Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • September 14, 2011 look both ways at the same time. The sort of jogger who broadsides a stationary car with his or her body is probably not going to revitalize NASA or find a solution for global warming. But nobody wants to kill the pompous joggers and nobody wants to listen to their self-righteous assertion that people whose standing cars are already in place should pull out of their way because traffic flow prevents road entry. Ever eager to put the other person in a bad light, I checked out the right-of-way issues with two local experts. One is Wyckoff Police Chief Benjamin Fox. Wyckoff is a town that, under his guidance as traffic officer, and now as police chief, invariably wins all kinds of top traffic safety awards. The other expert is an attorney and former prosecutor with vast experience in automotive and pedestrian cases. “A bicycle operator must obey all regulations applicable to motor vehicles except for those laws which by their nature have no application to a bicycle,” said Chief Fox. “They must stop for red lights, stop signs, etc. A bicycle operator coming down a hill in excess of the speed limit can be issued a speeding summons.” Chief Fox and the attorney concurred absolutely that pedestrians have no right to walk out from between parked cars and expect right-of-way laws to protect them. The attorney defined this as “jaywalking” and said that pedestrians hit while jaywalking tend not to do well in court, while the motorists who inadvertently hit them tend “to walk.” “A pedestrian crossing a roadway other than a marked or unmarked intersection shall yield the right-out-way to all vehicles on the roadway – NJS 39:4-32,” said Chief Fox. The only way a motorist can get in legal trouble after hitting a jaywalker, the attorney said, is if the motorist flees the scene of the accident. Leaving the scene of an accident where there is an injury exposes the driver to criminal charges. However, if a motorist sticks around and can show that a pedestrian darted out in front of a vehicle and didn’t leave the motorist adequate time to stop, even the act of hitting a jaywalking pedestrian inside a crosswalk can be legally defensible. Chief Fox noted that “a pedestrian cannot enter the roadway when the approaching vehicle is so close that it is impossible for the car to stop or yield.” Fox added, however, that this can be difficult to prove in court unless the accident was filmed when it happened or reliable witnesses saw it happen and testify on behalf of the driver. The message here is that motorists need to exercise extreme caution at crosswalks and red lights, and pedestrians need to refrain from crossing in the middle of the road unless they see no cars anywhere near them. “A vehicle already making a turn has established its right-of-way to the intersection or driveway,” the chief said, adding, “A pedestrian cannot walk or run into the path of a vehicle when the vehicle is so close that it cannot stop or yield.” Both the chief and the attorney chortled over the idea that joggers had any right to expect motorists who are already preparing to enter the street to get out of the joggers’ way, and said that those joggers who chose to run into the vehicles when the vehicles are not moving have “issues.” Chief Fox added that bicyclists are required to display a bicycle light visible from 500 feet when operating at night and that pedestrians are required to use “due care” in protecting their own safety. Motorists who are unfortunate enough to strike pedestrians or cyclists they could not see, the attorney said, are in a reasonably strong defensive position – provided that the motorists don’t panic and flee the scene, which is illegal and could negate a legal defense that might otherwise exonerate the driver. Plain and simple: Being a pedestrian or a bicyclist does not exempt a person from exercising common courtesy and common sense, any more than a driver’s license is a license to kill. Motorists who ignore posted regulations need to be pulled over and ticketed. If they are repeat offenders, they need to have their cars impounded. Jaywalkers also need to receive summonses if their offenses are drastic enough to be potentially life-threatening to others, or even to themselves. It’s a free country? Tell that to the EMTs or the doctor or nurse in the emergency room. Even people who aren’t driving cars have no right to do dangerous things in the public right-of-way. The roads don’t just belong to the bicyclists or the joggers or the motorists. They belong to everybody. Twice in the two hours before writing this column, I saw what I could call “wrong-of-way” incidents that could have killed or disabled pedestrians or bicyclists and cost motorists their licenses and some heavy psychological trauma. These were not isolated instances. In the first instance, I was waiting for the traffic light at Maple Avenue and Glen Avenue. Glen Rock Councilman Mike O’Hagan labored to get this light installed for years, and it is a useful safety feature – if people pay attention to it. The light changed. I looked both ways, headed out, and a middle-aged bicyclist who had the light against him shot right through what had to have been a red light from his perspective. He just kept peddling on. I never got near him, and neither did the people behind me, but he still had the light against him – and appeared not to know or care about it. This was the second time in two weeks I had seen adult bicyclists blow off a red light that stopped the cars traveling the same way. Drivers had to swerve to miss them in the other case. In the second instance, a group that appeared to be a local boys’ track team was jogging along the sidewalk facing traffic when an older motorist came up from behind the stream of joggers, signaled a left turn into a service station, and almost hit one of the stragglers. The kid was nimble enough to jump out of the way. Use some common sense here: Not only do joggers have the right-of-way on sidewalks, but because the older man was coming up behind the endless and rather annoying stream of kids, the kid couldn’t have seen that the motorist was signaling for a left turn unless the kid was looking backwards over his shoulder while jogging. Most people don’t jog that way. You tend to run into a lot of trees or people trying to pull out of their driveways. A few days ago, I was signaling for a turn off Maple Avenue at Ridgewood Library, when a girl who was about 10 years old darted right out in front of my car across the driveway as if I weren’t there. I was already halfway into the turn. If I had pulled a dead stop, the driver behind me might have kissed by bumper, but because I slow down whenever I see a kid on the sidewalk I never came anywhere near her, though she didn’t seem glad to see me. All this stuff is covered by a quote: “The pedestrian has the right of way.” The statement about the pedestrian having the right-of-way came up twice at a recent work session of the Glen Rock Borough Council. Councilwoman Pam Biggs said that, twice in one day, motorists had ignored the fact that she was already in a crosswalk on Rock Road, and had narrowly missed her. She also said she had seen several pedestrians blithely step out from between two parked cars, so motorists had to hit their brakes or hit the pedestrian. Twice in the past few decades, I have seen joggers get quite upset. One girl literally screamed at me because joggers assume that cars should not ever be in their path. This applies, in their rather self-serving vision of the world, to cars whose drivers are taking maximum safety precautions leaving their own driveways ever so slowly. Most cars are not operated by motorists who have two heads and can The wrong-of-way might be a fatal flaw Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Does the Ho-Ho-Kus Water Utility need an overhaul? It sure seems so. Four years ago, the wrong pumping system was installed at Well 1. When the DEP discovered this in 2009, the well was shut down. It remains so. In 2010, Ho-Ho-Kus exceeded its water usage by 24,000,000 million gallons. Ho-Ho-Kus was fined over $10,000 by the DEP for that oversight. Next time, it will be more, and overuse has continued this year. What seems to be wrong is the absence of a sense of immediacy about fixing Well 1 or getting ahead of the pattern of overuse. Maybe this plant is too complex for the one or two employees who are currently operating it. It may not have the technology to monitor and prevent the overuse. Can it detect defects which might reveal unsuspected causes of overuse? Is ongoing preventative maintenance being conducted there? The borough council may not be paying proper attention to the utility. Are the liaisons trained, even in the basics of public water management? What about the consulting engineers? Those no-bid professional services contracts need to become a thing of the past. The good news is that this is not a financial issue. Almost three-quarters of a $1 million worth of water utility bonds were auctioned in July of this year with a payback schedule from 2012 to 2021. How will this money be used? I’ve requested that insight from the borough and am hopeful that the majority of it will be applied to capital improvements as opposed to just patching up what might go wrong over the next 10 years. What to do now: Retain an expert in this field to conduct an operational audit. This must result in an analysis of the borough’s ability to effectively manage its water resource over the long term. Among its objectives should be identifying technology and equipment needs. The council needs to act by presenting an argument to the DEP that our water allocation must be increased. Seek the best training available for the operators and the liaisons. A liaison can’t be helpful to the utility if he or she knows nothing about the Concerned about borough’s water utility engineering and operation of a water plant. The DEP’s intensifying regulations and oversight make such training mandatory. Improve the communication to residents about what is happening to their water supply on an ongoing basis; limiting it not to just what will happen to them if they use on the wrong day. To date, if not for a fully functioning press, most residents would be clueless. Release the current outside engineering firm. They’ve been somewhat invisible until they had to make the recent appearance at the DEP. A shake-up is in order. This would be a great place to start. Implement a system that correctly identifies the watering scofflaws and take necessary action against them. There can be no favoritism in such a process. These are pretty simple steps for getting our water utility back on track and fixing it now and for the future. After all, as New Jersey’s best community, at least according to New Jersey Monthly magazine, Ho-Ho-Kus should be operating its best water utility. Lee Flemming Ho-Ho-Kus