What drives me mad, daily and without fail, in this lovely metropolis by the sea?

Freaking pedestrians.

I’ll throw this caveat in quickly as a defensive measure: I am not one of those drivers that ignore pedestrians or drives in a way that puts them in fear for their life. Far from it. I spent far too many years where my only means of transporting myself from point A to point B were by pedestrianing. (It’s now officially a word. Shut up.) Pedestrians have rights and should be given the right-of-way when they have the right-of-way.

However… in our fair city, a vast collection of yahoos seem to feel that the right-of-way means “everywhere we bloody well feel like it except in the middle of the highway, where we just might show a modicum of consideration. Might.”

The pedestrians here saunter. They perambulate. They freaking well mosey wherever and whenever they want. And do they look to see where they are going and what hulking gasoline-filled chunks of metal, plastic, and rubber are possibly hurtling toward them? Good god NO.

And why is this? Because the biggest problem is that the drivers in this city are enabling this behaviour. They stop, wily-nily, whenever someone decides to walk into the street to — I don’t know — look at something shiny. They stop because they expect to stop, because crappy-ass pedestrians in this city have, after so many years, trained them to stop.

Drivers in this town are sheep.

I spent seven years living in Toronto. God, now that was a town to be a pedestrian in. Not because you felt your life was in danger — I’m certain some out-of-towners probably felt that way, with the speed that everything went at. But by god, things moved in that city. Pedestrians had their rights, and they travelled with confidence. But they moved briskly. It was understood: “I have every right to cross this street right here, but my part of this social contract means that I won’t luxuriate myself in crossing. I’m gonna move with alacrity. Because while I have places to go, so does everyone else, and I ain’t gonna be the one that keeps other people from where they wanna go.”

That understanding is sorely lacking in this city. And it makes me grind my teeth in frustration.

But much to the delight of my dentist.

Notes:

1. This post was brought to you by the words “modicum”, “perambulate” and “alacrity”. They felt under-used recently and wanted to get off the bench. You have to oblige tenacity like that.

2. Because you were good and didn’t interrupt my rant, allow me to present an image from a Google Image search for the word “perambulate”:

I think that says it all.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 11:11 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.