Re: @ Goldmember
> People who ignore the red light telling them not to cross the rod, would in that instant be jaywalking. That's how it works.
No, that is just one example from the category of jaywalking. The term refers more broadly to any illegal crossing of a road (which isn't illegal in the UK), to walking on roads where pedestrians are banned (which, apart from motorways, we don't have in the UK), and to failing to yield right of way to a driver (who don't have the right of way in the UK). Some US jurisdictions even have separate laws for jaywalking and for disobeying traffic signals, precisely because they're not the same thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#United_States
Even taking your own personal limited definition of jaywalking that you certainly didn't specify in the first place... OK, so I'm walking through town at four in the morning; it's deserted, quiet enough for me to hear a car coming from a quarter-mile away, and I come to some traffic lights. According to you, unless I stand and wait for two or three minutes, waiting for the green man to grant me permission to cross the safely deserted street, I'm so idiotically reckless that I should be punished as a criminal. But, if I cross the same road a few hundred yards away, where there are no lights, I'm perfectly sensible and safe.
And so we're back to trusting every police officer in the country to apply a money-making law selectively, only demanding money from people who they deem to deserve it because they meet Mr Goldmember's ill-defined standard of "idiocy" whilst letting the others off. My example above is fair game: I get stopped and bothered by the police during daylight hardly ever and in the small hours rather a lot -- I suspect because they're bored.
As for your claim that pedestrians and cars are taking turns at traffic lights, you may have noticed that, despite the fact that there are more pedestrians than cars, drivers are given a turn of two to four minutes and pedestrians are given between six and ten seconds to cross the road. Surely, if it were all about doling out road time fairly and equitably, as you imply, they'd get roughly equal shares, or at least a bit more equal than that. But of course it isn't: the system is based on the assumption that cars must never disobey a red light but pedestrians can use their judgement. Which, when you consider the completely different ways they use the roads, is quite reasonable.
Meanwhile, here are the stats for road deaths in the UK and USA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
As you can see, the USA, with their law which you are convinced would make our roads so much safer, has far more dangerous roads than us.
You're the one proposing a new law here, based on a US law that you had apparently misconstrued, to be founded in the UK on a right that you have imagined, and which the statistical evidence available says would probably have the exact opposite effect from the one you claim. And you say I can't understand simple concepts. Feh.