Jersey Pedestrians Association

The Association was founded by Simon Crowcroft. Here's how he tells it in his own words:

Since my son's accident in Bath Street in January 1994, I've started to see the pedestrians who gather on every street corner and who, in the absence of any traffic signals, humbly, deferentially, wait for someone to wave them across.

Let me put it bluntly: as a motorist I always give way to pedestrians, no matter how many Ford Escorts are tail-gating me, except, I guess when I'm on Victoria Avenue. God knows how people get across that one when it's busy, with just the one pedestrian crossing between Millbrook and First Tower.

But I digress - it's a Friday afternoon and I'm standing at the junction of Bath Street and Phillips Street where my son was knocked down two years ago. Yes, Public Services did finally get their fleet of yellow lorries down here last year and after a lot of humming and hawing, and huffing and puffing, they put up a pelican crossing. I stand and watch its operation: waiting on the RBS corner I press the light North/South traffic on Bath Street gets 25 seconds, including the red light, through which a couple of cars sail nevertheless after 2 seconds East/West traffic on Beresford Street/Phillips Street gets 20 seconds the little green man lights up and I have 5 seconds to cross before he flashes a few times and goes out after a few seconds the North/South traffic gets the all clear again And that's Public Services idea of a fair deal for pedestrians at the bottom of Bath Street, 5 seconds out of 60 when, according to the Road Safety experts, we should step into the road.

Little wonder that while I was there hardly anyone bothered to use the request button. Why should the person on foot be entitled to only one twelfth of the freedom of movement that's afforded the motorist? What on earth (indeed!) is stopping the clever traffic engineers from introducing a pedestrian crossing phase between each of the car movements?

The pedestrian crossing at the foot of Bath Street is just a public relations exercise, as cosmetic as the lights outside the Post Office which are geared, as one might expect, to the needs of the motorists entering Broad Street from New Cut, Library Place and Conway Street. Or the lights at the top of Clarendon Road, where students en route to the Girls College stand every day, waiting for the scraps of crossing-time to fall from the ample table of the motorists on the Ring Road. They can press the button till they're blue in the face, for all they care at South Hill.

I don't believe that pedestrians should be denied their rights of passage across a land which has only known the press of tyres for a fraction of its history. I don't believe that parents should have to drill into their children the dangers of being out and about, or that schools should have been coopted into accepting the rule of the motor car (for Green Cross Code, read Lessons in Fear). But the motor car lobby is powerful, sleek, and impatient - particularly in Jersey.

If we are to change things and reclaim the streets for ourselves and for our children we need to drive more slowly ourselves, for starters. Don't curse those rush hour tractors: bless them. Bless, too, the lycra-clad cyclists pedalling three abreast, the occasional horse and trap. If you're worried about being late for your destination, leave earlier - pedestrians have destinations too, you know. Watch out for people trying to cross the road; anticipate the movements of children, the eager dash after a ball, the unsteady swerve of a bicycle. Stop driving as fast as you are allowed to; start driving as slowly as it takes to give non-motorised road users a fair chance.

As for pedestrians and cyclists, if they are going to be landed with equal responsibility for road safety, however absurd it may be to do so, the least they can do is to demand equal rights of passage across our roads and along its margins. Imagine it, the little green man at the Bath Street lights shining green for 30 seconds in the minute! Imagine rights of passage across Bath Street, not just down on the RBS corner, but every hundred yards all the way up to Upper Midvale Road.

Realistically though, I'd settle for a dozen new pedestrian crossings put up this year in places like the junction of New Street and Burrard Street, places where pedestrians stand like beggars, bowls outstretched, or at the junction of David Place and Val Plaisant where you can be as vigilant as a guardian angel and still run the risk of being skittled. To achieve that or even to achieve a twelfth of that, people will have to get together and draw attention to themselves.

Neither the average motorist, nor the average civil can see the old man waiting to cross Mulcaster Street; but if ten or twenty of us stood there, and demanded our right of passage, perhaps then things would change.

Simon Crowcroft is Deputy for St. Helier No. 2 District, and founder of The Jersey Pedestrians Association. He can be contacted on 58895 or emailed at wordcraf@itl.net