Jaywalking is a practice that is only nominally illegal in most North American cities. However, Montreal seems to be taking a different approach.

The Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) has begun its annual pedestrian safety campaign. Like most measures by government to raise “awareness” of a problem, there is a punitive stick as well as a pamphlet, and as usual, the stick is the traffic ticket. Police are now giving out $37 traffic tickets to leave an impression upon scofflaws. But whose fault are traffic accidents, and is jaywalking even a major problem?

In a recent editorial, the Montreal Gazette inveighed against “groups of pedestrians crossing against the light, impudently blocking cars that have the right of way.”

The piece cited bad behaviour by drivers, but by and large the editors of the Gazette, especially through such devices as juxtaposing the number of pedestrian fatalities with the number of jaywalking tickets given, seem to believe that pedestrians—those damned yokels crossing out of turn—are at fault for most traffic collisions.

The general assumption in any discussion of pedestrian deaths, that the pedestrian is at fault, is often written into the law. Several U.S. states, such as Maryland and Virginia, prohibit victims of pedestrian-vehicle collisions from suing drivers if they are judged to have contributed in any way to the accident­—the “contributory negligence” doctrine. Thus, a driver going several miles above the speed limit at the time would be able to avoid liability if the victim was simply listening to an iPod at the time of collision. More to the point, evidence from other urban areas, such as San Francisco, shows that cases of drivers violating pedestrian right of way are more frequent than the other way around. That cars are a much larger danger to pedestrians than the opposite seems to be lost in the concern over jaywalking. Efforts to reduce pedestrian fatalities would do well to target driver and not pedestrian behaviour.

One way to improve driver behaviour is road design. To their credit, the editors of the Gazette do put forth helpful suggestions such as better pedestrian signalling. But this only addresses part of the problem. Lowering and controlling speeds is a main factor in reducing traffic fatalities. Montreal did just that several years ago, reducing limits on residential city streets from 50 km/h to 40 km/h, while retaining the 50 km/h speed on major streets, since dramatic increases in pedestrian fatalities are observed once speeds go up from the 40 km/h range.

All of that said, a lower speed limit means nothing to pedestrians if the limit isn’t actually respected, and this is where a strategy called “traffic calming” enters the picture. Through changes in road design like curb extensions and speed bumps, traffic calming is meant to slow down drivers, and studies show that these methods are effective in both reducing speeds and traffic fatalities.

The idea that jaywalking is a major cause of traffic fatalities is predicated on the fundamentally flawed idea that drivers are less at fault than pedestrians when the two collide on the road. True progress in combating pedestrian fatalities starts with not blaming the victim.