start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

there are often traffic stings in L.A. where cops will pose as innocent pedestrians and walk into the crosswalk and cops down the street will pull over anyone who doesn't stop.

i always assume around here that people driving up to a stop sign or crosswalk will NOT stop. i assume it more since we had a kid. what i think is amazing are the people who passive aggressively walk across the street or step in front of you as you're driving and force you to stop for them. like...they don't want to get hit but they're being such assholes that they make you screech to a halt. i don't think these people are trying to kill themselves, really. (though our wedding coordinator's husband a few days before our ceremony, he was driving on a freeway here and a 16 year old girl ran out in front of his car and killed herself that way...so nm)

i'm also a fan of not thanking drivers but making passing eye contact with cars that are turning or slowing to acknowledge that I, human person who is walking, acknowledge their presence so they sure as hell pay attention

yeah if someone is driving quickly like nomar said I'll wait for them to go through, but if I'm already standing at the crosswalk and some asshole a block away obviously could see me if they were looking, I'll start to cross but give myself space to jump back

fuck em, they shouldn't be going 45 mph in a semi-residential area with crosswalks and can have fun wearing out their brakes

it definitely scared me when my kids were younger. i wanted them to be able to walk around main street but people wouldn't see them AT ALL when they stood at the crosswalk. but i would just tell them they had to wait until people stopped. and then i would tell them that most people were really drunk in town and they had to be really careful. i still tell them that.

"there are often traffic stings in L.A. where cops will pose as innocent pedestrians and walk into the crosswalk and cops down the street will pull over anyone who doesn't stop."

I would LOVE if they did that here.

I thank drivers all the time just not at a pedestrian crossing where I have right of way.

there are often traffic stings in L.A. where cops will pose as innocent pedestrians and walk into the crosswalk and cops down the street will pull over anyone who doesn't stop.

I wish they did that here.

(xp) hey!

note that this stretch of road I'm thinking of used to be four-ish lanes wide with parking on one side and an occasional turn lane in the middle, and it was re-painted a number of years ago with the idea there are a lot of businesses that could use foot traffic and it's not a long stretch. so it now has, depending on the area, one or two parallel parking lanes, two bike lanes, two lanes for traffic, and a middle turning lane

right after they did this, assholes would be so angry they had to go 30mph and would zoom around you in the bike/parking lanes. wtf.

we live at an intersection on a residential street which is pretty notorious (among the people who live at this intersection) for drivers not stopping. i mean not just merely slowing down a bit, but full on accelerating through the stop sign. speed limit is 25, you see people going 60. i see people with kids in their car doing this. or people drag racing. the "drive like your kids live here" signs don't work, i guess.

9 out of 10 Subarus will always stop for me when i'm at a crosswalk. just sayin'. anecdotal.

after midnight probably 50% of the cars going by don't stop. i kinda don't get it, i feel like it's a symptom of being at least mildly sociopathic.

we live on a street that the police use as a launching pad. it's wide and usually free of cars at night and it gets them across town the fastest. kind of annoying. ambulances too. and drunk people at night use it that way too.

There's an annoying crosswalk near my house at the bottom of a hill. The road curves up the hill so you can't see if any cars are coming until they come round the bend and are nearly upon you. It's a 25 MPH street but everyone uses it as a speed slope like "I don't mean to be going 50 but gravity, man." Of course there's also a school across the street and a blinking caution light, but whatever.

Every time I tried to drag my elderly blind dog across that crosswalk some car would come whooshing down at us. One guy started angrily honking the second he saw us. That nearly made my head explode. I stopped in the middle of street and we had an epic staredown and ended up reversing and going down a side street.

he ended up reversing

xxp see, that's the other thing that annoys me about the pedestrian-friendly street I'm mentioning -- it's two blocks down from a wide road with few stoplights that's mostly empty. if you want to drive fast and bypass traffic... go up two blocks! terrorize the people living up there!

President Keyes for the hardman pedestrian award

we put our left blinker on to go into our driveway the other day and someone passed us from behind on the left! how insane is that? they went into the other lane and passed us because they couldn't wait the TWO SECONDS it would take for us to pull into our driveway!

i actually had a truck go onto the sidewalk to pass me when i was turning into my driveway once. onto the grass because two seconds was too long to wait.

good argument for throwing a box of nails into the grass on that side

that thing of the big truck making a big show of passing you and then you just end up right behind them at a stop sign? always baffles me. then i tailgate them....

omg I hate that, too

I spent over half the year having to detour to a busy road with a shitload of stoplights for part of my daily commute due to bridge construction. Every day, without fail, someone would zoom around me during the one section where the road would open up, and I would always be right behind them at the stoplight. It was on a downhill section! It's like free driving, you just roll!

also bicycles will zip right past you at a crosswalk. the law does not apply to them. even when cars are waiting for me and i'm crossing the streets bikes will zip right past me. because they suck and are above all mortal laws. kinda like when i see someone jogging and i'm waiting for a stop light at the intersection and they just jog through the intersection. because that is like being a car apparently. joggers are cars.

I do a lot of yelling in cross walks.

"Learn to fucking drive!" is a favourite of mine.

all this stuff is rational though. my IRRATIONAL anger on the road is reserved for:

http://www.hamptonsedge.com/images/slide3.jpg

I'm so afraid I might hit them that i really want to hit them! and always with the science professor beards. they outta be outlawed. the bikes. not the beards.

there was a guy who lived near me in center city philadelphia who rode one of those in the streets of philly! city streets! so insane. i don't get it. i think i actually started a thread on those guys once. (99% of them are guys. #anecdotal)

Recumbents are good for people with bad backs who have trouble riding traditional road bikes, fuck off.

One of my friends was nearly killed in Wyoming last fall while cycling from Cleveland to Seattle. She just had the piece of her skull they removed re-inserted last Friday, and she's still re-learning how to walk right now. I don't find jokes about running over cyclists remotely funny.

recumbent bike guys are benign presences but it's weird how they all look like ron rifkin or bob balaban.

I remember reading about an elderly woman who was killed in a crosswalk by a bicyclist blowing through it. San Francisco, I think.

"President Keyes for the hardman pedestrian award"

Hopefully not the "There are old hardmen pedestrians, and bold hardmen pedestrians, but no old and bold hardmen pedestrians" award.

On average, cyclists in the US kill fewer than 1 pedestrian per year.

On average, motorists in the US kill between 800-900 cyclists per year.

Fuck off.

in terms of lapd, i've had the worst luck in the downtown la area, they're super strict there

never had problems on the westside but i'm mostly a law abiding resident

the suburbs are a free for all obv

recumbent bikes really, really need those visible tall flags on them

there's a particular small street in west hollywood/hollywood where a bunch of cyclists have marked territory and if you're on it it's hell because they take up the entire street and go nice and slow

oh stop i'm not gonna hit anyone. but it's fine to express your irrational anger toward my irrational anger here. x-post

i think it takes a lot of faith in your fellow man to ride one of those things though. they are hard to see and people go out of their way to avoid them on the road. often going into another lane entirely to keep their distance from them. which is kinda dangerous. and it's harder for someone who is riding one to avoid people/cars than on a normal bike i would imagine. they just scare me a little when i have to pass one. like its gonna fall over into the road. which is also irrational. there aren't a lot of them though. so, not much of a problem.

nothing beats the moped fear when i lived on marthas vineyard though. so frightening. people weaving in and out of traffic. sometimes riding on the road and sometimes on the side. lots of people who had never been on one before too. even bikes on the vineyard could be scary to drive near/around. they have put more bike paths on the island though. those roads were just not made for that many cars/bikes/etc.

i'm very careful around bicycles. but, like with car drivers, not everyone knows how to ride safely. which is why i'm careful. i just think there are too many big fast vehicles out there now. and most of them see bikes as a nuisance. i don't even think riding a bike is fun anymore. maybe if i lived in iowa or someplace with no people.

recumbent bikes seem much less rapidly maneuverable than conventional bikes. just try imagining a peloton made up entirely of recumbents. it would be static as hell. I think it is that lack of maneuverability that inspires drivers with secret dread. as a frequent pedestrian, I'd hate to have to walk anywhere that a lot of recumbents were zipping around, too.

i also don't care if i have to go slow. which seems to make me the minority. people (cars AND bikes) have to go so fast and they do stupid stuff all the time. definitely makes me angry. especially now when people drive tanks.

and i haven't even talked about how i want to kill the people who don't use their blinkers yet. which is a LOT of people these days. so dangerous!

oh yeah, there seems to be a law I didn't know about that if you're driving in a residential area you needn't ever use turn signals

As a pedestrian the combination of state laws and a regional respect for crosswalks here is still shocking and great, at least compared to Michigan where it's basically fuck you if you're not in a car. I was back there this summer and behind a motorcycle with a Washington State plate and watched him instinctively stop to let some pedestrians cross and all the other cars couldn't understand and just blew by him.

But as a frequent driver around a university this mindset combined with entitled or oblivious students is terrifying as they frequently cross streets without even bothering to look around or signal their intentions, regardless of weather or darkness and completely ignoring the laws of physics required to stop a car going 30 miles an hour on snowy roads.

I think people are Michigan-esque here in that there are a bunch of drivers who think all streets are 55mph highways that occasionally go through small towns/commercial areas even when they are in a dense pedestrian district

A lawyer who specializes in head injuries once gave me the following rundown: imagine a $4 million dollar settlement for a disabling car accident. That's if you were crossing the street at a crosswalk when the walk light was in your favor. If you were crossing the street somewhere other than a crosswalk, cut it in half. If you were crossing when the walk light was not in your favor, cut it inn half again.

A car knocked me off my bike once. I got about $1600 for it.

A bike knocked me off of my horse once. Now I can't add numbers.

A horse and a recumbent bike walked into a bar once. The bartender said, why the long faces?

Rod Stewart walked into a bar once. The barkeep poured gasoline on him and light him on fire and everybody thanked him afterward .

rip he was sexy

LIDL repackaging fairtrade bananas so the package labeling is the same colour as the other varieties. Used to be distinct enough to spot so you could tell at a glance if they had them in. Now got to pick up packs to check.

I work in a corporate building which also provides ESL classes for children in the afternoon. I get IA when these kids run in and out of the bathrooms screaming, with little regard for keeping the bathroom clean. Maybe this belongs in the disgusting savages thread.