I read recently about a civil engineer in the Neatherland who advocated doing away with roadsigns, pedestrian crossings, etc. under the theory that they train drivers to react to that instead of the actual going’s on around them- every bit of pavement should be treated with the same respect as a crosswalk. I know the other day I was almost run down crossing the street at a crosswalk by a guy who dutifully stopped at the stopsign, but wasn’t actually paying attention tot he pedestrian six inches in front of his car when he started back up again.
It doesn’t make sense to me to declare wide swathes of prime city in front of everyone’s house and everyone’s businesses essentially pedestrian “shoot to kill” zones. I don’t know what the solution is, but there has to be a better way.
There were no such fancy things in the rural place I’ve been brought up in. It didn’t prevent me from making a sport of crossing the road running just in front of incoming cars.
As much as I despise drivers that don’t follow strictly traffic regulations and safety rules (and I really do despise them), I’ve never been under the delusion that the driver is always at fault in accidents involving a kid.
My first thought is usually not that it’s the driver’s fault, but the kid’s. I encounter so many that seem to have a death wish when it comes to traffic.
Still, there were two I encountered where it wasn’t the kid’s fault.
A four-year-old was struck and killed in front of my office several years back. She was with her mother near a busy intersection when her mother did a quick “check if there’s a gap in the traffic” and then jogged across the street against the lights. Her daughter saw the mother go and followed behind a few steps later, darting out from between some parked cars.
Nobody got hurt in the second incident, but it just happened last week, so it’s fresh in my mind. The bike path I use is crowded with families on the weekends, so I usually ride slowly and keep my eyes peeled. So when I saw the two-year-old unsteadily toddling out across the path (8 meters wide, with lots of cyclists), I could slow right down with no problem. What I wasn’t expecting to see, though, was the kid’s mother on the opposite side of the path, crouching down with her arms out, going “come here, honey, come to Mommy!”