The right to haul ass
Crossing the road when and where we want is a British tradition — but driverless cars threaten that
I don’t like to tempt fate. I wish I could tell you this stems from all the Sophocles and Virgil I read as an impossibly precocious child. In truth, it’s more the result of all those American teen sitcoms I consumed growing up — Boy Meets World, Saved by the Bell, Hang Time.
In these universes, whenever one of the many interchangeably photogenic characters declined to visit an elderly relative (and by “elderly,” we’re talking anyone over the age of 40, I’m afraid), said auntie or granddad would inevitably be dead by the commercial break. Nevertheless, it isn’t hubris if it’s true: I’m really quite good at crossing roads.
Given the choice, I’ll do it at a zebra crossing or traffic lights. But I’ll cross where I want, when I want. To my many American and Australian readers (and the two in Japan!), this is known as jaywalking — a criminal act in your countries1. Fines can run into the thousands. But there is no such restriction in the UK — unless you’re attempting to traverse a motorway, in which case you have problems enough.
But like a Chancellor of the Exchequer on Budget day gleefully announcing not just a tax freeze but a tax cut, I can go further: I don’t even recognise the term “jaywalking.” It implies that I’m doing something illicit simply by engaging in an activity so mundane that an entire cottage industry has sprung up to understand how — and why — chickens do it.
It wasn’t always like this. Before cars, streets were a shared, practically a social space, packed with pedestrians, vendors and different varieties of street cars. This changed with the rise of the internal combustion engine, and streets became the monoculture we know today.
‘Allo Waymo
London is set to become the first European city to see driverless taxis on its streets. Last week Waymo, the autonomous driving technology company, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, Google’s parent company, announced they were coming to the capital next year. Whatever your initial reaction, at least it hasn’t been described by the government as a benefit of Brexit.