by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

The defining act that encapsulates this burg’s spirit happens day and night at Stanley and Ste-Catherine. Pedestrians cross that 30-foot intersection with wayward disregard for the red light.

Jaywalking is central to our urban mojo. It’s a dance that we can all do, it’s part of our urban swagger, a subversive statement of our anti-authoritarian panache. We’re reclaiming the land, taking back the streets, refusing to buckle under the tyranny of the automobile. Walkers pre-date drivers here and we give no quarter to the vehicular upstarts.

Stanley and Ste-Catherine is, I submit, the jaywalking capital of North America, and it’s the fruit of our insouciant genius.

But the triumph is a lie. Four pedestrians get hit by cars on the island every day, a couple of hundred get grievously injured every year and about two a month are killed on the island. Drivers rack up their totals while pedestrians can only reply with dirty stares.

Since Monday, cops have started cracking down on jaywalkers, just as they announced they would on April 2000, September 2004 and October 2004, among others.

This time, they’ve got 133 new cops to regulate the war and will also focus on ticketing cars burning red lights and stop signs.

In the ’90s, cops pretty much abandoned ticketing. We got fewer cops but higher budgets. Police, already widely reviled for their shoot-first-ask-questions-later ways, ducked additional citizen animosity by halving their ticket output between 1990 and 1996.

Meanwhile, the overseer of this ongoing murderous battle between car and pedestrian has been as helpful as a pedophile babysitter. The city has painted streets with crosswalks, which are about as well policed and as safe as a Yugoslavian intersection during the sniper years.

In theory, drivers stop when a pedestrian steps onto a crosswalk, or else are fined $148. But they rarely do. Crosswalks beckon pedestrians into a false sense of security. Cars will barrel right into pedestrians who attempt to sue them.

Some killer crosswalks can be found at: 1) St-Marc and Baile, where unseen cars explode out of a tunnel anxious to squash. 2) Harvard and Sherbrooke: four lanes of cars trying to shish-kebab you on their antennas. 3) Cedar, across from the Montreal General. At least you’re close to the hospital when you get nailed. 4) Peel and Cypress, where motorists aim to kill visitors outside the tourist office. 5) Bagg and the Main, where cars are bowling balls and drunken Ontario teens are unsuspecting pins. 6) Notre-Dame W. outside the Dome theatre. Those who disapprove of the theatre are invited to express themselves by killing its practitioners.

To his credit, former city councillor Jeremy Searle started to cure the confusion, but squabbles ended his career. He also sought to eliminate those confusing red-hand-white-silhouette traffic lights, seemingly rigged to frustrate and endanger.

Girouard and Upper Lachine is a known pedestrian kill zone. A few weeks ago, a greasy dude in a pickup tried to eliminate me and my three-year-old twins. The city plans to address the corner by increasing traffic there, thanks to mega-hospital planning and introducing a roundabout. Alas, terror mounts.

Some poorer neighbourhoods seem strangely safe. I scouted our anarchic East End, but the only scary thing I encountered was a transsexual sexy serveuse, as well as a 10 a.m. hooker flashing drivers at the train bridge at Ontario. On Wellington in Verdun, cars are so timid you could cartwheel down the middle of the road.

Montreal has long sneered at Toronto for its pussy pedestrian ways. But their crosswalks work. My Toronto friend Rhonda Chung describes crosswalks there as “pedestrian bullying at its finest. It allows us not only to feel empowered but belligerent and untouchable. With the delicate push of a small plastic button I’m able to stop a two-ton machine with but a few flashing lights. Man versus machine. Man finally winning the round.”

In Toronto, she says, it’s not pedestrians but rather drivers who feel crosswalk anxiety. You peek while crossing and deliciously witness “white knuckles clutching their steering wheel wondering just how long I’m going to take.”

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