You know how the state occasionally issues limited hunting permits, to thin out overpopulated species? Here's suggesting jaywalkers as the next species for that program in Connecticut.

Look, I'm a pedestrian for... 80% or more of my transit. I am profoundly sympathetic to people who have to walk in places with unsafe or nonexistent paths and crossing patterns. Downtown New Haven is not one of those places. It's built around a sprawling, busy pedestrian business (Yale), and has traffic controls that are generously pro-walker: turn-on-red prohibitions, frequent all-way stops, short limit lines, and an ever-baffling network of one-way streets and turn-only lanes. The short story: if you are a pedestrian capable of A. looking at a light and B. seeing a car, you're in business.

Not in business: the stroller-pushing mother sending her two toddlers running out ahead of her to "throw a block" against the three lanes of oncoming, green-lit traffic. Fortunately, drivers here expect this kind of tomfoolery, so a potential Battleship Potemkin was merely a brake-screeching French Connection. Less reprehensible, but equally dumb was the mopheaded summer student pulling the classic "Start running for two steps and then stroll leisurely."

Hey, jaywalking is fine if you cross when nobody's coming. It's entirely possible to know better than the timers in the lights. My ire is resevred for the ones who believe they know better than an oncoming car. I'm not saying they should die... I'm just saying that evolution doesn't want them to live.