bicycle, pedestrians, DC
Sep. 27th, 2005 04:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ebourlandIt's nine at night and I finish my network chores at the Kitchen and roll out on my bike and head home on 2nd Street NW with my running lights on. At 2nd and E I've got a green light and I'm about to go into the intersection when a youth steps out in front of me and I swerve to miss him and then I see two more youths just behind him, one on a bike, one on foot striding into the intersection against the red light. I hit the brakes, lifting on my front tire and balancing for a moment, not quite in a spill, and the three youths walk on. My rear tire thuds back down. I'm paused among them within the crosswalk facing the green traffic light.
Gentlemen! I tell them sternly.
They watch me with dull hostility and go on across the street. A car slows to miss them.
On my bike here in DC I see, every day, people stepping into a city street against a light or in the middle of a street not looking right or left. I go cautiously and am careful never to hit any of them. A collision would injure the pedestrian and me and my bike. I have no health insurance and my bike is a big part of my livelihood. And if the fault were his entirely the law would still come down on his side.
In any case I don't want to hurt anyone.
Who doesn't jaywalk now and then? I sure do. It's convenient and often I'm impatient to cross a given street. But I have a method (for lack of a better word) I use every time when I jaywalk: look for cars, look for bikes, look for police. If the coast is clear then I go. The last time I failed to do this I was age thirteen and Franklin Yahzee of Thoreau New Mexico ran me over with his pickup truck and I woke up later in a hospital in Gallup with different parts of me broken. He was drunk. But the fault was mostly mine. I knew it then and I remember it now.
Gentlemen! I tell them sternly.
They watch me with dull hostility and go on across the street. A car slows to miss them.
On my bike here in DC I see, every day, people stepping into a city street against a light or in the middle of a street not looking right or left. I go cautiously and am careful never to hit any of them. A collision would injure the pedestrian and me and my bike. I have no health insurance and my bike is a big part of my livelihood. And if the fault were his entirely the law would still come down on his side.
In any case I don't want to hurt anyone.
Who doesn't jaywalk now and then? I sure do. It's convenient and often I'm impatient to cross a given street. But I have a method (for lack of a better word) I use every time when I jaywalk: look for cars, look for bikes, look for police. If the coast is clear then I go. The last time I failed to do this I was age thirteen and Franklin Yahzee of Thoreau New Mexico ran me over with his pickup truck and I woke up later in a hospital in Gallup with different parts of me broken. He was drunk. But the fault was mostly mine. I knew it then and I remember it now.
