Jaywalking, the impatient act of crossing the street when the light’s still red or against car traffic, will be decriminalized in New York City following a Department of Transportation hearing today.

The amended law now allows “pedestrians to cross any roadway, other than a limited access highway, while clarifying that pedestrians who fail to yield to the right-of-way of other traffic would not be subject to a violation of the traffic rules,” according to the New York City Department of Transportation. 

Additionally, no longer “shall” pedestrians abide by the do and don’t walk signs. Rather, they are now “advised” or “are cautioned” not to cross the street when the red hand is lit. In the past, jaywalking would get offenders a  $250 fine from the NYPD.

Longtime critics of the law said jaywalking laws were used to shift blame for pedestrian accidents from the driver to the walker. 

“Motordom, led by the auto industry, seized upon ‘jaywalking’ as a tenet for a ‘propaganda campaign’ used to ‘stigmatize walkers,’” wrote University of Iowa Associate Professor Gregory H. Shill in his 2020 NYU Law Review piece “Should Law Subsidize Driving?”

The City Council overwhelmingly passed the legislation last year, and it became law after Mayor Eric Adams neither vetoed nor signed the bill within the 30-day window. 

A fineable offense since 1958, one year after jaywalking was responsible for 319 of the 448 pedestrian deaths and 11,459 of the 18,718 injuries, the law had been criticized for being outdated, unreasonable, and unfair. 

“Laws that penalize common behaviors for everyday movement shouldn’t exist, especially when they unfairly impact communities of color,” said City Council Member Mercedes Narcisse, a Democrat, last year. 

Critics said the rule was enforced more on black and Hispanic people than on white people. In the first six months of 2024, the NYPD issued 786 jaywalking summonses, only 15 percent of which were given to white people, according to reports. Black and Hispanic pedestrians, meanwhile, received 51 percent and 26 percent, respectively, in that same timeframe.

Shortly after its passing in the 1950s, the city launched a memorable pedestrian campaign that urged New Yorkers to “cross at the green, not in between.” 

In 1998, Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s proposed crackdown on jaywalkers was met with resistance by NYPD cops.

“This is just taking hard-earned money from people who can’t afford it,” one cop told the New York Times in 1998, “and I’m not going to prostitute myself for the Mayor or anybody else.”

The term “jaywalking” takes its name from “jay”, a common old New York slang term for a “rustic or even a city boor,” wrote Irving Lewis Allen in his 1993  book “The City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech.”

“When a country jay comes to town, he wanders without urban purpose, gawking at the sights, walking heedlessly through the city traffic as through his rural fields. For that ignorance of the rules (which was probably understood as deliberate lawlessness) he was by the 1910s called a jaywalker,” Mr. Allen wrote.