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Sometimes I look out the window and think of how many babies are now part of a personal brand.

Today's News:

Get yourself an RSS reader. If you're not using this tool, then some corporate algorithm is probably using you as its tool.

Today's links

• You should be using an RSS reader: The one thing you can choose to do that will make your internet life better and make the internet better for everyone else, too.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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You should be using an RSS reader (permalink)

No matter how hard we all wish it were otherwise, the sad fact is that there aren't really individual solutions to systemic problems. For example: your personal diligence in recycling will have no meaningful impact on the climate emergency.

I get it. People write to me all the time, they say, "What can I change about my life to fight enshittification, or, at the very least, to reduce the amount of enshittification that I, personally, experience?"

It's frustrating, but my general answer is, "Join a movement. Get involved with a union, with EFF, with the FSF. Tell your Congressional candidate to defend Lina Khan from billionaire Dem donors who want her fired. Do something systemic."

There's very little you can do as a consumer. You're not going to shop your way out of monopoly capitalism. Now that Amazon has destroyed most of the brick-and-mortar and digital stores out of business, boycotting Amazon often just means doing without. The collective action problem of leaving Twitter or Facebook is so insurmountable that you end up stuck there, with a bunch of people you love and rely on, who all love each other, all hate the platform, but can't agree on a day and time to leave or a destination to leave for and so end up stuck there.

I've been experiencing some challenging stuff in my personal life lately and yesterday, I just found myself unable to deal with my usual podcast fare so I tuned into the videos from the very last XOXO, in search of uplifting fare:

https://www.youtube.com/@xoxofest

I found it. Talks by Dan Olson, Cabel Sasser, Ed Yong and many others, especially Molly White:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c

Molly's talk was so, so good, but when I got to her call to action, I found myself pulling a bit of a face:

But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them. The platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable…

Are the platforms really that vulnerable? The collective action problem is so hard, the switching costs are so high – maybe the fact that "there's a lot more of us than there are of them" is a bug, not a feature. The more of us there are, the thornier our collective action problem and the higher the switching costs, after all.

And then I had a realization: the conduit through which I experience Molly's excellent work is totally enshittification-proof, and the more I use it, the easier it is for everyone to be less enshittified.

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.

It's RSS.

RSS (one of those ancient internet acronyms with multiple definitions, including, but not limited to, "Really Simple Syndication") is an invisible, automatic way for internet-connected systems to public "feeds." For example, rather than reloading the Wired homepage every day and trying to figure out which stories are new (their layout makes this very hard to do!), you can just sign up for Wired's RSS feed, and use an RSS reader to monitor the site and preview new stories the moment they're published. Wired pushes about 600 words from each article into that feed, stripped of the usual stuff that makes Wired nearly impossible to read: no 20-second delay subscription pop-up, text in a font and size of your choosing. You can follow Wired's feed without any cookies, and Wired gets no information about which of its stories you read. Wired doesn't even get to know that you're monitoring its feed.

I don't mean to pick on Wired here. This goes for every news source I follow – from CNN to the New York Times. But RSS isn't just good for the news! It's good for everything. Your friends' blogs? Every blogging platform emits an RSS feed by default. You can follow every one of them in your reader.

Not just blogs. Do you follow a bunch of substackers or other newsletters? They've all got RSS feeds. You can read those newsletters without ever registering in the analytics of the platforms that host them. The text shows up in black and white (not the sadistic, 8-point, 80% grey-on-white type these things all default to). It is always delivered, without any risk of your email provider misclassifying an update as spam:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you've read in it. On top of that, they get all the private information your browser or app leaks about you, including your location. This is unbelievably gross, and you get to bypass all of it, just by reading in RSS.

Are your friends too pithy for a newsletter, preferring to quip on social media? Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to get an RSS feed from Insta/FB/Twitter, but all those new ones that have popped up? They all have feeds. You can follow any Mastodon account (which means you can follow any Threads account) via RSS. Same for Bluesky. That also goes for older platforms, like Tumblr and Medium. There's RSS for Hacker News, and there's a sub-feed for the comments on every story. You can get RSS feeds for the Fedex, UPS and USPS parcels you're awaiting, too.

Your local politician's website probably has an RSS feed. Ditto your state and national reps. There's an RSS feed for each federal agency (the FCC has a great blog!).

Your RSS reader lets you put all these feeds into folders if you want. You can even create automatic folders, based on keywords, or even things like "infrequently updated sites" (I follow a bunch of people via RSS who only update a couple times per year – cough, Danny O'Brien, cough – and never miss a post).

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

Now, you sign up to so many feeds that you're feeling overwhelmed and you want an algorithm to prioritize posts – or recommend content. Lots of RSS readers have some kind of algorithm and recommendation system (I use News, which offers both, though I don't use them – I like the glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of the undifferentiated firehose feed).

But you control the algorithm, you control the recommendations. And if a new RSS reader pops up with an algorithm you're dying to try, you can export all the feeds you follow with a single click, which will generate an OPML file. Then, with one click, you can import that OPML file into any other RSS reader in existence and all your feeds will be seamlessly migrated there. You can delete your old account, or you can even use different readers for different purposes.

You can access RSS in a browser or in an app on your phone (most RSS readers have an app), and they'll sync up, so a story you mark to read later on your phone will be waiting for you the next time you load up your reader in a browser tab, and you won't see the same stories twice (unless you want to, in which case you can mark them as unread).

RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform.

Unlike those largely useless, performative boycotts of widely used platforms, switching to RSS doesn't require that you give anything up. Not only does switching to RSS let you continue to follow all the newsletters, webpages and social media accounts you're following now, it makes doing so better: more private, more accessible, and less enshittified.

Switching to RSS lets you experience just the good parts of the enshitternet, but that experience is delivered in manner that the new, good internet we're all dying for.

My own newsletter is delivered in fulltext via RSS. If you're reading this as a Mastodon or Twitter thread, on Tumblr or on Medium, or via email, you can get it by RSS instead:

https://pluralistic.net/feed/

Don't worry about which RSS reader you start with. It literally doesn't matter. Remember, you can switch readers with two clicks and take all the feeds you've subscribed to with you! If you want a recommendation, I have nothing but praise for Newsblur, which I've been paying $2/month for since 2011 (!):

https://newsblur.com/

Subscribing to feeds is super-easy, too: the links for RSS feeds are invisibly embedded in web-pages. Just paste the URL of a web-page into your RSS reader's "add feed" box and it'll automagically figure out where the feed lives and add it to your subscriptions.

It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference.

But using RSS will! Using RSS to follow the stuff that matters to you will have an immediate, profoundly beneficial impact on your own digital life – and it will appreciably, irreversibly nudge the whole internet towards a better state.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

* You Can't Make Friends With The Rockstars https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/

• Tom Lehrer Discovers Australia (And Vice Versa) https://taylorjessen.blogspot.com/2024/10/tom-lehrer-tom-lehrer-discovers.html

• Conceptual models of space colonization https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html

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This day in history (permalink)

#20yrsago Sony bullies Retropod off the net https://web.archive.org/web/20041018040446/http://www.retropod.com/

#15yrsago This Side of Jordan – Violent jazz age novel by Charles M Schulz’s son Monte https://memex.craphound.com/2009/10/16/this-side-of-jordan-violent-jazz-age-novel-by-charles-m-schulzs-son-monte/

#10yrsago FBI chief demands an end to cellphone security https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/politics/fbi-director-in-policy-speech-calls-dark-devices-hindrance-to-crime-solving.html

#10yrsago Please, Disney: put back John’s grandad’s Haunted Mansion tombstone https://thedisneyblog.com/2014/10/16/petition-to-return-a-lost-tombstone-to-the-haunted-mansion/

#10yrsago How Microsoft hacked trademark law to let it secretly seize whole businesses https://www.wired.com/2014/10/microsoft-pinkerton/

#10yrsago If you think you’ve anonymized a data set, you’re probably wrong https://web.archive.org/web/20141014172827/http://research.neustar.biz/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-passenger-privacy-in-the-nyc-taxicab-dataset/

#10yrsago The lost cyber-crayolas of the mid-1990s https://memex.craphound.com/2014/10/16/the-lost-cyber-crayolas-of-the-mid-1990s/

#5yrsago “The People’s Money”: A crisp, simple, thorough explanation of how government spending is paid for https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2019/10/the-peoples-money-part-1.html

#5yrsago What it’s like to have Apple rip off your successful Mac app https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/what-its-like-to-have-apple-rip-off-your-successful-mac-app/

#5yrsago Blizzard suspends college gamers from competitive play after they display “Free Hong Kong” poster https://www.vice.com/en/article/three-college-hearthstone-protesters-banned-for-six-months/

#5yrsago Terrified of bad press after its China capitulation, Blizzard cancels NYC Overwatch event https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-15/blizzard-cancels-overwatch-event-as-it-tries-to-contain-backlash

#5yrsago A San Diego Republican operator ran a massive, multimillion-dollar Facebook scam that targeted boomers https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-subscription-trap-free-trial-scam-ads-inc

#5yrsago Britain’s unbelievably stupid, dangerous porn “age verification” scheme is totally dead https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/uk-government-abandons-planned-porn-age-verification-scheme/

#5yrsago Not only is Google’s auto-delete good for privacy, it’s also good news for competition https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/not-only-is-googles-auto-delete-good-for-privacy-its-also-good-news-for-competition/

#5yrsago Edward Snowden on the global war on encryption: “This is our new battleground” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/15/encryption-lose-privacy-us-uk-australia-facebook

#5yrsago In Kansas’s poor, sick places, hospitals and debt collectors send the ailing to debtor’s prison https://features.propublica.org/medical-debt/when-medical-debt-collectors-decide-who-gets-arrested-coffeyville-kansas

#5yrsago Want a ride in a Lyft? Just sign away your right to sue if they kill, maim, rape or cheat you https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/16/want-a-ride-in-a-lyft-just-sign-away-your-right-to-sue-if-they-kill-maim-rape-or-cheat-you/

#5yrsago #RedForEd rebooted: Chicago’s teachers are back on strike https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/union-strike-chicago-teachers/

#1yrago One of America's most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• OKFN Tech We Want Online Summit (Remote), Oct 18
  https://okfn.org/en/events/the-tech-we-want-online-summit/

• SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
  https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn

• Eagle Eye Books (Decatur), Oct 23
  https://eagleeyebooks.com/event/2024-10-23/cory-doctorow

• TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
  https://tusconscificon.com/

• International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
  https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

• ISSA-LA Holiday Celebration keynote (Los Angeles), Dec 18
  https://issala.org/event/issa-la-december-18-dinner-meeting/

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Speciale intervista a Cory Doctorow (Digitalia)
  https://digitalia.fm/744/

• Was There Ever An Old, Good Internet? (David Graeber Institute)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Jlxx5TboE

• Go Fact Yourself
  https://maximumfun.org/episodes/go-fact-yourself/ep-158-aida-rodriguez-cory-doctorow/

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Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Today's progress: 818 words (64779 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: Spill, part one (a Little Brother story) https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2024/10/06/spill-part-one-a-little-brother-story/

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

A web of streetcar rails weaves throughout greater Pittsburgh. Downtown employees walk yards to catch a trolley. An interurban railway connects the city to green spaces in Butler County and as far north as New Castle. Shoppers cross streets where they please, dodging kids, not cars. There are no deaths caused by automobiles.

This is not a future Pittsburgh imaged by eager urban studies students or the city’s 10-year plan. This is Pittsburgh in 1900. Ten years later, 1,600 automobiles were registered in Allegheny County. By 1930, there were more than 200,000.

In 1931, The Pittsburgh Press reported that 189 pedestrians were hit by cars and killed the year prior. 

About 110 of the deaths involved jaywalking — broadly defined as crossing a road unlawfully.

Nearly a century later, jaywalking concerns have faded faster than hopes of a Pirates playoff berth. 

On March 4, the City of Pittsburgh adopted Vision Zero, an international program that seeks to eliminate traffic fatalities. The program established a High Injury Network map and a fatal crash response group to find solutions where fatalities occur.

In 2023, seven pedestrians were killed by vehicles, but the city’s Crash Data Dashboard makes no indication of whether jaywalking was involved. When asked why, Mayor Ed Gainey’s Press Secretary Olga George and three Public Information Officers did not comment.

“It’s always been about power”

“Our safety measurements in this country are a crime because we measure safety by risk per mile driven,” says Peter Norton, author of “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.” 

While expanding roads to accommodate more vehicles means “each mile driven may be safer, you drive more miles,” Norton says. “You can’t win that game. And we are losing it. Every day we’re losing it.”

Since the 1920s, as cars have taken over cities, Norton says the shift leaves pedestrians two options: jaywalk or go out of their way to the nearest crosswalk. The latter seems the obvious and safer answer, but that may not be the reality, Norton says.

A deeper exploration of the city of Pittsburgh’s Crash Data Dashboard contradicts Norton’s claim. By extrapolating the data on the city-generated map, only one of the seven pedestrian fatalities in 2023 occurred at an intersection. A woman was struck and killed at the intersection of Wilkins Avenue and Beechwood Boulevard in Squirrel Hill.

But Norton isn’t dissuaded.

“It’s never been a scientific study about optimum safety or optimum traffic flows or anything, it’s always been about power,” Norton says.

The advent of the automobile spurred a 100-year-old battle for power that has literally played out in the streets. A pedestrian’s place on the roads wasn’t taken away for their safety, it was taken through “huge marketing campaigns,” Norton says.

How to win a war with marketing

In the 1920s, automobile ownership was a leisure activity, and the vehicles were designed with specific purposes. 

“The Sunday drive in the country was a major motive for people to buy cars, because you could take it out to a place that the streetcar couldn’t get you to,” Norton says.

The most common car, the Ford Model T, was made specifically for the muddy and rutty roads of rural America. It was a tool for one job, not for everyday transportation.

Under that marketing plan, though, the “tools” sold by automobile manufacturers appealed to a small crowd. To some, the price tag was too high. Other Pittsburghers could afford a car, but didn’t need one with easily accessible streetcars.

So automobile manufacturers and fanatics — “they called themselves ‘Motordom,’” Norton says — reinvented the car to make it part of everyday life.

“To make that work, you have to make some big compromises,” Norton says. “This was a great city, but we had to make it a worse city so that cars would work.”

Manufacturing opposition

As ownership revved up, cars sped their way into cities around the country, clashing with slower streetcars, horse-drawn buggies and pedestrians.

Norton, in his 2007 article “Street Rivals: Jaywalking and the Invention of the Motor Age Street,” describes cars with war-like qualities: 

Motorists made claims to the street “by right of conquest. … Pedestrians (and bicyclists) cited custom to claim prior right, but custom could rarely withstand motorists’ superior power and speed.”

Pedestrians who easily avoided streetcars and horses were being struck and killed by unpredictable drivers.

To counteract public outcry, Motordom pushed for measures like crosswalks to keep pedestrians safe, which in actuality, redefined who had the right to the streets.

As roads became “safer” for pedestrians, they became more convenient for drivers, encouraging more people to buy cars. Norton’s aforementioned game had begun: The miles traveled became safer, but more miles were driven.

Motordom took to disparaging those who ignored crosswalks by calling them “jays” — midwestern slang for a country bumpkin, so to speak.

“Because jaywalker bore the right connotation of rural backwardness, it was just the tool for this reeducation effort,” Norton writes.

During the height of the push against jaywalkers, Boy Scouts in Providence, Rhode Island, hosted a “school for careless pedestrians.” In New York City, people would gather for “safety parades” to watch a clown get repeatedly rear-ended by cars as he walked down the center of a street.

A Pittsburgh left

Although the war against jaywalkers was popular across the country, physical and sociocultural aspects of Pittsburgh allowed the city to partially steer clear of the clash.

For the steel mill workers, automobile ownership was not just out of their budget, but impractical because they lived near the mills.

“Those steel mills were overwhelmingly opened up before automobile ownership was even, say, at a 20% rate,” Norton says. “If you were a smart steel executive, you made sure that there was affordable housing near the mill because you wanted those workers.”

Retail spaces inevitably popped up in the same areas due to the power of proximity, forming walkable communities.

“Wherever you could meet your daily needs — by that I mean can you get to work, can you take care of your shopping, can your child get to school — any place those needs can be met on foot, they will be met on foot,” Norton says.

Some of these mixed-use areas still exist in Pittsburgh today — or will soon be created, by the looks of upcoming developments. To Eric Boerer, BikePGH’s advocacy director, spaces like the Strip District and Market Square are emblematic of how the city by design promotes jaywalking.

“You can’t expect that everyone’s going to go to the next intersection when their destination is directly across the street,” Boerer says. “It’s almost like the way cities are moving, especially in those pedestrian-dense areas, is designing streets to encourage jaywalking so that cars are forced to slow down.”

In the nearly two decades that BikePGH has tracked data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey, Pittsburgh’s large number of pedestrian commuters has consistently earned it a top-five spot compared to 60 of the country’s largest cities.

Aside from popular destinations and places of work, physical aspects of Pittsburgh — from its narrow streets to its abundance of public staircases — also promote pedestrian activity, Boerer says.

“Our topography … is a bit of natural traffic calming that we have here that other cities don’t benefit from,” Boerer says. “I go to other cities, especially in the midwest, and we just don’t have those wide roads that they do.”

Setting the PACE

Jaywalking has continued to go unpoliced in the greater Pittsburgh area, even though calls for enforcement have cropped up time and again. It is, after all, a formal offense written into PA’s consolidated statutes — although the term “jaywalking” is not used.

Still, there is one township in the area that has continuously tried to curb jaywalking.

In February 2016, Mount Lebanon — which its officials like to call a “walking community” — introduced an ordinance that would fine pedestrians $25 if caught jaywalking. In August of that year, Mount Lebanon launched its “Look Up Lebo” campaign to increase pedestrian attentiveness and safety.

Advocates like Boerer rallied against the decision.

“This car-centric way of thinking treats pedestrians as a menace to cars, instead of the other way around,” Boerer wrote in a 2016 BikePGH blog post. “Fining pedestrians will never get to the root of the issue: signals and crosswalks in their current locations aren’t serving people.

In April 2024, the township refreshed its campaign, calling it, “PACE yourself, Lebo.” PACE stands for Pedestrian, Automobile, Cyclist, Everyone.

Mount Lebanon Police would not comment on the 2016 ordinance, aside from saying that it, “in conjunction with State laws addressing the operation of vehicles on roadways and in school zones encompasses the goal of” the township’s new PACE initiative, according to an email from Mt. Lebanon’s Deputy Chief of Police Daniel Cuiffi.

Neither Cuiffi nor Chief of Police Jason Haberman would confirm if the ordinance had been used since its implementation. Public Information Officer Laura Pace Lilley said in an email that the township prefers education over issuing fines.

“On several occasions, we had an officer (dressed in a ‘Where’s Waldo’ costume) at the schools handing out reminders to people crossing illegally,” Pace Lilley’s email reads. “That created an opportunity for constructive conversation and learning rather than punishment.”

Chief Haberman said in an episode of the “Inside Lebo” podcast that PACE is taking a holistic approach to street safety while leaving behind Look Up Lebo’s pedestrian-centric framework.

“Speeding is the number one factor to determine whether someone is going to live or die if they’re hit by a car,” Boerer says.

Preserving Pittsburgh’s favorite outdoor sport

In 1986, Pittsburgh Press columnist Phil Musick mused on Pittsburgh’s penchant for jaywalking. The so-called “artful dodging,” he writes, is Pittsburgh’s favorite outdoor sport.

Musick published his column a few weeks after two women who were walking Downtown were struck and killed by automobiles. A Traffic Safety Committee was created following the deaths, and the city declared it would issue citations for jaywalkers. Musick was skeptical.

“From birth, we have been taught that the basic instinct of the Pittsburgh driver is to scare the Pittsburgh pedestrian without actually maiming him, while the rightful role of the pedestrian is, by dint of personal bravery, to walk wherever and whenever he pleases,” the column reads. “Such open warfare is seen as both natural and honorable.”

Norton and Musick both tell tales of David and Goliath: the agile pedestrian versus the relentless automobile. But Musick rests on the status quo, while Norton says it’s crucial to understand what the purpose of continuing down our current path is.

“We’re on a treadmill of misery right now with the automobile,” Norton says.

Pittsburgh is taking measures to get off the treadmill, and pedestrian deaths have dropped from 189 in 1931 to seven in 2023.

Yet people still jaywalk in Pittsburgh, and people still die. But, Norton would argue, it’s far too easy to succumb to Motordom’s narrative.

In 2024, the city completed eight traffic calming projects adding speed bumps, curb extensions or raised crosswalks in hopes of reducing vehicle speeds.

Six of them are at or near intersections with crosswalks, but only one of seven pedestrian fatalities occurred at a crosswalk last year. 

Vision Zero’s purpose is to make all modes of transportation safer. Will Pittsburgh’s iteration include our jaywalking habit?

The post Pittsburgh’s deadly addiction to jaywalking may be a habit we shouldn’t have to kick appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.

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