caused pedestrian injuries per pedestrian crossing vs. number of police-caused injuries per police interaction.

I have seen countless pedestrians walking at their top speed, the moment the walk sign turns green, only to have it turn red before they've cleared the intersection. In many of those situations where I've been driving, I've been honked at for not carelessly running down the elderly or disabled. If every crossing was long enough to permit those folks to cross in time, cities would be deluged with complaints. How many pedestrians in your statistics were physically incapable of crossing in time?

I've been nearly run over by probably a dozen cars in my life, while I've had the right of way in a crossing (my favorite being the time that a cop was looking one way and turning the other, and my timely shout saved my legs). How many pedestrians in your statistics had the right of way?

Every place I’ve lived in the US, the pedestrian’s right of way is maintained as long as they enter the crosswalk before the car does, and the status of the adjoining intersection is immaterial. In California law, there’s legally a crosswalk at every intersection with sidewalks, even if there aren’t any markings on the road. A green signal doesn’t absolve a driver of these responsibilities; just like with a blind corner, drivers must slow down to a speed where they can react appropriately to pedestrians.

Pedestrians are so rare, however, that cars don’t know how to deal with them. I’ve never seen a driver in the US stop for someone who is waiting to enter a crosswalk, only ones that have actually started to cross.

This is only an issue for right turns (on two-way streets, anyway). Recently, walk signs have started illuminating a few seconds before the green light, and I assume it's for more pedestrian visibility. I wouldn't be surprised if the most dangerous thing in this scenario is a right on red while jaywalking. The driver knows they have a red, they look left for oncoming traffic, but not right for jaywalking pedestrians.

Wait, are there states where this is not required?

It's time enough. Unless you are blind, you should look both way before crossing. You shouldn't jaywalk anyway.

Isn't that what a zebra crossing is for? Give pedestrians permanent right of way so they can always go and don't need a light and everyone understands that they need to yield.

Traffic laws can vary by state, but in general pedestrians always have the right-of-way on a crosswalk (except when there's a traffic light).

Whether or not cars will actually stop for you is a different story.

I'd change "don't need to" with "shouldn't have to".

There are a lot of dead pedestrians who didn't look before crossing a street because they knew they had the right of way.

It's just another form of "trust but verify". I know when I'm crossing a busy intersection, even if the cross-traffic has a red light and I have a walk sign, I'm closely watching the on-coming cars to make sure none of them are running the red light. I'm extra vigilant for the people making a right turn on red.

> Which is an indication that jaywalking isn't the real problem here, it's inattentive drivers. How many of the 36 above were similar situations?

Perhaps your signals are different, but in my area a "red walk sign" means "Do Not Walk".

Your comment to me sounds like you're talking about a white walk sign, which would in fact be mostly attributable to inattentive drivers.

But if the sign is red, then while driver inattentiveness may be involved, it's not the primary culprit.

Well she's right; of course you have to stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk. You can't wilfully hit someone and just say 'my right of way' and be all in the clear.

I think in the UK pedestrians actually always have priority, as long as they are travelling in a straight line and you as a driver are making some kind of turn. So for example a road joining another road at a T junction, pedestrians crossing the joining road have priority over cars, regardless of lights or markings.

As a road runner and bike commuter in the before times who's been run over a couple of times, crosswalks are a shit idea that cause far more harm than good, full stop. Fuck crosswalks. This is actually a good example of what the article discusses, because there's only two possible states: one, in which there's little enough traffic that crossing normally is obvious and trivial, and two, where there's enough traffic that no quantity of flashing lights, neon striping, reflectors and such could ever make crossing truly safe. Staying alive on the roads without a death cage requires assuming that anyone in a car can and will ignore any rule at any time, because, eventually, someone will - and if you trusted that little green man to keep you alive, well, whoops. Crosswalks encourage the sort of head-down passivity in inherently dangerous situations that just gets people killed, and the more flashing shit you attach to them the more you alert fatigue drivers into ignoring them.

Crosswalks are similar to speed limits in this context in that they're utterly ineffective but provide an excuse to not actually fix the problem, i.e. build a lot of nonvehicular overpasses/underpasses. The point of criticizing a rules-based approach to traffic safety isn't to encourage some orgy of vehicular homicide, but to move to actually workable solutions involving changing the built environment.

And in my area, anyway, roundabouts are more likely to come with nonvehicular bypass structures than other forms of interchange. I'll take a roundabout + overpass over a traffic light + crosswalk every day of the week. In the most walkable places I've lived, that walkability was delivered not by an obsession with figuring out the precise set of rules or the precise enforcement mechanism needed to finally make it work, but by an acknowledgement that the sort of infrastructure you build is inextricably linked to how people use it. Build a stroad and you'll get pedestrian deaths regardless of the rules you try to layer on top of it. Build a walking bridge and you dodge the problem entirely.