Take your life in your hands…
…and try to cross the street in midtown at lunch time on a workday.
I actually had a woman in a white SUV speed up after stopping so she could cross the crosswalk in front of me. She waved as she went by.
I wish I could carry a paintball gun and splat her white car with dark red paint. That’s the color she wants smeared and sticky on her front bumper, the way she’s driving.
In fact, if I had a paintball gun, at least three vehicles would have been splatted today–but hers I would have taken pleasure in splatting, all over the front windshield, all over her smug, rude face.
Perhaps one of the famous 3rd Street crows will splat her for me. Imagining this tribute makes me smile.
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Gary Reed
Forum Editor
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how aggressive Prius Drivers can be in Midtown. It’s like they’re trying to compensate for somthing….and it’s not their carbon footprint.
Just because you can cross in a crosswalk doesn’t mean you always *should*. Common sense, people! If there’s a bunch of oncoming cars, wait your turn.
But hey - if you want to walk in front of oncoming traffic, it’s your life - but don’t blame the car when you deliberately walk in front of one.
No, the car stopped at the stop sign, saw me walking, then gunned it through the crosswalk.
Not a case of deliberately walking in front of traffic–no, not at all. She just didn’t want to wait 3 more seconds for me to get across.
I don’t know…I recently moved here from Seattle and one thing that’s really noticeable to me is the pedestrian right of way, or lack-there-of. In Seattle people will stop for you. And they’re not angry about doing so. It’s a city. It’s busy. There are people around. It’s expected. I don’t see what the big deal is. Just about any time you hit a person with your car it’s going to be the car’s fault, so you better stop!
Drivers around Midtown sure seem like an irate, unpleasant lot some days. I live and walk in Midtown, even to work. Drivers DO get angry having to stop for pedestrians. Maybe one out of every 50 cars actually stops. I also don’t understand the dire inconvenience of pausing for 5 seconds to let pedestrians cross. I think a bunch of lonely, isolated, disconnected people commute in from the ‘burbs with their self-centered "me first" view of the world, and just have no genuine regard for other people. People think cities are the hubs of the nameless and faceless, but I know my neighbors a lot better than most people in suburbia know theirs.
The suspicion I have is that the people walking on the street realize that they’re in a city, and people walk, but the people driving for the most part don’t live in the city, they live in the suburbs, where a pedestrian is lower than dirt. I have been known to use very colorful language at the folks who wave at you as they’re tearing through stoplights, although my favorite are the Joe Cools who make a profound effort to avoid eye contact with pedestrians, other cars, stoplights, etcetera, as though their sheer egotism will protect them from getting T-boned as they run red lights.
This is a side-whine that I might give a post of its own, but picking up on the theme that midtown drivers can be an angry, dangerous bunch: my commute home now takes me down N Street past the Capitol and across the intersection at 15th and N where there’s a forced right-turn lane onto 15th that SO MANY people just can’t seem to realize means they are FORCED to turn on to 15th. The far better thing, of course, is to get into the intersection and cut off those driving in the middle lane.
Like the douche who did that to me on Friday and then when I honked out of fear and anger, he flipped ME off and then drove slowly in front and flipped me off 3 more times before turning down 19th. Argh!! WTF?