Jaywalking: a ticketable infraction that starts with my favorite letter. Sure, technically it’s against the law, but we all do it. It’s a fairly innocuous crime. I think many of us regard the entire campus as free pedestrian reign, and cars can simply wait their turn. (As someone with a car, though, being a driver on campus is exactly as frustrating as you think it would be given how much we disregard cars as pedestrians). Pomona is a place for us to go wherever, right?
There are many choice jaywalking locations. Pretty much anywhere across Bonita is fair game to get from places like Frank, Mudd-Blaisdell, Harwood, and Wig to Thatcher, Rembrandt, Oldenborg, and the rest of campus. Crossing Sixth Street I think people are a bit more careful because it’s higher traffic zone for cars, but there are a couple choice spots where crosswalks and corners are very far away and there are sidewalks leading right up to the street on both sides, where hopping right across only makes sense. Plus we all cross at random between the side of College Avenue with Lincoln Edmunds and the side with Walker and Clark V.
One of my favorite jaywalking spots, though, is now no longer jaywalkable and I have to remember to adjust my path accordingly. See, there’s the sidewalk that emerges out of the west side of SCC and goes past Alexander Hall, and then reaches the street (College Avenue). The other side similarly has a sidewalk that goes right up to the street from the Academic Quad. College Avenue is pretty busy, and most of it has thick bushes that prevent jaywalking. But with the sidewalks right there, it was clearly once a path or driveway or something. It was always so easy to just cut across to get to class. But Pomona has now put up bike racks on both sides of the street, which I am guessing are to prevent the very shortcut that I and many others use.
It’s nice to know that Pomona is curbing our liberty putting our safety first. I think, though, especially at a college campus, these major jaywalking spots show that these are areas where people want to, and will, cross regardless of the safety of crossing there. Rather than blocking us off, perhaps it would be useful to prioritize the pedestrian and make the campus more walking friendly. That’s not to say that it is not walking friendly at the moment, because it is, and in the case of the blocked off crosswalk on College Avenue there is an actual crosswalk not twenty feet away. But for the ones on Sixth Street, it might be useful to put a crosswalk where people cross anyway if the goal is to make crossing the street safer.
Then again, ever since I went to South Africa where I’ve seen people cross major boulevards one lane at a time, waiting in the middle for the next lane to clear, I’ve been a lot bolder about crossing the street. I have to say, though, in Cape Town pedestrians don’t exactly have the right of way. In LA jaywalking is very much ticketed, though luckily I don’t think it is here on campus. Hopefully we’ll continue to prioritize pedestrians over cars.
Some articles on the subject:
“Getting a ticket for Jaywalking in LA: Drop it or keep it?”