Nine witnesses, one intersection, zero applicable DMV categories — Fresno’s Non-Vehicular Transit Subcommittee convenes under emergency session to determine what, exactly, just had the right of way

At approximately 11:14 p.m. on Tuesday, a Fresno Nightcrawler was documented crossing the intersection of Shields Avenue and First Street using the marked pedestrian crosswalk. It used both lanes. It also, depending on which of the nine witnesses you ask, used neither. The Fresno Municipal Traffic Authority opened Case File TR-00091-NHC by end of business Wednesday. I have a copy of the filing. The entity’s gait is described in the official paperwork as ‘bilateral, methodical, and of unclear origin,’ which is either the most accurate thing a traffic report has ever said about a Nightcrawler or the most accurate thing a traffic report has ever said about anything.

The Fresno Nightcrawler — if you’re new here, and some of you are, though I don’t know why you’d start with a crosswalk story — is a cryptid indigenous to the Fresno area first captured on security camera footage in 2007. It appears to consist almost entirely of legs. Long, pale, jointless-looking legs beneath a small draped body, moving with a quality that witnesses consistently describe as ‘calm’ and that I would describe, having reviewed the Tuesday footage three times on a laptop in the parking lot of a Chevron off Highway 99, as deliberate. It knows where it’s going. Whether where it’s going is a place that exists on any map I currently have is a separate question.

Community Notice

The Lane Question

The issue before the Non-Vehicular Transit Subcommittee is, at surface level, administrative. The crosswalk at Shields and First is a standard two-lane configuration with a painted median guide. The Nightcrawler’s stride width — estimated by traffic camera analysis at somewhere between sixty and ninety inches, pending formal measurement methodology that does not yet exist — placed it simultaneously in both the northbound and southbound pedestrian lanes for the duration of the crossing. This took eleven seconds. The signal gave it twenty-two. It did not rush. Form NV-7, which governs non-vehicular transit incidents in Fresno County, was designed with bicycles, scooters, and what the handbook calls ‘non-standard personal conveyances’ in mind. The subcommittee’s emergency session, which ran four hours and twenty minutes according to meeting minutes obtained under a public records request I filed at seven this morning, concluded without determining whether Form NV-7 applies. They have scheduled a follow-up. I will be at the follow-up.

It wasn’t jaywalking. I want to be clear about that. It waited for the walk signal. I watched it wait. We all watched it wait. The issue is more that nothing in the handbook accounts for something that is essentially all crosswalk at once.

— Councilmember Denise Trautman, Non-Vehicular Transit Subcommittee, Fresno

Of the nine witnesses, seven spoke to me on the record, which is an unusually high rate. I think the crosswalk setting normalized it in some way — it happened in a lit intersection, at a time when people were around, and the entity behaved in a manner that witnesses consistently described as non-threatening and, in one case, ‘almost courteous.’ A woman named Patricia Dumont, who was waiting to cross in the opposite direction, told me she stepped back to give it room and then felt briefly embarrassed about that, and then stopped feeling embarrassed when it passed close enough that she could hear what she described as ‘a very quiet sound, like something folding.’ Patricia Dumont has lived in Fresno for thirty-one years. She is not a person given to drama. I liked her immediately.

I gave it the right of way. I don’t know what else I was supposed to do. It was already in the crosswalk.

— Patricia Dumont, witness, Fresno resident

I’m going to be straightforward about where this case sits. The Nightcrawler is not new. The Fresno footage goes back seventeen years and the entity has been documented in Yosemite and in Chilean footage that WTC covered in 2014, which I have on the timeline in my office. What is new is this: a public record now exists. Case File TR-00091-NHC is a municipal document. It describes a non-human entity using public infrastructure. It was filed by a traffic authority employee named Kevin Solis who told me, when I reached him by phone this morning, that he filed it because ‘something happened and I am required to document things that happen.’ I told him that was exactly right. He said he hoped somebody would figure out the form question because he’d been thinking about it since Tuesday night and it was bothering him. I told him I understood. I do. It’s the right question to be bothered by. Not what it was. Not why it was there. Whether it gets a pedestrian classification. Whether the city of Fresno is now, technically, responsible for its transit experience. I have my own opinions about what comes next. They’re in a notebook. Not the one people ask about.