Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Letter to the editor:

Pedestrians play a dangerous game

I come from the Northeast, where you wouldn’t think of walking out on a roadway in front of a vehicle, crosswalk or not. The law that gives pedestrians the right of way here invites disaster.

In areas such as New York, which have significantly more pedestrians than Las Vegas, pedestrians don’t get hit. Why? They know if they walk in front of a vehicle, they lose. They don’t have the entitlement attitude that pedestrians have here that the vehicle has to stop because “I’m a pedestrian and I have the right of way.” This pedestrian right-of-way law in Southern Nevada must have been designed for an earlier, less urbanized and sophisticated environment.

I’d recommend a law change that stresses only crossing where there are traffic control devices and never against the signal; an education program that teaches there is no entitled right of way; and that even when crossing with a signal, a pedestrian needs to make eye contact with a driver and never assume a vehicle is going to stop.

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