Let me begin by getting an acknowledgement out of the way. Crossing a street on foot does require you to pay attention, and if you're not willing to pay attention, then you really shouldn't expect anyone to feel sorry for you if you end up getting hit by a car. Crossing a street should be a 'dedicated' activity: you shouldn't be doing anything else - making a phone call, texting, whatever - while you're doing it.
My argument parallels an observation made by Tom Vanderbilt in a "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" op-ed that was recently published by The New York Times:
I routinely jaywalk across one-way streets with my young daughter in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I do this not as an act of vigilante pedestrianism, but simply because the times we came closest to being hit by cars were when we had the “Walk” signal and a driver attempted to make a turn.Yes! A fellow veteran of the streets who gets it! As a public service of sorts, allow me to flesh out the preceding blockquote with the following scenario:
(1) You are on the southwestern corner of an intersection and you want to walk across the street from south to north, and you have a green light.
(2) Directly in front of you is a western motorist who has a red light and who wants to make a right turn and go south.
(3) Directly to your right is a one-way flow of traffic that runs from north to south. The western motorist is looking northward, watching the traffic, and is completely oblivious to you, the pedestrian at the intersection. You begin crossing the street. Meanwhile, a brief break in the traffic spurs the motorist to begin turning right.
Folks, I have come exceedingly close to being hit in this exact situation. (If there are any NOLA readers in the audience, this happened to me at the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana in the course of walking from the Exxon corner to the Rite-Aid corner.) So let's say it one more time,
<strong>ly: It is simply not true that it is safer to cross at an intersection than it is to jaywalk; show me someone who holds otherwise and I'll show you someone who is not a pedestrian.The "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" article concludes with a cynical comment on law enforcement's attitude toward pedestrians:
The Los Angeles Police Department may be patrolling on foot in downtown Los Angeles, but it is still looking through the windshield.It's not just the police, Tom: as long as society in general is
looking through the windshield(as you intimate earlier in the article), it should be legal to jaywalk.
And now for something completely different…Everyone else has commented on Arthur Chu's spectacular run on Jeopardy!, so I thought I would as well, being the loyal Jeopardy! viewer that I am.
Arthur Chu was a formidable contestant, and he played to win, as was certainly his prerogative; there was nothing stopping other contestants from adopting his unorthodox tactics and trying to beat him at his own game. As he worked the board, Chu exuded an air of confident competence, and I enjoyed watching him and rooted for him for that very reason, and I'll miss his presence in tonight's show. (Indeed, I suspect it was his demeanor, vis-à-vis his hopscotch approach to the clues, that actually annoyed his detractors.) However, I knew it was only a matter of time until one or more bad bets knocked him off his throne, as happened last night.
FWIW, I missed Chu's first win because the 28 January episode of Jeopardy! was preempted by President Obama's State of the Union address; why anyone would substitute the latter for the former is beyond my comprehension but evidently the directors at NBC felt differently.
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