I’d like to discuss a small but somewhat interesting situation involving the side-effects laws and customs that attempt to make things better for some portion of the human community. A few years ago, my home state of New Jersey passed a law requiring motorists to jam on their brakes and stop anytime a pedestrian enters a roadway intending to cross it. You can get a ticket with points and fines if you don’t immediately stop, even if the speed limit is 40 and you’d have to make a panic stop and risk getting rear-ended because some pedestrian starts into the road just ahead of you.

Well, actually this rule applies at marked crosswalks and at street intersections, marked or not; it may not hold when people take their chances with “jaywalking” on an open road stretch. The obvious intent of this law is to prevent auto-pedestrian collisions and the terrible injury they cause. The unfortunate side effect, which is becoming very apparent in my current home town of Montclair, is that pedestrians are getting careless and stepping out into the road without any regard for whatever vehicles may be approaching. This is especially apparent with the younger generation; a lot of kids don’t even look for approaching traffic anymore, they just step zombie-like onto the crosswalk. However, older folk also seem to be getting sloppy and assuming that every motorist is going to grind to a stop on a main thoroughfare as soon as they arrive at the curb.

In some towns, the chances that you are going to get ticketed for a technical violation of this law, i.e. for not stopping when there is clearly no danger to the pedestrian because the road is wide and they are still 15 or 20 feet away from where your car will pass, are relatively low (although you never know when a cranky cop will go after you just for fun). This is especially true in the low-income urban  »  continue reading …

Since it’s a weeknight and I’m still working full time for a living, I’m gonna try to make this quick. I’m just going to cite an interesting article that I read over the weekend, and add a quick though or two, not a complete essay.

If you are interesting in poverty and social justice in America, Nicholas Kristof has a very thought provoking (and hopefully an ACTION provoking) article in the NY Times, entitled “The Way to Beat Poverty“. That’s quite an ambitious title, given that America has been trying to beat poverty since the days of Lyndon Johnson. To put it optimistically, our national efforts have had “mixed success” over the past half century. Kristof and co-author Cheryl WuDunn contend that the ongoing generational poverty experienced by many low-income communities is caused, to a great extent, by poor pre-natal and early life care for infants.

We’ve always known that sub-standard conditions in early life were an effect of poverty, but Kristof is saying that it is in fact a CAUSE. He doesn’t use the politically incorrect expressions “cycle of poverty” and “poverty culture” (this is the New York Times,  »  continue reading …