Author's Note: as usual, the opinions below are my own, and have not been ratified or endorsed by the CART Board of Directors.

In my part-time job as a traffic cycling instructor, I give students the facts and data on the strengths and weaknesses of each bicycling technique. The class examines riding techniques from three angles:

1. Legality - doing what the law says is a plus, because then if something happens you have a legal remedy.
2. Safety - legality is one thing, but if the law tells you to do unsafe things, you don't want to be 'dead right'.
3. Mobility - travel is to achieve some destination, and the faster you can move, the more destinations you can reach.

Fortunately, all three of these factors all point to a single riding technique, which is called variously 'vehicular cycling', 'integrated cycling', and 'bike like you're a car'. Vehicular cycling is a set of behaviors including using turn lanes appropriate for their destinations, signaling and scanning prior to lane changes, passing slower traffic only on the left, obeying traffic signals, and so on.

Vehicular cycling's primary competitor is 'riding on the sidewalk' or 'fast ped'. Inside Louisville its illegal for adults (except police). It is demonstrably less safe because the bike is harder for motorists to see, and it is slow because the sidewalks are not designed for bicycle speeds. We lay all the reasons for this before the students, give them plenty of crash statistics to chew on, and most of them reach the following conclusion: the legal behavior is also the smartest choice.

We have good bicycle laws.

But when you begin to look at behavior when you're on foot, the decision is not clear cut. Legally speaking, the only way to cross a street is at a crosswalk (KRS 189.570 subsection (6)(c)). This is important for three reasons:

1. Getting a ticket for jaywalking is a pain.
2. Getting your hospital bills paid by the driver when you get hit anyway is nice.
3. The legislature might be wiser than you or I.

Against crosswalk use are two other factors.

The first is Mobility - walking however far to an intersection or crosswalk, pressing a crosswalk button, waiting up to three minutes for the light to let you across, all that burns precious time when you could be making progress. Slower net walking speed means fewer destinations are reachable in a given time. Because we live on a 2-d map, destinations are proportional to walking speed squared, so speed matters a lot. Secondly, using crosswalks decreases the mobility of other road users. Those annoying crosswalk buttons are there to hold the light green longer for you, and they assume you can only walk at the speed of the slowest walker. If you're faster than that, you're stealing green time from motorists going the other way. You're slowing them down, forcing them to idle their engines, gives us asthma, give our unborn children birth defects, etc etc etc. Pressing that button, unless you really really need it, is bad for the common good.

The second factor is safety. Crosswalks are not actually safer. Source 1. Source 2. Source 3. Source 4 = call up the city and ask for a crosswalk in an obvious location, like at an all-way stop leading to a park. They'll return your call and politely explain that they'd love to put it in, but that it would increase danger at the instersection, because it would make walkers overconfident and underattentive. This makes intuitive sense too. Crossing streets at intersections - where most crosswalks live - requires you to divide your attention between four directions. Crossing mid-block requires only attention in two directions.

Meanwhile, mobility for jaywalking is good for everyone. You first yield to all vehicles - possibly while continuing downstream, then you sieze that unused roadway capacity to get across without ever stopping. Vehicle operators don't get stuck behind extra-long red cycles from pressing the walk button, and you're moving the whole time.

Jaywalking makes walking faster, and thus more competitive with other modes. Of course right now walking's main competitor is motoring. When you compare health and environmental impacts of these two modes, its pretty clear which mode we want to encourage. By taking a tolerant view of jaywalking - or better yet repealing KRS 189.570 subsection (6)(c) entirely, we'd be taking a step in the right direction. On balance civil disobedience is called for against a stupid law. And its no wonder that this law is commonly flouted.

These factors make jaywalking attractive to many people. Make your choice, and I'll see you out on the street!