I was just wondering if anyone on these boards (or frankly anywhere else, for that matter) ever got a ticket for Jaywalking.
I know officially, the police do hand them out. But I have never seen someone get one.
Also, what happens when a little kid does it? Does he get the ticket? Or does his parents?
You can see my confusion too.
Never did. But I worked for decades in the Chicago Loop, where anyone who DOESN’T jaywalk is identifiable as a tourist. Used to travel regularly to Milw for work, where there is (comparatively) NO traffic. The folk I worked with up there assured me that jaywalking tickets were a very real thing. So despite an absence of traffic, I’d walk to the corner and wait there for the light…
I’ve seen lots of friends get them in Los Angeles (around USC). Nowhere else.
I got one when I was in high school. Running across Pacific Coast Hwy was much more expedient than crossing at the corner. I did it every day for months and then one day a cop yelled at me through his megaphone or whatever to stop where I was. He gave me a ticket - I don’t recall how much it was - and my mother had to take me to the municipal building to pay it. IIRC it was the juvenile division.
Not for jaywalking but as a ten year old I got a ticket for running a stop sign on my bike. This was on some residental street with hardly any traffic.
When I told my mom she cried because, she told me, “now you can never be president”. True story.
My son did. He was down south, somewhere in the LA area. He lives in NYC where he says they do it all the time. When he got it he called me to ask what he should do about it. He also managed to slip in a WTF is wrong with you guys in California? I told him to suck it up and pay it, don’t bother trying to fight it, it’s a legit ticket.
He’s coming home for Christmas. I’ll ask him where that happened. If he remembers.
And thank God they do. I don’t drive past USC very often, but I’ve had by far more near-misses near there than anywhere else in LA. Near misses like slamming on brakes while honking and hoping the kid jumps out of the way in time. The confluence of Expo, Figueroa, Flowers, and inattentive college students is deadly. Somehow they don’t realize that “Don’t Walk” likely means some vehicle lane has a green arrow through their crosswalk.
The area with the second most number of jaywalkers is Chinatown.
I did in LA back in 1995. Parked across the street from a museum and instead of walking to the corner to use a cross walk, I just trotted across the street. There was no traffic. I stood on the sidewalk for a couple minutes waiting for my now ex while she used the cross walk before a cop drove up and got me. He saw me from a couple blocks away. Cost me $17 and a stern talking too.
Oh, I just remembered, one of the company founders where I worked got one too, right in downtown Mountain View on Castro Street near Villa Street, if you know the area.
This was in the late 1990s. The company back then (I’m still connected today) was a very tight-knit group, a small Silicon Valley startup where we worked hard and played hard. We also poked fun at each other, didn’t take ourselves too seriously, and at the annual office party the highlight of the annual awards presentations was The Bonehead Award that went to the person who did the dumbest thing that year. Lots of fun — we’re all dressed semi-formally, drinking and laughing and having a good time.
Anyway, some background as to who we were then. Not the dysfunctional, large and diluted group we are now, 22 years later.
When this founder got the jaywalking ticket, he’s swearing up and down the hallways, truly pissed off. This guy is from Rhode Island and he’s got the thick New England accent going with colorful language for the cop who’d written the ticket earlier. And the rest of us, we’re laughing at him, and with him.
The best part about it is that the name of this guy is Jay.
That was a great and unique place to work, that company founded by Joe, Jay, and David. I remain thankful and grateful to them for that. That’s where I met an engineer who became my wife. She is still there. (And that information alone is not sufficient to search for and identify the company.)
I’ve never received a ticket, but I have fairly recently been stopped and reprimanded by a police officer for walking across a street near pedestrian lights. It was not in the US, but in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where I was on vacation. I showed the policeman my Australian passport, and he told me not to do it again.
Got one in LA, decades ago.
I was crossing the street in a small town we live near. A cop yelled out that I was jaywalking and he could ticket me. I rolled my eyes and continued on my way. On my way back to my car, I crossed at the same spot and the cop jogged over and again told me to stop jaywalking. I chuckled and drove off.
I was about 12 when I got a stern talking to from a police officer for walking my bike across the middle of University Avenue in Palo Alto.
That was the last time I ever deliberately jaywalked.
I got one for loitering once and I have seen a couple people written up for jaywalking but this was back in college in the 70s.
They had a crackdown on jaywalking in DC around 1980 or 1981, and I got three jaywalking tickets during the crackdown. The only jaywalking tickets I’ve ever gotten.
One was on the 1600 block of I Street, NW, a one-way street, with no traffic coming for blocks, an absolute zero-risk situation for crossing back in the days before right-on-red. I crossed in the middle of the block, and a cop saw me, and ticketed me.
Circa the 90s, a tattoo artist I knew hitchhiked form Pittsburgh to Georgia to get a tattoo from a popular artist. He spent every cent he had on him, then headed back for Pittsburgh. A cop rousted him and charged him with vagrancy of all things. He served a week in jail, then headed home, bringing lice with him and totally changing his thoughts on the south.
(Sadly, a few months later the Georgian tattoo artist visited Pittsburgh for the local convention, The Meeting of the Marked. My buddy could have skipped the entire ordeal.)
Nowadays, in DC, I am generally crossing streets with traffic cops working. They expect people to jaywalk and will even gesture for them to cross if there is a break in traffic and the pedestrian seems hesitant.
Huh. Didn’t realize LA was notorious for this. The only place I’ve heard of people getting ticketed for jaywalking is Seattle. I have definitely never heard of anyone getting a ticket here in Chicago. It wouldn’t even occur to me to be dissuaded from jaywalking by the presence of a cop (and I’m almost certain I’ve jaywalked in front of police officers multiple times.) It’s such a normal, everyday thing around here.
Maybe not quite what you’re looking for but a lady my mom used to work for got hit by a car while she was jaywalking. Mom’s boss tried to sue the driver of the car but the driver counter-sued saying Mom’s boss was jaywalking and the driver won the case. I think Mom’s boss just had to pay court costs, no monetary award.
I got one inside of the UCLA campus. A cop was there, although I never saw him, and he thought I was trying to show him up.