Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Jaywalking

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Jaywalking is a crime. Sort of. But why? Learn all about this weird law today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's even here. Dave's

not knowing even knows where Dave is right now, but Jerry's here and that's good. And this is short stuff about Jay walking. Yeah, Jay. Yeah, I think I want to start this out by saying that our mutual friend who shot Stuff You Should Know TV shows, the DP, Scott Ippolito, when we lived in LA together, he got a Jay walking ticket one day. Man, that is so Scott. And I was like, what? They do that? And he said, they do that. I could see Scott's face when he actually got a ticket and it was sinking in that he was getting a ticket for Jay walking. It's great, great stuff, man. And I think it wasn't even like crossing against the crosswalk sign. I think he literally just crossed the street where he shouldn't have. That cop's like, I don't like your face. Yeah,

he's got a great face too. Supposedly that's the thing too that we'll talk about later that Jay walking is not equitably doled out among the different types of people in the United States, which is sucky. But at the same time, Chuck, we should probably start at the beginning of Jay walking because Jay walking hasn't always been around because cars haven't always been around. And Jay walking doesn't really exist without the context of cars because thanks to a really interesting Vox article that we found, it turns out the automobile industry is behind the creation and criminalization of the concept of Jay walking before it was just, here's the street, you're a pedestrian, which means you basically own the street. Go ahead and cross wherever you want.

Yeah, so shout out to Vox and our old pals from HowStuffWorks.com for this stuff. What I couldn't derive from the Vox article, well, let's just go ahead and say this. The term Jay back then was a name, if you were like a roub or a nudge or a hick, you would be called a Jay a lot of times. It was a name for somebody like that. It was very derogatory. That's my new one. You can call somebody Jay. I like that. But people were called Jay drivers or they were known as Jay driving, but it seemed like Vox had it the other way around and that Jay driving came about after the term Jay walking and I couldn't figure out which it was. I couldn't either, but they were so very close that they were pretty much created almost at the same time, but they were both born,

it seems like, out of this conflict between automotive drivers, car drivers we might call them today, and pedestrians, people who are just walking around because like I was saying before, the street belonged to everybody and there were like horse drawn carriages and all that stuff, but for the most part, people were on foot and the first people who were driving cars were super rich gadflies basically, like F. Scott Fitzgerald types were the ones who were driving automotives at first. There was certainly class resentment out of the gate, but there was also more than anything resentment for people who were just zipping through these streets that were crowded with people, including children playing in the street because that was a normal thing to do.

And so there was a tension almost out of the gate between drivers and pedestrians. Yeah. I mean, the drivers essentially were like, get off the road and the walkers were like, wait a minute, the roads belong to us. And they said, no, that's why we started building sidewalks and the walkers were like, what? You want us to walk over there on that little four foot span when we've lived our whole life in the streets? There's cracks there that I can't step on. The term j-driving, I think it may have been first though, because this was like the 1920s when the automobile really started to come on the scene and started making a legit claim to the streets. And it looks like j-driving was in an actual newspaper in 1905

and the Kansas Junction City Union and the Kansas City Star talked about j-driving. So I think that may have been first. And this was driving on the wrong side of the road. And then initially, j-walking meant just being rude on the sidewalk and like not, I don't know if it was right or left base, but basically walking in a way that wasn't appropriate on the sidewalk. Yeah. That's the how stuff works spiel. If you read that Vox article, it's basically saying that j-walkers were called that for getting in the way of cars. It was a derogatory term for people who didn't know better to stay out of these new awesome cars way. And then in response, people called j- like people driving cars j-drivers because they didn't, it was just a retaliatory term from

what I could tell. So this shall be known henceforth as the great how stuff works fox brawl. Yeah, exactly. 2022. Between j-how stuff works and j-vox. But the long and the short of it is that once this started to be a thing, the automobile industry got involved and their lobby and their money got involved and they got together with local police forces and they started initially like a shame campaign. Yeah. Didn't they to like shame people that were j-walking? Yeah, there's apparently the national automobile chamber of commerce who had the bright idea of creating a free wire service for local journalists where the journalists would send in the details of like a car accident, like a pedestrian hit by a car. And the wire service would send them back a full article.

Go ahead and run it. You can put your name on it if you want. But it would put the onus on the pedestrian. It would talk about how the pedestrian was a dummy for not getting out of the way of the car. It was the pedestrian's fault. And they were like, that was the level of like underhandedness that this campaign was taking. Yeah. And as far as the shame campaign, it was literally on the streets. Like they would advise police officers to shout them down, to blow their whistles at them and like call attention to them. There were like legit, you know, 1940s, 50s style propaganda posters about j-walking that they would put up. And all of a sudden, the pedestrian was, you know, persona non grata in the United States. Yeah. And in very short

order, they started making crosswalks. And then in very short order after that, there were laws that were passed that said, this is where the only place you can cross the street and be within the letter of the law. And as a result, cars came to dominate streets for the first time ever pretty quickly after they were invented and introduced. And I say we take a break and then talk about those laws that kind of came up as a result of that automotive industry lobbying. Let's do it. Well, now when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck. It's stuff you should know. All right. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I hard podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place. Because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird. Fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology. It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, so back in 1925, Herbert Hoover apparently, who was the commerce secretary at the time before he was president, he wrote up a uniform law that guided pedestrian behavior in the hopes that everybody would just adopt this law and it would make sense. But instead a patchwork of not just state laws, but municipal laws arose. So depending on where you are in the country, the law is going to be radically different from somewhere else in the country about whether you're in the right or the wrong for getting hit by that car.

Yeah. I mean, that's still this thing today. Like it depends on what city you're in. And this is, you know, like you said, even sometimes small towns and municipalities, all the way up to big cities. There are like in New York, it's people J walk. That's the only way you can get anywhere in New York is if you just kind of do your own thing. And I've never seen anyone get busted for it. It seems like it's acceptable to do there. In Los Angeles, it's weird to like people will will stop. And if there's no cars coming, they will sit there. They will stand there and wait at a crosswalk, a crosswalk until it turns. It's much less pedestrian friendly than New York is obviously. But depending on where you are, it's either a faux pas to do it or it's downright illegal. If you're talking right of way, it's anybody's guess sometimes who technically legally has the right of way. There's an old saying that the right of way is something you give, not take, especially when you're in a car and someone's walking. I think you should always sort of be nice and defer to the person walking. Right. Don't you think? Yeah, of course. I mean, and the overall, the overall points of this is that if you're driving a car, you're not really in any sort of danger of being harmed yourself if you get in an accident with a pedestrian. But a pedestrian is in a lot of danger for getting hit by a car. And so you as the operator of the car have a responsibility to look out for pedestrians.

And then conversely, you as a pedestrian, just for out of a sense of self preservation, have a responsibility not just walk in front of cars and presume they're going to stop. Yeah, because here's a stat. 3% of traffic incidents involved pedestrians, but 14% of traffic deaths are pedestrians. And I think 70% of those fatalities are outside of intersections, just people crossing the street or whatever, wherever they want. Yeah. So the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration put together a publication called Pedestrian Safety Enforcement Operations and You, Colin, a how to guide, I added the and you part. Okay. They basically, it's instructs cops to just go ahead and cite everybody, cite the driver and the pedestrian if there's any kind of accident, but they recommend really bringing the hammer down on drivers because they're the ones who are going to cause the most damage. So they really need to be taught to be on the lookout for pedestrians, even if the car has the right of way. This How Stuff Works article makes a really great point. Regardless of any local laws of who's right or who's wrong. If you're a driver and you hit a pedestrian, it doesn't matter whether you're in the right or wrong. You just hit somebody and maybe seriously injured or maybe even killed them. And that's a life changing event. So forget the laws. Just look out for pedestrians at all times. Maybe if you actually do hit somebody, you can look into local laws to see what the deal is or have your lawyer do it.

But up to that point, you should be looking out for pedestrians. And if you're a pedestrian, you should never, ever, in a million years, ever be looking at your cell phone when you step off of a curb and cross the street. It is one of the dumbest, most easily avoidable things that you can do. And yet it happens everywhere. Yeah. I mean, there are towns that have, and cities that have, I think, distracted pedestrian laws on the books for stuff just like that, right? Yeah. And I also want to put in two cents for enforcing distracted driver's laws. Like just seeing people driving around, looking at their phone is... That makes me crazy. It makes my blood boil. Like if blood could boil, I would say it literally makes my blood boil. Speeding down the highway, just staring into their lap. Oh my God.

80 miles an hour. It's unbelievable. Or like they'll drop down all of a sudden from 80 to like 60 because they're checking their phone now and they're not really paying attention. But yeah, no matter how you're doing it, it's just wrong, wrong, wrong. You're wrong, you're wrong. Yeah. I used to give a nice little friendly tap at someone in front of me at a red light hadn't gone yet on the horn. Oh, on the horn, I see. Yeah, no, not the bumper. But now when I see the head down and they're on the phone, I just, I lay on it. I don't care. Yeah, I'm with you. I got one more quick story, if I may. Sure.

To illustrate yielding to pedestrians. It was Christmas Eve this year and I was coming down McClendon through the neighborhoods of Atlanta toward Candler Park. And there's kind of a funky pedestrian crossing there that's a little, it's not very intuitive. And there was a legit elderly couple, like maybe in their 80s even, sort of like, should I go? Should I not? And they shouldn't have, but I could tell that they were confused. So I stopped and they started to go and a guy coming from the other direction laid on his horn and was like screaming and pointing up at the sign saying they shouldn't be walking as he went by on Christmas Eve. Oh, yeah. This elderly couple. And he was like, he didn't look like some young jerk. He was like some middle-aged guy. I think he had a normal middle-aged passenger. Oh, you gotta look out for them. Yeah, they're the worst actually. Yeah, those are the ones you have to look out for the most.

Oh, it just made me so mad. I couldn't believe that this guy just blew through there. Like what it would have cost him to just let this whole couple pass. I know. And you see that so much. Everybody's so keyed up these days, but it seems like middle-aged dudes are the most keyed up of all over the slightest stuff, you know? It's a time to be keyed up, which also means it's a time to be kinder than ever, you know? Yeah, that's good advice, Chuck. Alrighty, I'm done. Half the soapbox. I've got one more thing. Apparently, there was a 2012 study that looked at how jaywalking is enforced among races. And depending on the town you're in, you are much likelier to be cited for jaywalking if you're a person of color. Champaign Urbana, Illinois is the one that's usually trotted out as the shameful poster child for this.

But the 89% of people back in 2012 who were cited for jaywalking were black, despite only 12.4% of the population of Champaign Urbana, Illinois being black. For shame. And it's not just them. This happens in towns all over the country, but it's bad enough to get a ticket for jaywalking. But if it's not being doled out evenly, then that is even worse, you know? Agreed. Be careful out there. Be nice to people. That's all I got. I think that's good. Well, then that means everybody's short stuff is out.