Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Seattle has its idiosyncrasies. It’s what makes this city unique. It’s what gives the city its specific “feel.”

In general, we don’t use umbrellas. We’re more a head-down-and-face-the-weather sort of town.

In general, we’re polite and courteous. Drop your wallet and chances are someone will help you retrieve it (9 out of 10 times, according to a Reader’s Digest study). We say good morning and thank you to the bus driver. We rarely honk our horns at each other, except for a polite little “bip” when the guy in front hasn’t noticed the light’s turned green.

And, in general, we don’t jaywalk. As evidence of this, I supply a recent video that shows Seahawks fans waiting for the light to turn green before they cross the street to revel in their team’s recent victory over the Broncos.

It’s not that we never jaywalk. Waiting at the corner, if there are no cars coming for a block or so, you’ll sometimes see a person walking against the light, but this is rare. In New York, people at a corner tend to increase the jaywalking probability, as if each person adds to the collected anticipation until the group reaches critical mass and they boil out into the crosswalk. In Seattle, it’s different.

In Seattle, the more people waiting at a corner crosswalk, the more likely we are to stay there until the light turns green. Jaywalkers in Seattle are lone, solitary pedestrians who, momentarily unconstrained by the collective mind, give in to their impatience. In groups, we keep to the rules, not wanting to misbehave in front of witnesses. It’s not a matter of being overly lawful; it’s more a matter of not wanting to be embarrassed.

Seattle has some of the strictest pedestrian laws in the nation–the SPD issues over a thousand jaywalking tickets each year–but ask the average Seattle pedestrian and they won’t know this any more than they’d know that the current fine for jaywalking is about $56.

To be perfectly frank, Seattle is a relatively dangerous place for pedestrians. Close to half of the traffic fatalities in Seattle include a dead pedestrian, but one might think that if the SPD concentrated on drivers who fail to yield to a pedestrian (only about 200 citations, annually) instead of pedestrians who jaywalk (over 1500 citations annually), they might see a better outcome. They might also have a better relationship with the walking public.

Despite all this, though, Seattleites stick to the curb like lemmings at the cliff’s edge, waiting for the Green Man to send us on our way. It’s just one of the things that makes Seattle Seattle.

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