Your own source disproves your post title

Wikipedia

While jaywalking is associated with pedestrians today, the earliest references to “jay” behavior in the street were about horse-drawn carriages and automobiles in 1905 Kansas: “jay drivers” who did not drive on the correct side of the street.[1] The term swiftly expanded to pedestrians, and by 1909, The Chanute Daily Tribune warned “The jay walker needs attention as well as the jay driver, and is about as big a nuisance.”

I remember asking a cop in my country if it was okay to “jaywalk”. He looked at me like I was fucking stupid and said no ofcourse not, after which I said “ah okay it’s just that I read that it’s illegal in America”. He responded by saying “well this isn’t America is it”.

Kinda goes to show how america centric the Internet is, and how idiotic some of America’s laws are

The USA needs the “Verkehrsberuhigter Bereich or Living Street” traffic rule for city center areas packed with restaurants, pubs, and stores. Better yet, close the street to motor vehicles.

People would be quite surprised to know how many things like this have happened in the last hundred years from both business and government. If you want an eye opener read Propaganda by Edward Bernays.

Most jaywalking is fine, but there are instances in which it’s legit dangerous.

This is a law that’s only as good as how it’s enforced by the pigs.

One of the most surprising thing in old timey movies is that streets were truly mixed-use spaces, people walked there, rode horses, sold things from carts, etc. I guess that was possible because horses and horse-drawn carts were slower than cars, plus horses would generally try to avoid crashing into something, even without orders from their rider or driver.

I always thought that a “street” and a “road” were synonyms, until I heard the term “stroad” from Not Just Bikes. It turns out that in modern planning, a street is meant as a paved path intended to provide local access to homes, shops, and other things. A road is supposed to be a way to get from A to B. A “stroad” is a derogatory term to refer to a street that has been combined with a road, so you get high speed traffic that wants to travel through an area next to homes and businesses.

Stroads are the worst of both worlds because you end up with people who just want to get through an area dealing with kids playing, cars turning onto and off the path, other drivers slowing down to spot an address, etc. It also sucks for the locals because the way onto their driveway or school has to deal with large volumes of high-speed traffic.

IMO we’re not going back to horses and carts. High speed movement of people is here to stay. But, we really need to use modes of transport that separate people who are passing through on their way somewhere from people who are exercising, playing sports, shopping, hanging out outside their homes, etc.

The best way to do that is public transit, especially light rail and subways which pack a lot of people into a really efficient people-mover. Subways additionally move the people-mover underground to an area where there’s nobody who isn’t trying to travel. Light rails are easier to build, but they have to share the above-ground with people doing other things. But, at least when they’re on rails the only shared space is the rail, and the pedestrians know that as long as they’re not standing on rails they don’t have to worry about the light rail vehicles.

For North America, giving up cars might be too difficult, at least in the short term. But, it seems like in newly built neighbourhoods, the least they should do is make it so every second “street” is pedestrian / bicycle only. Or, maybe allow local vehicles but with an incredibly low speed limit, less than 10 km/h and a rule that they must yield to pedestrians at all times. That way someone can still pull into their driveway but they’ll only drive half a block on the local street to get there.

Also the word “accident.” A collision caused by negligence is not an accident.

Would you like to hear how the auto industry destroyed electric trolleys so GM could sell diesel buses?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

Oh wow, first time seeing this on Lemmy! Been seeing this exact post on Reddit for over a decade though.

Oddly most other countries have laws which protect people not industry.

Ive been told that given the language of the time, it roughly translated to “jackass-walking”

“Carbon footprint”

The real question is : who is Jay?

More than shift blame, but change the nature of streets from supporting all forms of transportation and functioning as third spaces (streets were used for commerce, play, and socializing) to automobile dominated transportation only spaces.