How To Jaywalk

I think we all have to learn at somepoint.

Disclaimer - if you believe that jaywalking is inherently bad behaviour. Kill yourself, that's how darwin would have wanted it.

Jaywalking is impressivly statistically much safer than crossing at a pedestrian crossing.

And to ease into today's lesson let's start with the pedestrian crossing and how to cross it.

1. wait for the green man.
2. look out for oncoming traffic.

How not to cross it is to follow the 1 step process.

1. wait for the green man.

Which is why more people die crossing at the designated place than jaywalking. People run red lights, check their mobile phone sms, or just want to kill somebody.

Now let's move onto how to jaywalk:

1. look out for oncoming traffic.

It is much less confusing than the traffic light cycle, because instead of trusting everyone to obey flashing lights and know the road rules and be sober and keep their eyes on the road and have their cars serviced and not be riding a fixed gear brakeless bicycle...
...you simply trust nobody. Well you do trust space that appears to be devoid of solid matter travelling at a given velocity, the laws of physics have proved pretty trustworthy since they were discovered in the late 60's shortly after LSD.

That said, this wouldn't be (and admittedly isn't) much of a post if I didn't also point out that there is an incorrect way to jaywalk.

Namely it is to walk out onto the street trusting cars to slow down and stop and wait for you to get the fuck out of their way because they are decent human beings that don't want your idiotic death on their conscious.

Why this is so popular I don't know, I have a theory though that it has something to do with the release of 'Back to the Future II' where Marty's son in the future keeps crossing the street and when cars stop and honk at him yells out 'I'm walking here! I'm walking here!' which seems like a cool thing to yell out since its so annoyingly obvious.

But none of the bad jaywalkers ever yell this out, so I remain perplexed.

That said, sometimes when jaywalking it may be advisable to cross halfway across the street before the next lot of traffic arrives and stand between the lanes for the other side of the street to clear and the drivers in the far lane slow right down like you are going to suicidally leap in front of them.

These drivers I feel don't give the average jaywalker enough credit. And the whole thing slows everyone down. This method of jaywalking is a lot like frogger, its usually slow moving and deceptively safe. That said unlike the frog in frogger, a person standing upright generally does fit safely between the lanes, so if you see such a jaywalker slow down to be confident to stop, but maybe just enough so you clip them at 5km or so if necessary, no reason to let the fuckers off easy if they do turn suicidally stupid.

Remember all, the good jaywalker is the unseen jaywalker!*

*and by that I don't mean jump out from between two SUV's parked by the side of the road into oncoming traffic. I mean cross when there's no traffic to be bothered by you.