Why not enforce crosswalks law?

The law is pretty clear about pedestrians in crosswalks. Unless there’s a signal flashing “wait” at them, they have the right-of-way over motorists.

If you’re driving down the street and a pedestrian is trying to cross at an unsignaled intersection, you’re supposed to stop and let the person do so.

But while the law is generally understood, it is obeyed only sporadically and enforced inconsistently.

The four pedestrians who were struck near Comstock Park on Tuesday — a mother and three children — were in a plainly marked crosswalk by Comstock Park. Yet the motorist who hit them probably won’t face criminal charges, a police sergeant said at the scene.

The “very most” the driver would be cited for, Sgt. Rick Dubrow said, is failure to yield the right-of-way to pedestrians. Such phrasing — “the very most” — implies that failing to yield the right-of-way to pedestrians is not a particularly serious offense.

That attitude is consistent with the attention police normally give — or don’t give —the infraction. Once or twice a year, the Police Department conducts an emphasis patrol. They announce that officers will be stationed at a given intersection during a certain time, ticketing drivers who continue through intersections where a police officer posing as a pedestrian is trying to cross.

As many real-life pedestrians know from experience, Spokane has plenty of intersections where their right-of-way in a crosswalk is routinely ignored. Tickets could be issued by the bookful most days of the week.

A policy like that would send a stronger signal to motorists than the publicized, special-occasion approach that has been used. Knowing they were at high risk of a citation might even make drivers as attentive to pedestrian rights as they are to, say, stop signs and red lights.

That, in turn, would help create a more pedestrian-friendly city, the kind that planners equate with civic vitality and vigorous street life.

More important than that, though, it would contribute to the outcome traffic laws are supposed to promote — safety. It might even have spared a mother and three children — as well as the motorist herself — the trauma they experienced in front of Comstock Park Tuesday.