Having now walked to my
place of work from my
place of residence every (
business)
day for the past
two months, I have noticed a
disturbing fact about
motorists: they
yield to
pedestrians!
Now, this is not a bad thing, if I am, say, in a crosswalk.
However, I, like
oh, so many other pedestrians, often try to take the most
efficient path when walking, because
walking is slow! This often includes
walking across the street illegally,
jaywalking, if you will. Now, I have never seen anyone just walk out into the street
blindly (outside of a
movie, anyhow); we pedestrians tend to plot out courses that will put us
ahead of the
car coming from the left in the near-lane
1, and
behind the
SUV coming from the right in the far-lane.
This is a standard maneuver2! But for some reason, the
peon in the SUV deems it necessary to slow down - not enough for me to walk in front of
him/her3, of course, but enough to force me to
stand in the middle of the road, while all the traffic which I would have
conveniently
dodged comes roaring by.
It's exasperating, verily it is...
So the next time you see someone crossing the road, and you feel tempted to slow down, DON'T!
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1How ethnocentric of me! If you don't happen to live in the U.S., "ahead of the car coming from the right in the near-lane, and behind the SUV coming from the left in the far-lane" would be the correct sentence
2curses! my enthnocentricity strikes again! "A standard maneuvre". There, how's that?
3Note that I was going to pick "her", rather than "him" here, but decided that that would cause me no end of pain by perpetuating the myth(?) the women drivers are terrible, and I would certainly not want to do that...