Your article on hit-and-run pedestrian collisions in Jersey City ("On foot? You're in danger", Dec 15) stated that the police pedestrian safety program seeks to keep jaywalkers out of harm's way. With 1,336 pedestrians hit by cars in Jersey City in three years, it's clear that harm has found walkers anyway.

It is time not only to educate pedestrians, but calm traffic on neighborhood streets.

In Jersey City, a full 10 percent of the population walks to work, according to the Census Bureau. Half take public transportation, which usually requires some walking to and from stops. Children routinely walk to school. Thus, the efficiency and safety of pedestrian travel should become a top priority for transportation planners.

But instead, our state government spends only 2 percent of its federal safety funds on pedestrians, despite the fact that pedestrians constitute more than 22 percent of traffic fatalities in the state.

Only this year, the governor prodded the state Department of Transportation to allocate funds for pedestrian safety. At $5 million, it's less than 1 percent of state transportation spending. Meanwhile, city planners want to ram a nine-figure highway through the Bergen Arches as a way to stuff more cars on the Waterfront. Hey, if you can't walk to Newport Mall, at least you can walk inside it!

Enlightened planners are now embracing street design that protects pedestrians with less reliance on police enforcement. It's called traffic calming, and it alerts drivers with sidewalk extensions, reoriented parking and speed humps that they are in the company of unarmored pedestrians.

Rather than educating walkers to stay out of the way, traffic calming emphasizes safe shared use of the streets. It could mean less work, lower enforcement costs, and fewer tragedies in the long haul.