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The inadequacy of the crosswalk law becomes evident when we look at an arterial road on which drivers travel at a speed of 50 mph. or more. White lines painted across the road give us no
protection against drivers who cannot stop in time.
Inadequate scanning and heavy reliance on California's crosswalk law was reported in San Francisco.(4) A law that encourages you to step onto a crosswalk and walk in front of a moving car is outright dangerous. It is no less dangerous to force a car to a sudden stop so that the next runs into it. It is always safer to cross a street after a car has passed than cross in front of it.
WALK ALERT and similar safety programs teach pedestrians to look out and avoid the dangers of relying on their legal right-of-way.
At unmarked crosswalks, pedestrians are said to be more careful than at marked ones and to scan for cars until the road is clear. Studies have shown that up to five times as many pedestrians were
hit on marked crosswalks as on unmarked ones.(5,6)

2. In Figure 2, a left-turner is moving to pass through a gap in oncoming traffic when a pedestrian steps onto the far-side crosswalk. The left-turner stops for the pedestrian, as required by law and, unable to leave the intersection, sits broadside across the path of drivers from the opposite direction. Those drivers are going fast in the belief that no one would get in their way. If an accident happens, the left-turner gets the blame, even though it was the law  that created this dilemma.                   

[Insert Figure 2.]

To escape the dilemma, many left-turners disregards the pedestrians' right-of-way and do not stop. The pedestrians now ask for a traffic signal, which compresses an hour's traffic into half an hour of green time and doubles the chance of a conflicting encounter. Left-turns were found to be four times as hazardous to pedestrians at signalized intersections as right turns.(7)
The highway profession has long known that, contrary to public perception, the traffic signal is not a safety device.(8) As many pedestrians get hit when walking with the red as walking against it.(9) The false sense of security inspired by traffic signals and other controls has been called the greatest hazard of all: whenever the feeling of danger is diminished, the accident risk is increased.(3)  Children should be taught self-reliance rather than depends on mechanical obedience to traffic controls, said a Committee on School Crossings more than half a century ago.(10)
To overcome the danger inherent in the crosswalk law, the UVC and most states forbid walking or running into the path of a vehicle which is so close as to constitute an immediate hazard.(11) In short, pedestrians have a legal right-of-way as long as there is no danger of collision.

3. Figure 3. The most dangerous point to cross a street is at the intersection, where we are exposed to conflicts from four directions, and where drivers are distracted by converging cars. The safest point is in mid-block, where we can spot cars from a distance. Better yet when a refuge island helps us cross in two stages, so that we can deal with one conflict at a time.

[Insert Figure 3.]

However, the Uniform Vehicle Code §11-503(c) and most state codes forbid pedestrians to cross in mid-block between two signalized intersections except in a marked crosswalk. The original purpose was to prevent pedestrians from interfering with vehicles on busy urban streets. It is lawful to walk across a busy six-lane highway outside of a crosswalk and yield to vehicles between two unsignalized intersections or between a signalized and an unsignalized one. But it is illegal to cross a narrow one-way street that has a signal at each end of the block and carries little or no traffic.
These are just a few examples of right-of-way rules the early legislators adopted without testing
for their consequences.

4. The operation of urban major roads on which vehicles travel at high speed is in conflict with  UVC §11-801 and state laws that mandate "safe and appropriate speed when approaching and

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