In many states you are required to stop if a pedestrian is crossing the street.
What has happened a lot is I will stop to let a pedestrian cross the street at a legal cross walk and the person behind me will assume I am an idiot, honk, and speed around me.
My intuition is this is the cause of a significant amount of pedestrian deaths: impatient drivers that assume every stopped car is just an obstacle to zip around.
We had an 8 year old boy die in my hometown to this exact scenario and I have witnessed too many near collisions to count. I would support making passing like this automatic jail time, equivalent in severity to drunk driving.
The problem with making this jailable (which I do not support in the absence of a collision) is that you stopping to let a pedestrian legally cross is difficult to distinguish from you stopping in a travel lane or bike lane to pick up an Uber fare or stopping to double park near someone waiting for their own Uber. The latter two cases are actually obstacles created by anti-social behavior and are probably more common in aggregate than drivers stopping for pedestrians.
GP is suggesting they’re in a locale where mid-block pedestrians have the right of way. (I think they may have edited their post to add “at a legal crosswalk” as I don’t think I read that the first time and it does change the meaning significantly.)
Fundamentally the issue is that cars are huge visibility blockers. It is completely inconceivable that a cyclist could stop or slow to let a pedestrian cross, and the driver behind them would not see the pedestrian.
Without clear sight lines, drivers would need to communicate. But fundamentally drivers have extremely limited means of communicating information to those around them, and all of them are ambiguous. Hazard lights can mean a million things, including either "please pass me" or "it is extremely dangerous to pass me". In my city they most commonly mean "I want to park in this bike lane." Honking can mean a million things too, and sounds angry, aggressive, and startling. You can't really use your words, in a car, unless all of you have quiet engines, quiet tires, and roll your windows down. It is very hard, in most lighting conditions, to see the driver if they are trying to signal with their hands, because of sun glare, window tinting, lighting differentials between the cabin and the exterior.
So, the car in front blocks your ability to receive information about what's in front of them, while also being unable to communicate any helpful information themselves.
It's very easy to distinguish. People indicating to the right and slowing down are probably picking up or dropping off a pedestrian. If they aren't indicating, you must assume there's a hazard in front of them, slow down, and proceed with caution.
This happened to me and it left me with lasting anxiety. I stopped in town at a crosswalk for a pedestrian waiting to cross, and the car a couple seconds behind me went around and tore through the crosswalk.
I don't know what the answer is. Drivers make mistakes -- they don't see things, they might be preoccupied, etc. etc. And yeah, all too often they're negligent to the point of malice. But urban landscapes are almost explicitly designed to force those misjudgements to have literally life-ending consequences, and I haven't seen any large-scale societal acknowledgement of that.
It's actually solvable like a lot of things if we have time and willingness to invest in doing so. You put cameras at intersections or accept cryptographically signed unmodified dash cam footage and mail out the notice that the offending driver is a pedestrian for the next period of time starting at 3 days and progressively increasing until they are giving up driving for the next year.
If they drive during suspension the same cameras allow us to send escalating fines calculated based on their annual income in the last 12 months terminating in confiscation of their car.
Most bad drivers will get small escalating fines that aren't ruinous and stop driving like assholes. A tiny minority who are basically a menace to society will end up owing a ruinous amount of money and losing their wheels.
The thing to do is NOT do the unexpected. Being excessively courteous and letting an oncoming car turn left, or stopping for a pedestrian who is not already in the crosswalk but is waiting for a gap in traffic, is unexpected. It surprises other drivers and they get annoyed and then do something stupid like zooming around you.
If you are required by law to stop for them once they are in the crosswalk then cars should expect to find people stopped some of the time and stop themselves.
If nobody expects to stop then pedestrians either must always wait for a big enough gap that they hope to cross unimpeded or step out knowing you are coming to force you to stop. The first is frequently impossible and the second is dangerous. It also creates the "dangerous" situation of having a car stopped at an intersection.
Older folks especially likely to have a hard time doing A or B due to decreasing mobility and vision. Personally I think if you can't handle such a scenario safely you have no business being in charge of a car.
I don't disagree but I also know who's going to "win" in a collision between me and a car.
When I cross a street I have my head on a swivel and I do not step into the crosswalk unless I have the "walk" light and the cross-traffic is already stopped, or far enough away that they have room to stop. I try to make eye contact with drivers so I can be (more) sure they see me. Or if there is not a signal at the crosswalk I wait until there is a big enough gap that I won't be causing approaching drivers to stand on their brakes to stop for me.
And with all that I still assume that the approaching cars do not see me and am prepared to break into a sprint if needed to get out of the way.
In Britain stopping (to load/unload the car, or to park) at a pedestrian crossing is worth a £100 fine and ¼ of the driving licence 'lost' (do this four times within 3 (?) years and you're banned from driving and must retake the driving test). This is similar to passing a red light, or going slightly faster than the speed limit, though I think they have a larger fine.
I'm not sure what the penalty would be for overtaking a car stopped at a crossing. In theory it's the same, but in practise I think the stronger offence of dangerous driving would be used. If found guilty, that's an automatic ban from driving, an unlimited fine and up to 2 years jail.
This happens a lot in PDX and it makes me furious. It's like putting a hit out on the pedestrian crossing the street. I would like to see how the people honking their horns would like it if someone called for their death.
I see exactly this in Oakland, CA a lot. If someone slows down even a bit, people will rip around them and pass them in what should be turning lane. I think people are stressed, traumatized, maybe disabled from the pandemic/long covid. I also think instant gratification devices/apps have made us super impatient. And there's next to no traffic enforcement in many cities now.
People randomly crossing the street? Yeah you have to stop to the best of your ability because murder is against the law, but if they are jaywalking across a busy street and get hit? I highly doubt any state would prosecute you if you were going the speed limit and hit your brakes but still hit them.
What has happened a lot is I will stop to let a pedestrian cross the street at a legal cross walk and the person behind me will assume I am an idiot, honk, and speed around me.
My intuition is this is the cause of a significant amount of pedestrian deaths: impatient drivers that assume every stopped car is just an obstacle to zip around.
We had an 8 year old boy die in my hometown to this exact scenario and I have witnessed too many near collisions to count. I would support making passing like this automatic jail time, equivalent in severity to drunk driving.