Below is a remarkable newspaper article that appeared in my newspaper (the
Arizona Republic) a couple of days ago.
While it displays a decidely pro-car bent I still thought it was
encouraging.
The startling thing (to me) was that the powers-that-be actually admitted
that the years of strict jaywalking enforcement had no effect on ped
safety -- but that new-improved stategy has measurable (didn't quantify)
improved ped safety.

Ed
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Seattle goes soft on jaywalkers: Police more lenient, write fewer tickets

Tom Boyer
Seattle Times
Feb. 03, 2001

SEATTLE - Seattle's legendarily law-abiding pedestrians, waiting obediently
in the rain for the "walk" signal, have become almost as much of a sight for
gawking tourists as the flying salmon at Pike Place Market.

The city is known for uncompromising pedestrian enforcement, once operating
a "jaywalking school" for violators. But over the past 15 years, Seattle has
gone softer on jaywalking.

In 1987, police wrote 7,000 jaywalking citations; last year they wrote
1,200. And nearly a quarter of those were generated by one officer,
motorcycle Patrolman Eric Smith.

Arlene Jelliffe of Kent, Wash., on her way to jury duty, ran into Smith,
almost literally.

"I happened to cross the street in front of him, and he was waiting at the
light," she said.

She was given a $38 ticket.

Smith doesn't have it in for pedestrians. His assignment is to keep traffic
moving along at rush hour, when hundreds of buses arrive to unload
passengers.

The way Smith sees it, jaywalkers contribute mightily to congestion when
they walk at the "Don't Walk" sign.

"That's the car's time to turn," he said. "When they walk against the 'Don't
Walk,' that is one of the worst cases of jaywalking, because it's preventing
the cars from turning, so the cars block the intersections."

Misbehaving pedestrians can shut down two lanes of a three-lane artery,
slowing buses by the dozens, because cars in both side lanes are stuck
trying to turn.

Smith's 298 tickets notwithstanding, jaywalkers can get away with a lot more
than they used to in Seattle. As recently as the 1970s, each officer
assigned to traffic duty was encouraged to write three or four jaywalking
tickets per shift. Now that's the number for the entire city on an average
day.

John Moffat, former head of traffic enforcement for Seattle police and now
director of the state Traffic Safety Commission, estimates that Seattle
police wrote a half-million jaywalking tickets from the 1930s through the
1980s. That, more than anything else, is where Seattle got its reputation,
he says.

Retired Seattle Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons still remembers looking out
the window of his hotel room when he arrived in Seattle in 1979.

"I woke up at about 4 in the morning," he said. "I looked out the window and
it was raining, and there weren't any cars coming as far as I could see, but
there were three guys down at the corner waiting for the light to change,
and I said, 'This is a very special town.' "

The late 1980s, however, brought a jaywalking reformation: Extra traffic
patrols assigned to a transit-tunnel construction area produced so many
tickets that complaints poured into City Hall. The city's no-tolerance
policy for jaywalkers became a political headache.

Moffat, then head of traffic enforcement, was told to examine the policy and
see whether it could be justified on the grounds that it saved lives. The
answer, he found out, was no.

Pedestrians hit by cars tend to come from three high-risk groups - children,
the elderly and drunk people - and jaywalkers don't fit any of those groups.

So Moffat, after consulting with safety experts at Harborview Medical
Center, instructed his officers to write fewer jaywalking tickets, and try
to match them with an equal number of tickets to motorists for
pedestrian-endangering offenses, such as blocking crosswalks. Result:
Jaywalking tickets fell, as did pedestrian deaths.

The man who oversees jaywalking enforcement now, Lt. Mark Kuehn, says police
are writing jaywalking tickets primarily along streets where traffic flow is
essential.

But he says officers will still pay attention to certain types of flagrant
jaywalking, including people jumping out from between parked cars or
directly into traffic, and "lone rangers" who cross against a signal when
others are waiting