Apparently, Purdue University is trying out crossing guards.

[conuly]

The article is accompanied by four related articles on pedestrians being struck by cars there.

Now, I picked this up at FRK, where the attitude was "OMG, we're even babying grown-ups in college now, it's bad parenting!" and that might be the case. However, if I were to make a view from JUST this article (and I'm about to do that, though it's a very short and uninformative article and I'm aware I don't have all the facts) my view would be different.

Let's look at two quotes:

"When I was in undergrad and we didn't have the yield sign, it was pretty obvious you don't take the right of way from cars."

and

"I think they are needed because people walk through and they won't pay attention," said student Megan Collins.

Now, here's an interesting thing. I took the time to actually look up Indiana's laws regarding pedestrians, and as near as I can tell, pedestrians have the right of way at all crosswalks unless they, you know, take a running jump at a moving vehicle or something.

If the situation is such that many people (as indicated by the comments) think that travel belongs to drivers, and that the responsibility for paying attention is ONLY on pedestrians, the problem is bigger than "Some people, when walking, are texting or listening to music". (Which is not to say that when walking along you should be totally unaware, that's absurd, just that there's something screwy about a system that doesn't put people at the center.)

Comments

[mc776]

The way I was brought up, I've pretty much been trained to understand intellectually* that people on foot have right of way, but act as though the drivers did. It seems to make sense to me, since have much less freedom to turn or suddenly stop and so are more predictable and the pedestrian has the easier time between the two of them to make the ultimate decision, but if anything happens the pedestrian has much more to lose so the driver should bear more responsibility.

*based entirely on hearsay - I must admit I've never read a statute in my life that spelled out who had right of way.