Photo by erin*carly.

While taking a walk around the city with some out-of-town guests this weekend, yours truly received disbelieving looks after dropping the knowledge that District police can occasionally be spotted handing out tickets for jaywalking. But such enforcement has apparently slowed — the Examiner reports that, for a number of reasons, there just aren’t as many pedestrians and cyclists getting ticketed for moving against the light, among other infractions:

The District issued 628 citations to pedestrians in the last fiscal year, most of them for jaywalking-type offenses, and has issued 467 in the first 10 months of the current year. That’s on average about six fewer tickets a month.

Citations against bicyclists have dropped more. Bikers were cited 334 times in the last fiscal year, data from the city’s Department of Motor Vehicles show, and 171 times so far this budget year. That’s a drop of about 27.8 citations per month to 17.1.

“We are not aware of the reasons for fewer citations this year versus last year,” said DMV spokeswoman Sylvia Ballinger, referring questions to the agencies that hand out the tickets.

The report offers a few hypotheses for the drop, and most of them make sense on the surface: the tickets don’t bring in that much revenue, more people are biking and walking and improvements in infrastructure. (For example, no one’s getting ticketed at New Hampshire Avenue and U Street NW anymore thanks to the contraflow bike lane which was installed there.)

But perhaps the reason that beat cops are are handing out fewer tickets is that residents are adopting a changing perspective about how we all should behave ourselves while sharing the city’s streets. If that’s the case, you can make the argument that such policing has probably served its purpose.