Jaywalking

I could not help but observe when travelling around the world how people in different nations treat jaywalking. Furthermore, their attitude to jaywalking says a lot about their willingness to unorganize. Jaywalking is the practice of walking across a road when the "DO NOT WALK" sign is lit. Jaywalkers either do not wait for the green man at a crossing or do not bother to navigate themselves to a crossing but cross roads anywhere and any time that it is convenient.

It seems to be that the greater the propensity to jaywalk, the greater the willingness of that person to support unorganization- jaywalkers are your change agents, your branders, your impatient creators. As such, I tend of course to support jaywalking. After all, why should a person wait around at the beck and call of the system, when there is an opportunity for that person to move on and get on without slowing down or adversely affecting themselves or anyone else- people travelling by foot or vehicle?

I spent a year in Germany during my studies, and there, jaywalking is strictly forbidden. I remember once coming out of an "Imbiss", a caf', eating some chips. I crossed one half of the road and carried on over a central island to cross the other half of the road. Meanwhile, a police car had come up the road and the policemen inside used a megaphone or loudspeaker attached to the patrol vehicle’s roof to reprimand me against jaywalking! I was so shocked by the sudden burst of loud noise that I spilled my chips all over the road!

I noticed the same sorts of negative attitudes towards jaywalking whilst over in Japan. I took great pleasure in being the "stupid foreigner" who walked straight out across the empty roads whilst the local people stood and waited for the lights to change in their favor. I was hoping to prompt a few open-minded people to rethink the received "wisdom" that jaywalking is bad that their society had ingrained in them. When I did see some young people jaywalking in Shibuya, the youth district of Tokyo, there was an audible gesture of displeasure from some old women waiting at the crossing.

In other countries such as the US and the UK, in particular in the cities, jaywalking is not just practiced, but you regularly see people jump out in front of vehicles (and vehicles jump out in front of vehicles) unprompted. In the US, pedestrians have no choice but to jaywalk: there are few designated paths because everyone drives everywhere- even the bank teller machines are drive-thru- you pull up alongside and insert your bankcard!

Other countries such as Norway seem to tow the middle way between the manic denial of jaywalking in Japan and Germany and its manic acceptance in the US and UK. In Norway, jaywalking is an accepted practice- people cross the street when they consider there to be a viable and safe gap in the traffic. In fact, Norway is probably the only place in the world that I have yet come across where motorists voluntarily slow down to let pedestrians cross the road.

I am not sure however that you can draw too strong a conclusion from observing how people jaywalk and their willingness to unorganize. After all, I recently flew from Oslo to London in a flight filled with predominately Norwegian people. And I was stunned to see every single one of them concentrating hard on the airplane safety instructions- and this was a video and not a beautiful steward/ stewardess! Now there’s an interesting indicator of unorganization……!

 

Author: Simon Buckingham

What do you think?

To make a comment to the author, send e-mail to simon@unorgan.com