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TODAY Monday 26 January 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Jaywalking and Jaydriving

Now that Leno and Letterman have had their fill of Rudy Giulliani and his campaign to teach manners to New York pedestrians, let us note that your chance of being killed by a person wielding an automobile or truck in New York City is twice as likely as your chance of being killed by a person wielding gun or knife. 302 pedestrians and bicyclists were killed by strangers behind the wheel in 1997. 150 persons were killed by strangers on foot. Here's the beauty part. Tickets issued by police for moving violations by vehicles declined 32 percent last year.

Ergo: step up enforcement of laws limiting pedestrians.

In a poll taken by the New York Daily News, a sample of New Yorkers -- 60% of whom owned cars -- thought that the first priority for police should be a "crackdown on vehicles blocking intersections and double-parking." Next favorite priority: restricting the use of private cars in Manhattan (be careful; it is illegal to advocate such a step in most jurisdictions). Seven percent of Gothamites ranked pedestrian barricades at the top of their list of things to do, and only three percent urged a crackdown on jaywalkers. The Mayor has embraced the last two steps as his favorites.

Of course New York pedestrians are chronic, gleeful lawbreakers, worse even than the drivers, and I would guess that maybe 151 of those 302 fatalities colluded in their own demise. Just last night I almost ran over two teenagers coolly shuffling through a crosswalk against the light, aristocratically indifferent to bourgeois notions of rule observance. The Mayor is correct that illegal pedestrian tendencies add to driving time, and thus the cost of doing business, in Manhattan. The Mayor is crazy if he thinks that pedestrians slow things down nearly as much as pick-up or drop-off vehicles, from delivery trucks to stretch limos.

The double-parked trucks are fine, so along as they stay out of the crosswalks and don't idle their engines. The limos provide employment for hundreds of immigrant Russian men whose rudeness would otherwise preclude them from gainful employment. And both the illegally-parked trucks and the illegally-parked Town Cars slow down the flow of traffic, which facilitates jaywalking. What the mayor wants -- higher vehicle speeds -- is just what we don't want. True, vehicles in a traffic jam contribute more to air pollution than vehicles going 40 mph, but people walking to work contribute zilch. And if there is a supreme reason to live on this skinny island, it is because it is one of the very few places in America this side of a retirement village where you can lead your life on shoeleather. Wes Jackson always says that kids in New York are much more in tune with the hunter-gatherer history of Homo Sapiens than farmers in Kansas. Save the bipeds; cross on the red.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

"Horrible." So said a site visitor on reading Leonie Haimson's account of head lice. Schoolkids of lots of backgrounds in lots of places are infected by the persistent little buggers to a degree not known to any of us born before 1980. Children today, including Leonie's daughter and classmates, apparently are victimized by the inevitable tendency of pests to cope with pesticides: head lice seem to have adapted to the chemical weapons hurled against them in the past, and parents are having a hard time staying ahead of the curve. A planetary crisis comes home.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

1/23: Good Biotech, Bad Biotech
1/22: No More Roads
1/21: Swordfish
1/20: Electromagnetic Sleuthing
1/16: Good News Way Down Under
1/15: Twenty-Four Forty or Fight!
1/14: Your Tax Dollars at Work
1/13: Johnny Mobil Appleseed
1/12: Superbowl, Scientific Uncertainty, and the Future of Al Gore
1/9: Goodbye, Delaware
1/8: Leaf Blowers, Old Cars, Class Conflict
1/7: The Great Improvement That Didn't
1/6: Proactive, Shmoactive
1/5: Mediocre Landscapes and Hope for the Planet
1/2: The Greatest Environmental Cause of the Year
12/31/97: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.