The Seattle Weekly takes a peek at statistics on pedestrian safety and points out that they may not be entirely accurate.
For one thing, most jaywalkers who get hurt are, in fact, drunk off their ass — “as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration notes, ‘about 25 percent of fatally injured pedestrians have a BAC greater than .20′” — a condition for which there is already another law on the books.
The blog post also references an article in Slate defending jaywalking, which adds to some of the questions we raised here about the illegality of jaywalking.
That Weekly post is like two months old, but I went ahead and commented on it anyway. Aside from extrapolating from data on pedestrian fatalities generally to jaywalking fatalities specifically, even if the data held, in no sense of the word are “most” jaywalkers who are killed drunk.
The study that the author quotes clearly states that in 62.9% of pedestrian fatality accidents, there was no pedestrian alcohol impairment, and in 53.3% of pedestrian fatality accidents, neither the driver nor the pedestrian were impaired by alcohol. Most pedestrians who are killed, and most of the drivers who kill them, are stone-cold sober.
nobody cares