Once again, Seattle Police seem to be targeting jaywalkers and ignoring crosswalk-charging drivers, while collision numbers climb.
By Eric Scigliano
… Another car wheeled off Denny onto Boren and straight in my path. I pivoted and waved madly, and it slammed to a stop a foot or two from my front wheel and 10 feet from the cop. As I reached the far curb, he rolled down his passenger window, leaned over, and told me, “You’re lucky.”
“Lucky?” I replied. “That was a crosswalk!”
“Yeah, he was completely at fault,” the officer said, and drove off before I could ask, “So why didn’t you bust him?”
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The result: More than two-thirds of Seattleite pedestrians killed or fatally injured by vehicles were where they were supposed to be, in crosswalks or even on sidewalks. Just 3 to 4 percent of the people involved in collisions are pedestrians, but 36 percent of those killed or seriously injured are. By contrast, drivers are by definition involved in 100 percent of collisions but compose just 42 percent of the victims. Pardon my saying so, but what would Jesus drive? He’d walk, because then he’d have a chance to die for somebody else’s sins.
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But Seattle’s police have reverted to their old ways — to that familiar 6:1 ratio. In 2010 they issued 1,570 jaywalking tickets, up from 1,274 in 2009, and just 197 failure-to-yield citations, down from 406.
If that approach reduced accidents, it would make more sense. But it didn’t. According to the Seattle Department of Transportation, the number of collisions with pedestrians rose 10 percent in 2010, to 529, even as the total number of collisions fell 11 percent, reflecting a decade-long pattern of decline. In 421 of those pedestrian collisions, the drivers failed to yield in crosswalks.
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Recently, I flagged down another police car that came barreling at me as I crossed Rainier Avenue at night. “Don’t you know that’s a crosswalk, and the pedestrian has the right of way?” I asked.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you have to be out in it!” that officer snarled, and roared away.
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https://crosscut.com/2011/12/13/transportation/21672/Crosswalk-carnage:-Why-do-cops-still-ignore-drivers-who-won-t-yield-/oldId.20111229001511168
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