Most Likely: Your chances of getting ticketed are slim. However, some cities — including St. Paul and Milwaukee — target jaywalkers as a way to raise money, fining each perp as much as $60.

Worst Case: A collision. In 2001, 1,297 people were killed in the United States while improperly crossing the street, down from 1,322 casualties in 2000. For a jaywalker (jay meant "stupid" or "fool" in early-20th-century American slang), the real mean streets are in Florida, which has five cities in the nation's top 10 most fatal places to be a pedestrian.