Columnist Susan Snyder: LV traffic ignorance runneth over

Friday, Feb. 21, 2003 | 4:31 a.m.

Answer the following question as quickly as you can:

When is it OK to hit a pedestrian?

Stop. If anything other than, "Never" was forming in your brain, it's best to quit while you're behind.

It's not OK to hit a pedestrian. You might get a ticket, or you might not. But it is never OK to run over someone with your car.

Where, when and how did we ever get the idea that it is?

Our local news media. Our local police. You know, the people who are supposed to give us good information so we can protect ourselves and the people who are supposed to know good information and use it to protect us otherwise.

Both failed miserably this past week in the wake of a 24-hour period in which three pedestrians were struck by motorists. Two died.

With the manner in which cops and journalists tossed around the "jaywalking" word, you'd think jaywalking was a criminal offense, punishable in Clark County by immediate death without due process.

"Jaywalking" isn't a legal term, and it isn't a chargeable offense. The word doesn't appear in local ordinances or in Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 484, which dictates pedestrian and bicycle laws.

What we didn't read or hear one police officer or one reporter say last week was "due care." They are the second and third words in NRS 484.3245, right after it says, "Duties of driver of motor vehicle to pedestrian. A driver of a motor vehicle shall:

"1. Exercise due care to avoid a collision with a pedestrian."

That's No. 1. It doesn't say anything about avoiding a collision with a person who isn't jaywalking or one who isn't walking fast enough or one who, in the words of a television news reporter, "jumps out in front of your car." (Yeah, those crazy peds are jumpin' around like crickets out there -- 'specially the old ones.)

Of course, NRS Chapter 484 also says pedestrians crossing midblock must yield rights of way to motor vehicles. But we don't ever hear that midblock crossings are legal unless the section of road a person is crossing has traffic lights or signs at either end of it and no other roads intersect between them.

We only hear about whether he or she was in a crosswalk. Did you know they don't have to be marked?

It's probably pretty easy to determine whether a person was inside a marked or unmarked crosswalk when he was killed by a car. It likely gets sketchier trying to figure out whether the midblock crossing was in a legal spot and whether the motorist used "due care" -- slowed down or wasn't distracted -- before hitting the person who was walking.

Half the people in such crashes are dead. The other half don't want a ticket.

And the people with badges and the people quoting them seem content to leave us with the impression that it's OK to hit a pedestrian as long as it's in a situation where the motorist doesn't get a ticket.

Somehow it's OK if a motorist doesn't drive the speed limit or doesn't, as the law says, "exercise proper caution upon observing a pedestrian on or near a highway." It's as if people outside crosswalks deserve to die.

They don't. It's never OK to hit a pedestrian because it's not about getting a ticket.

It's about killing somebody.