I hereby nominate the city of Boston, Mass., for having the dumbest...

The BBQ Pit
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…pedestrians and public transport riders in the United States.[sup]1[/sup]

Seriously, i’ve just arrived home after a trip to Boston, and i don’t know what the fuck is up with the citizens of that fair city. When going from place to place and not driving a car,[sup]2[/sup] they must be the biggest group of fucking dimwits i’ve encountered in a long time.

Let’s take the pedestrians first.

Do you morons have any idea what a red hand signal on the crosswalk lights means? Let me give you a hint: it doesn’t mean “Step out into the road so that the traffic (which has a green light) needs to slam on the brakes to avoid mowing you down.” Furthermore, when said traffic does, in fact, manage to screech to a halt just in time to avoid flattening your worthless self, the appropriate response is to step back onto the sidewalk looking apologetic and chastened. The correct response is not to proceed across the road in front of the cars as if you actually had the right of way, inducing your fellow dim-witted, slack-jawed Bostonians to follow suit and completely making a mockery of the very expensive traffic light system installed by the city.

Seriously, what the fuck is up with these people? On literally dozens of occasions during my stay, i saw large groups of pedestrians just step straight out in front of traffic under the assumption (usually correct, unfortunately) that the cars would stop. Sometimes, a group of cars would literally have to wait for a whole cycle of the light—while they had the green—because the sea of pedestrians was never-ending and completely oblivious to the rules of the road. I almost found myself wishing that someone would mow down a jaywalker, just to show the rest of the bleating herd that they need to respect the two ton hunks of metal careening around the city.

Note that i am not anti-pedestrian or anti-jaywalking. I don’t own a car, and if some asshole driver tries to push through a crosswalk when i have the right of way, i’ll make my anger known. I’m an ardent believer in the right of pedestrians to their share of the road, and i’m also a frequent jaywalker.

But fuck, people, there’s a way to do these things. If you are at a large intersection and you don’t have the walk sign, at least look to see if there’s any traffic coming before you step onto the road. Don’t just march out there and force cars to slam on their brakes. And don’t think that wandering across the road in large gaggles absolves you from following basic rules of courtesy and road etiquette. Hell, if only for the sake of self-preservation, try to walk when the cars aren’t coming. Not only is following the signs (or jaywalking only when there are no cars coming) likely to preserve your useless hide, it also makes traffic flow more smoothly and thus makes everyone’s life easier.

Now to the riders of public transit, especially the “T”.

MOVE INSIDE THE FUCKING CAR!!!

How many times does the poor fucking train driver have to ask you—nay, plead with you—to shift your lazy, self-centered ass towards the back of the car in order to let more passengers on? I know that you are the most important person in the universe, and you shouldn’t have to put yourself out for anyone, but ferchissakes would it kill you to take a dozen steps towards the back of the train so that those fifty people on the platform might stand a chance of boarding sometime before the end of the rush hour?

Almost every time i rode the T, i had to elbow my way through these assholes, packed in like sardines, only to find that there was acres of room at the back of the car. At first i was polite about trying to make my way through the crowd, but once i realized what selfish fuckwads these people were, i just barged through. I’m not sure whether the defect that requires these people to stand as close as possible to the front of the car is congenital, or whether it’s something in the air up there in the Bay State, but i sure wish they’d fucking get over it already. They don’t seem to realize that if they moved inside, the entering passengers could board more quickly, and the train would be on its way in a timely fashion.

Now, while in Boston i was staying in an area known as Allston, which is where Boston University is located. When i first noticed these two above-described manifestations of Boston idiocy, it was in the area around the university, so i initially chalked the phenomenon up to college-student morons. It is, after all, a fundamental law of the universe that college students have the God-given right to cross a road whenever they happen to arrive at the kerb, and traffic be damned. But my initial thought that this was purely a college student affliction was soon dispelled by the large crowds of Boston workers who exhibited exactly the same selfish obstinacy at the beginning and end of each working day.

So, Boston, learn to fucking walk, and learn how to use your own public transportation system. This is one area where Bostonians truly could take some lessons from New Yorkers.

Other than that, i love the city. :slight_smile:

  1. Feel free to nominate another city if you see fit. Unfortunately, i haven’t been to every city in North America.

  2. Not having spent any time behind the wheel of a car, i have no real comment on Boston drivers. For the most part, they seemed pretty patient and considerate with the douchebag pedestrians.

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I hear you. I think. My eyes glossed over half a screen down. I love the power of being a pedestrian. Arrogant fucks use the word “pedestrian” as a pejorative. I’m taking it back. I’m a PEDESTRIAN . You got the vehicle but you gotta fucking stop for me. Suck it up Nancy.

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Having just moved away from Boston after having lived there for the past 6 years, I have to agree with basically everything you said. Also, realized that almost everywhere in the Boston area is crawling with freshman from various colleges and universities who don’t know their way around the city this time of year. Be grateful you just barely missed baseball season…

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You just don’t understand. Getting around Boston – by foot, by the T, by vehicle – is more than mere travel, it’s a competitive sport. The drivers have no more consideration for others than the pedestrians, and the color of the traffic lights is irrelevant. Only fools and visitors to the Hub try to cross a street when the light turns. After all, it will take at least three red-light-runners before the traffic actually stops for the red.

Pedestrians therefore regard drivers much as the matador regards the bull – something to be toyed with, frustrated, and made to dance to the matador’s whims. Yes, at times the bull manages to run over the matador, but that merely adds spice to the sport.

As to the T, well, there it’s a game of King of the Hill.

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A lot of people haven’t quite grasped that “right” and “dead” can be concurrent conditions…

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So you are saying that pedestrians can never be wrong even when they are doing something against the law? My how priviledged, unreasonable, and self-centered. You have probably never seen the behavior in the OP expressed the way it is here.

As a resident of the Greater Boston area, I agree with the OP. I am pretty sure that most Boston residents would and they just don’t care. Boston has that problem with almost anything that has competition for finite resources: walking, driving, beaches etc. People are real assholes about that stuff and many are proud of it.

It is a terrible trait for a city to have and makes a great deal of people hate Boston for that reason. I moved to a nice polite suburb on the outer fringes of the Boston area to get away from that type of thing. As you move away from the city, people’s attitudes and behaviors magically convert to normal.

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Have you ever considered that you’re just weak and pathetic and unable to hack it in a real city?

Seriously.

If you’re primarily driving to get around Boston, you’re a dimwit anyway. It’s slower than walking, even without the pedestrians. You can walk from B.U. to the Common faster than you can drive there and park.

The streets are narrow, crowded, and poorly designed. That’s what you get for paving old cow paths. Snow makes the roads 3’ narrower in the winter. Deal with it.

Push your way into the center of the train, and make the trip uncomfortable enough for everyone in your way so they reconsider the relative merits of standing pat and moving centerward. Bonus points if you can time your elbows with the train lurches so that smacking people in the face appears accidental.

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aamco sums up the attitude of many in Boston quite well. I lived in the city for 4 years and that type of thing started wearing on me a lot. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hack it. I just got tired of fighting for everything.

Boston also combines extremely confusing, meandering, and ever-changing roads with a severe lack of signage. The local attitude is that if you don’t know the roads well enough on your own, you probably shouldn’t be driving here anyway.

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You’re an idiot. I didn’t say i couldn’t hack it. I just said these people are morons.

I’ve spent time in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Tokyo, and other cities that i’ve probably forgotten. I have no problem at all with the hustle and bustle of a big city—in fact, i love it. I’m a city person, and probably always will be.

But the hustle and bustle of big cities works best when people use a little bit of common sense. Something you apparently lack if you think that walking out in front of moving cars isn’t problematic.

Hey, moron, how the fuck is this related to what i wrote? I made no comment at all on whether people are better off driving or walking. I agree with you about that driving is probably best avoided in Boston. But it doesn’t change the fact that pedestrians and users of transit could usefully employ some basic courtesy, intelligence, and common decency.

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It’s an interesting phenomenon this one.

I have a sister who drives with no thought given to the possibility that even though she might be in the right, that bloody great truck ploughing down on her is going to do some wicked damage if she doesn’t give way.

It is more luck than good judgement that she isn’t, in fact, dead. She has had numerous (sometimes serious) accidents though… none of them have been her fault of course.
**Footnote to aamco.

Wot mhendo said, with extra raspberries blowin’ your way.

Dickhead.

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mhendo, for Christ fucking sakes, you’re talking about Boston. This is the city where lane markers are, at best, “guidelines”, the city where the use of a turn signal is considered a sign of weakness. One becomes numb here, or you go insane with rage. As a pedestrian, you have two options: Stay on the curb, or accept fate, which is to say, you enter the street, hopefully with the knowledge you have your last will and testament in order. Think “Don’t Walk” signs appear meaningless? Red lights don’t seem to make much of an impression, either. As a pedestrain, you get good at guaging trajectories. That red light means the guy making the left turn might slow down if there’s traffic. As the yellow light means “gun the engine to full throttle and go, go, GO”, really, that driver is now committed to his path, no matter what color the light is. Brakes are only so powerful. Your job as the pedestrian is to see if you can make across alive with maniacs like these people around. Facing such challenges day after day, mere one-way traffic moving under 25MPH hardly registers. That’s the equivalent of a clear street in most other places. You don’t even think about it then, you just walk right out. It’s either that or be stuck on one side of that street forever, never to see your home again.

It’s a mad house. A maaaaaad house. I know it’s jarring, and I can totally understand your frustration. But these are elemental forces at work. Boston transportation has, over what is now the centuries, evolved with tenacity into the permanent horror you see today, and no amount of aneurysm-inducing apoplexy can change that. It’s like railing at a hurricane. You just learn the survival skills (or, to put it less succinctly, adopt the sufficiently fatalistic attitude required to venture into the thourofare without having an anxiety attack), take a lot of deep breaths, assume an almost zen-like stoicism, and get from point A to point B.

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What does that have to do with driving in Boston? Only the desperate and the mad drive in Boston.

I ride the T every damn day, and am seriously considering acquiring a shillelagh. to deal with those doorway standing punk asses.

As for traffic lights… dude. NO ONE obeys the traffic lights. Not cars, not bikes not pedestrians. Nobody.

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Actually, the roads were built primarily on the paths that people took. Only a very small portion of the roads were cowpaths.

I’m just surprised that no one seems to have noticed the number of pedestrians that jaywalk nowhere near a crosswalk, appearing suddenly in the middle of a busy road from behind a double-parked box truck.

In general, the streets and public transit of Boston are the sort of nightmarish environments that bring out the worst in people, not least because one is surrounded by the worst of everyone else.

But, damn it all, I do love the place. (I’d love it more if I was allowed to mow down the idiots in my way with an M-2 machine gun, though.)

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It has nothing to do with driving in Boston, which is exactly the point i was making to aamco.

My rant was not about driving in Boston, nor about whether it is a smart move to drive in Boston. My rant had to do with the behaviour of pedestrians and transit riders in Boston, and aamco suggested that i might be “weak and pathetic and unable to hack it in a real city.” The reason for listing those cities was simply to demonstrate that i have considerable experience with “real” cities, and that aamco’s jab was irrelevant and dumb.

Sounds like a plan

Well, my rant wasn’t specifically about whether or not pedestrians should obey the lights. As i said, i have no trouble with jaywalkers. But, as my wife said to me, “jaywalking is an art that should be practised according to certain rules.” There are times to go, times not to go, and a good jaywalker knows how to anticipate gaps in the traffic and cross without impeding the flow. Boston jaywalkers seem not to have a clue about how to do this.

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You’ve been to Montreal and didn’t notice this sort of behaviour there?

Sheesh, nothing in the OP was in the least bit odd or shocking to me. That’s normal life.

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Baltimore. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well, there’s your reason he forgot…

runs

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Heh. True enough. I shouldn’t diss Charm City by leaving it off the list.

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It’s really not an attitude, more like a lifesaving truism that should be stressed to all out-of-towners before they venture forth into the wicked wild streets.

First of all, there *are *rules, but you need to live here to know them and they’re very subtle. Second of all, a big problem is that in the most congested parts of the city like Downtown Crossing/The Common, or Cambridge or Kenmore Square, or a variety of smaller areas, there are far more pedestrians than cars and the pedestrains have that power. If you’re a veteran Boston driver, you know all the pedestrians are going to cross in a pack and you just make your way slowly through the hot spots. And if you’re a pedestrian, you’re not going to be the only shmoe standing at the light waiting for the little WALK sign. You’ll be all alone for a very long time. You go with the pack or you’re not going to get far. The “T” has it’s own set of rules. I primarily rode the “Green Line”, which I think is the mildest of the various lines. Even still, at one point I was on crutches for a few days - a decent-looking college girl - and noone even thought about giving up a seat except for a few little old ladies. Didn’t expect anyone to, either. I did feel bad for the little old ladies, though, cause they were so disgusted with the younger people around them for not doing so, but I wouldn’t take their seats.

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One thing you should consider, mhendo, is that just because a pedestrian appears to step out in traffic without looking doesn’t mean he actually did that. After living in places where cars won’t stop for you if they know you see them, I’ve perfected the art of using my peripheral vision to appear to be cluelessly wandering into the street. :smiley: