EMILY FENG, HOST:
This scenario might sound familiar. You want to cross the street, but the crosswalk feels far away. So you just look both ways, and you go for it. You jaywalk. Some of us may feel like jaywalking is a pretty minor offense, but it is illegal in a lot of American cities, and it can get you a costly ticket. KCUR's podcast A People's History of Kansas City has been diving deep on America's jaywalking laws in a new two-part series. And the reporter of this series, Mackenzie Martin, joins us now. Hi.
MACKENZIE MARTIN, BYLINE: Hey. Thanks for having me.
FENG: So, Mackenzie, you gave me my favorite fact this week, which is, you explain in this series how Kansas City is where the term jaywalking originated.
MARTIN: Yes. And the important part of that word, I should say, is jay, which was actually a Midwestern slang word that, in essence, meant idiot and...
FENG: (Laughter).
MARTIN: ...Immediately turned any noun into a 19th century insult. That's according to University of Virginia history professor Peter Norton. So he says that jaydriver (ph) might have been used as a derogatory word for, like, a farmer blocking the road with his wagon, while a jaywalker might have been someone stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to stare into a store window.
FENG: Burn. But I can imagine jaywalking might have been more treacherous, maybe, back at the turn of the 20th century.
MARTIN: Yes, definitely. You had to be very careful because back then, there weren't really any traffic lights or traffic lanes. So streets were governed sort of like a public park. You're welcome to walk or bike. But if someone is coming at you, you will have to adjust, which worked well when everyone was moving slowly, but it got a lot more complicated as cars joined the fray. If there was a traffic dispute, it was enforced by the police officer on the corner. And more often than not, it was the pedestrians who triumphed.
PETER NORTON: The sort of mainstream view was that the responsibility is all on the people who choose to operate a dangerous machine.
MARTIN: So that's Peter Norton, the history professor from the University of Virginia that I mentioned earlier. He wrote a book called "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn Of The Motor Age In The American City."
FENG: That's really interesting. Drivers and pedestrians, they just had to figure it out. There weren't really rules. How did that change? Most cities now are kind of car dominated.
MARTIN: Yes, this is very much the case, and it has a little to do with that term jaywalker. In 1911, Kansas City implemented this path-breaking new ordinance that prohibited pedestrians from jaywalking, which at first mostly referred to cutting corners and, you know, crossing the street diagonally.
FENG: Why were there these new rules in the first place?
MARTIN: Well, as cars were getting more and more popular, we started seeing a lot of death. So in the 1920s, for instance, Norton says motor vehicle accidents caused more than 200,000 deaths in the United States, and many of those killed were actually children. And so part of this new legislation was legitimate concern for the safety of Kansas City. But then in the 1920s, the auto industry kicked off these targeted campaigns that redirected blame from the driver to the walker and even to the child. And a lot of times the auto industry borrowed that term from Kansas City, jaywalker.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: He crosses the street anywhere he likes. In the middle of the block, he just walks into the traffic. And you know what a jay is? Well, besides being a bird, it also means a silly person. And that is just what the jitter-brained jaywalker is.
MARTIN: Simultaneously, similar jaywalking restrictions started popping up all over the country, most famously in Los Angeles. And these laws fueled the nationwide trend to redesign our roads for the car at the expense of everyone else. And many of these laws are still on the books today.
FENG: And what about Kansas City? Is it illegal to jaywalk in Kansas City today?
MARTIN: So it was until relatively recently. In early 2020, the country was consumed with protests after the murder of George Floyd, and Kansas City started looking at laws that contributed to overpolicing. And one of the ones that came up was this jaywalking ordinance. People started asking themselves, like, is this law really making people safer?
MICHAEL KELLEY: Jaywalking laws are less about traffic safety and more about enforcing people's movement, which doesn't actually make them safer in the long run.
MARTIN: That's the voice of Michael Kelley, who was the policy director for local advocacy group BikeWalkKC. And what he found was that even though Black Kansas Citians make up less than 30% of the city's population, they were receiving 65% of the jaywalking tickets. It's a phenomenon that's been reported on for years, but nothing had really changed as a result. So the Kansas City Council decided that they didn't really want this law on the books, and in 2021, Kansas City became the first major city to completely strike its jaywalking ban from its code of ordinances.
KELLEY: In the 20th century, Kansas City was the birthplace for jaywalking as a term and really as a law. And in the 21st century, because of our work, Kansas City is now ground zero for decriminalizing jaywalking as both a term and a law. And I think that's pretty cool.
FENG: Any sign that other cities might follow Kansas City?
MARTIN: Oh, yeah. The state of Virginia actually led the charge by moving jaywalking to a secondary offense several months earlier. And over the last five years, more cities and states have decriminalized it. That includes Nevada, California, Denver and New York City.
FENG: That was Mackenzie Martin, one of the hosts of KCUR's podcast A People's History of Kansas City. The episodes are called "When Jaywalking Became A Crime" and "Reclaiming The Right To Jaywalk." Thank you, Mackenzie.
MARTIN: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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