Invented Crimes for the Automobile Age

Five o’clock on a December afternoon in Bangor might as well be the middle of the night. My friend was one of several people leaving the event and crossing the street to get to their cars. It’s a small one-way side street, speed limit 25 miles per hour.

I had just left the same venue. The car zoomed by me, two blocks down the sidewalk, just as my friend stepped into the street. He had plenty of time to cross. But the driver was going way too fast. It was dark, and there were pedestrians in the immediate area. There was no need for speed.

No one got hurt. But brakes squealed, and my friend yelled, “Slow down!” as anyone would.

An argument ensued. It would have amounted to an apology and maybe an

acknowledgement from the driver, had not a passer-by on foot decided to insert himself into the discussion. Loudly berating my friend, he screamed, “You walked right out in front of him!” and “Use the f---ing crosswalk!” I stopped, unsure which way it was going to go. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.

The most interesting thing about this altercation was the immediate reaction of the observer: to leap to the defense of the speeding driver against the vulnerable person crossing the street on foot. The crosswalk in question is on the next block. The street doesn’t get much traffic on a dark Sunday afternoon in December. But this man was incensed at my friend for getting in the way of a car.

He's not alone in his attitude. The street, the public right-of-way, has been almost completely colonized by motor vehicles and their owners. It didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident.

“Jaywalking" – a word people use today without a second thought – was coined by automotive interests in the 1920s,” say the authors of a new book, Life After Cars.*

Their goal was to shame pedestrians as “jays,” slang for country hicks, implying that they didn’t know how to walk properly in the city, and neatly shifting the blame for pedestrian deaths and injuries from drivers onto the victims. Defining jaywalking as a crime only adds insult to injury.

If jaywalking is a made-up crime for the car culture, what about loitering? I remember a conversation I had with an American friend who had been living in Bulgaria for many years. We were rolling along on a narrow-gauge railroad through the mountains at 25 kilometers per hour, which is even slower that the speed limit on Bangor’s side streets. A girl of about six poked her head out of an open window, enjoying the spring breeze. “People have a lot more personal freedom over here,” he said.

He went on tell me of his last visit to the States and a trip to a beach on a lake. The place was bristling with signs prohibiting various items or behaviors, backed up with threats of prosecution for anyone who disobeyed. Among the violations was “loitering.”

But what is loitering, other than simply hanging around? Loitering is what people throng to public parks and public beaches to do. It’s ridiculous to characterize it as a crime. Can one really be arrested for going nowhere and doing nothing?

The Interstate Highway System, that exclusive government welfare project for motor vehicles, might be the most accurate metaphor for modern American life. We move in isolation from one another, as fast as we can toward somewhere else.

Look at the signage in the picture above. That’s the bus stop at Shaw’s supermarket in Bangor. No bench to sit on. No posted schedule. No protection from the wind. (There is an overhanging roof, for a modicum of protection from the rain.) A warning not to stay too long. No bicycles or skateboards. But you can take both on the bus. Have you ever seen anything so unwelcoming? Everything about this bus stop discourages people from using the bus and pushes them toward cars.

Wait too long for a bus and you’re “loitering.” But would you be harassed and potentially ticketed if you sat for three hours in the parking lot in a car?

Cross the street in the most direct way and you’re “jaywalking.” But driving ten miles an hour, or more, over the speed limit on narrow city streets is considered acceptable.

Maybe it’s time to stop making laws--invented crimes-- that put the rights of motor vehicles over those of flesh and blood human beings.

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*Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. By Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek, copyright 2025 by The War on Cars LLC, published by Thesis/Penguin Random House.