Despite being both dangerous and against the law, jaywalkers are hardly ever punished, writes Patrick Logue
It takes a certain amount of foolhardiness to run across three lanes of oncoming traffic at rush-hour in dark clothing. At best you could get blown out of it by an irate motorist or tackled by an unhappy cyclist. At worst you could be killed or seriously injured but you will probably not be arrested.
If a motorist mounted a footpath and drove slowly through the oncoming crowds and gave the two-fingers to whoever challenged him he would most likely be set upon by an angry mob before being carted off to the nearest Garda station. And rightly so.
But things seem a little unfair from behind the wheel where it can appear that jaywalking is a national pastime that goes unchecked despite it's obvious dangers to all road users.
It's a different story across the Atlantic, where a British professor was recently wrestled to the ground by no fewer than five police officers in the US city of Atlanta after attempting to cross the road in the wrong place.
A distinguished historian from Queen Mary College, University of London, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, was trying to cross the road while attending the conference of the American Historical Association. A man, who later turned out to be a police officer, warned him he was crossing in the wrong place. "I thanked him for his advice and went on," Fernandez-Armesto told the BBC. He was subsequently pinned to the ground by the officers demanding to see his identification and brought to the local police station for eight hours. Charges were later dropped.
But there is little doubt that American authorities take jaywalking seriously. A New Jersey teenager who was hit by a car earlier this month while crossing a road, ended up in a 10-day coma, during which she received a ticket for jaywalking. Sixteen-year-old Ryan Van Brunt later made a full recovery and had the charges dropped.
Most cities in the US and Canada have laws banning jaywalking and it is illegal in many other states around the world including Singapore and Taiwan, where it was made illegal last July.
In the UK, Netherlands and India, however, there are no such laws. The Dutch, naturally, legalised jaywalking in 1997.
In Ireland the law is also very clear. Road traffic regulations state that "a pedestrian shall exercise care and take all reasonable precautions in order to avoid causing danger or inconvenience to traffic and other pedestrians".
The law states that pedestrians must respect red lights at pedestrian crossings and must use footpaths where provided. Pedestrians are prohibited from crossing a road within 15 metres of a pedestrian crossing, without using the crossing.
Fines range from €800 for a first offence, to three months in prison for repeat offenders.
"It is a very serious issue and at the heart of it is the safe cross code: stop, look, listen and live," says Brian Farrell of the Road Safety Authority (RSA).
"You should cross the road at a safe place, we all learned this at school. Pedestrians are carelessly crossing roads. If they got the basics right they wouldn't be getting knocked down and it is all the more important in an urban setting."
It is indeed a serious issue. About one fifth of all road deaths are pedestrians. Last year a total of 74 pedestrians lost their lives on the roads out of a total of 367. A total of 29 of those deaths were people aged between 61 and 80.
So far this year five out of the eight deaths on our roads have been pedestrians.
There is no breakdown between urban and rural for these figures, but they do demonstrate that pedestrians must exercise more caution on the road and be held as accountable as much as careless motorists and other road users are.
A spokesman for the Garda Dublin Traffic Division told The Irish Times that jaywalking was a "daily problem" in the capital for officers on the street: "It's pretty bad really. At every single junction in the city pedestrians don't wait for the green man."
He said pedestrians in other European countries respected the laws and did not generally wander out in traffic.
"It is the exact opposite here. Maybe it's because it's not enforced, maybe it's bad habits, maybe it's impatience, it's hard to tell," he added. "People don't see the dangers they put themselves in. The dangers certainly are there given the volumes of traffic. You have motorcyclists legally filtering up and down through traffic and there are cycling tracks."
But the laws are hard to enforce and certainly not in the way they are hammered home in the US. Unlike that country, gardaí do not have the power to arrest jaywalkers and issue on-the-spot fines. Instead they must rely on the offender stopping voluntarily and giving them the correct name and address. Then a summons must be issued and the matter must proceed through the courts.
The spokesman admitted that penalties issued for jaywalking were at best a "rarity" if, in fact, they ever took place at all.