Stopping for Pedestrians

When I walk to school in the morning, I have to cross Walnut Street. It is a rather busy road, and I usually have to wait for a while before there are no cars coming in either direction and I can walk across. Which is something that I don't much mind. There are bound to be some natural troughs in traffic when I can safely cross the street. What does bother me is when cars try to stop for you when there is still traffic on the other side of the street. Then you can't just ignore the car that stopped for you, but you also have to force the other cars to stop as you walk across, which leads to confusion and, well, awkwardness.

I had one of those experiences this morning. Rebecca and I reached Walnut Street just as a large amount of traffic started coming on both sides. We could easily have waited for the end of the Poisson clump, except that another pedestrian began to cross just before we got there. So the traffic pattern was disturbed as cars on both sides stopped to let the pedestrian cross.

A few seconds later, Rebecca and I were at our crossing place, and we thought we would wait as if none of that had happened. The trouble was that one car saw us and remained stopped to let us cross. But instead of immediately taking the opportunity, we stood for a while. Then, just as it occurred to us that we should go across, the car realized that we were not crossing and started to move. So we of course had to stop again, just as the car that had started to move stopped again for us and started waving his hand for us to cross.

So we had no choice now. We started to cross, only to find that the other side of the road was paying no attention to us, cars zooming by at full speed. We stood in the middle of the road for a while, hoping that the car coming towards us would see us and stop. It didn't, but the next one did, and we crossed.

I don't like to complain about people with good intentions, but crossing streets would really be much smoother if only nobody tried to make exceptions to the law to be nice to you.

-Philip