Sometimes pedestrians are just as annoying as drivers. I have waited for peds that were crossing the street preventing me from turning right on red and have had them slow their pace to a crawl and turn to me and give me a huge obnoxious smile, like they know if they make me wait long enough I will never be able to turn and will have to wait through another light cycle. It’s like they’re just asking to be run over.
Then there’s this crosswalk at a shopping center that I encounter a lot. It’s in front of a Target. There are stop signs for cars on both sides of the crosswalk. Drivers will wait while the peds clear out of the crosswalk and then slowly move through. Once the cars start to move any peds approaching the crosswalk will stop and wait but I have seen many people just blindly walk on through without watching for cars. They seem to think that the cars must constantly yield for peds whether the car is already moving or not and they need not watch for cars but at some point the peds are expected to yield to the cars, just like at stoplights, or the cars would never be able to get past that crosswalk. It holds everything up when you, as a driver, have patiently waited and allowed everyone to clear the crosswalk and have started through the crosswalk only to have some dumbshit come barreling out of the store and just blindly walk on through the crosswalk in the path of your car.
It goes both ways though.
I’ve been hit (not hard) twice and nearly hit two more times while crossing with the light. Why? Someone stops on the red then turns right while looking left never even looking to see if someone is crossing.
Or maybe we get to the stage where “white motherfucker” is not different of an epithet than “bearded motherfucker” or “redhaired motherfucker” or anyone of millions of other adjectives that ya know, actually describe how people look.
Walking with my mother, we often have to grab her and force her to stay on the sidewalk or to cross in the proper place (rather than ten yards from a traffic light, because that’s where the store she wants to look at is). The other day my brother told her “you know, sometimes I wonder if I could just let you get hit and split the inheritance, but I don’t want to mess up some poor driver’s life…”
When she told me about it, I told her that, speaking as a driver, she deserved the zinger. Mind you, if she got messed up but not killed it would be a pain in the ass for us, so I agree that we better not.
