Brutally Honest Rant - 05/30/07

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Re-thinking the Pedestrian Rule
Audio Transcripts
05/30/07

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – “American Idiot Remix” – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

I have a rather interesting subject to talk about tonight… something that is… dare I say it?... a little bit off the beaten path.

I’m talking about the ancient rule of PEDESTRIANS!

I’m sure you’ve heard about it, right? “Pedestrians ALWAYS have the right-of-way. Always, always, ALWAYS!”

Doesn’t matter if you’re riding a bike, driving a car, or trying to navigate a fat-ass 18-wheeler down a busy freeway. The pedestrian trumps EVERYTHING!

Now am I the only one who sees something wrong with this concept?

Okay, let’s apply some brain cells to this…

Even a chunky pedestrian is maybe 300-400 pounds maximum… before needing a hand-truck to be hauled around. Now you pit that head-on against a two-ton urban assault vehicle going 50 miles an hour, and guess who’s going to win? Here’s a hint: it ain’t going to be the chunky pedestrian, unless the driver of the urban assault vehicle swerves first.

And that’s an urban assault vehicle! Can you imagine the turnout if Chunky decided to pit his odds against an 18-wheeler? I’m sorry Chunky, but that big red vehicle with little chrome doggie on the grill is not a Transformer, and it will NOT turn into Optimus Prime and heroically leap out of the way at the last minute. You will not only lose, but you will be turned into ugly bloody goo!

And yet Chunky still gets the legal right-of-way!

Now WHY is that?

Well the truth of the matter is that it is an OLD tradition that never got revisited, and it sorely needs to be changed.

The Pedestrian Rule is something that got started back when bicycles got started. Bicycles! You know, those two-wheeled human-powered vehicles. And back in those days there were no custom-made multi-geared bikes with an elaborate hand-braking system! They were crude, hard to navigate, and often hard to balance on. But there also weren’t as many people riding them as there were people walking. So to make things easier on the pedestrians, they hobbled the bike-riders by telling them that they had to kowtow to the quirkiness of their foot-walking brethren.

It’s strange because you really didn’t hear anyone say that chariots or horse-drawn carriages had to yield to pedestrians. If a horse came barreling through, you had to scurry out of the way or you would get run over. TRAINS certainly didn’t yield to anyone! If they did, then the whole bit about killing yourself on the rails or tying the damsel in distress up and leaving her on the train tracks would not make for a good cliffhanger. But bicycles… and later automobiles… would be told that PEDESTRIANS would have priority over them.

Now mind you the automobiles back when those things were added on to that rule were obviously not the same kind as you see on the streets today. They were still big and bulky, but they were also very noisy, often hard to start, and didn’t go very fast… AND there weren’t as many people who owned one as there are today. They simply couldn’t afford one, let alone figure out how one worked. Remember, back then you were pretty much on your own if your car broke down. There was no Jiffy-Lube to get you fixed and back on your way in thirty minutes.

Today cars are bigger, faster, and are pretty much the dominant form of transportation in our society. AND they’re driven by some of the most mindless people you can imagine! Soccer moms and business people; folks who have half their brains tied up reading the newspaper, the other half chatting on the cellphone, and are keeping from wrecking their cars out of pure instinct as they’re driving 80 miles-an-hour down the highway.

AND YET a person who is STUPID enough to cross the street in front of these vehicular morons still has the legal right-of-way!

If the idiot on foot is run over by the idiot behind the wheel, then it is the idiot behind the wheel that gets the blame, because THEY are supposed to somehow know that a foot-walking idiot is going to step out in front of them and they’re supposed to be able to bring that 2-ton urban assault vehicle traveling at 80 miles-an-hour to a COMPLETE stop at a moment’s notice so they won’t hit the idiot on foot. I’m sorry, but that’s when the laws of idiot politicians take a back seat to the laws of physics.

So now we have people who have developed this mindset that because pedestrians have the automatic and universal “right of way”, that they can pretty much do whatever they want to and actually expect people driving these big lumbering vehicles to magically come to a halt JUST FOR THEM.

One of the problems with illegal immigration is that all along the roads near the US-Mexican border you have drivers getting into accidents, because when you have people crossing into this country illegally they’re running across those highways, sometimes without a care in the world as to anything on that road. And who gets the blame? Not the people who are here illegally and are mindless and self-centered enough to run across a busy highway, that’s for certain! No, it is the DRIVERS that are getting the blame!

Here in the Metro Atlanta area there has been a continual problem of people getting run over by cars. Why? Because they’re jaywalking! They’re running out between cars, crossing the street whenever THEY feel like it, and sometimes the drivers just can’t see them soon enough to bring their car to a stop.

Even in my neck of the metro area, I see potential vehicular accidents every other day. People who ignore the crossing signals, or simply ignore the crosswalks altogether! It is one thing to do that kind of thing in a store parking lot, folks, it is completely different when you decide to do that in the middle of a busy four-lane road during rush hour!

But perhaps the worst of these pedestrian idiots are the JOGGERS! Hey, I don’t have anything wrong with people who go jogging. I really don’t. In fact watching a beautiful woman in running shorts and a sports bra casually bounce down the street brightens my day… UNLESS she’s running ON the road in front of me and NOT on the sidewalk!

You see… some absolutely self-centered MORON came up with this idea that it is somehow BETTER for joggers to go running on asphalt instead of concrete! And I really wish that the rocket scientist that came up with THAT idea ends up on the front grill of a semi, because now we have all of these self-centered jogging morons with their ears plugged up with MP3 music ignoring perfectly good sidewalks and are instead running either with or against the flow of traffic!

And guess what? WE are supposed to stop and yield for these people! We’re supposed to put ourselves and our vehicles at risk because these JOGGERS want to get a better workout instead of keeping their sorry asses safe and using the sidewalks that were actually DESIGNED for pedestrians to use!

So let’s get brutally honest here… it is high time that we CHANGE the “pedestrian rule” once and for all! Pedestrians need to know that they DO NOT have the automatic universal right of way! Their right of way needs to be null and void when they do something mindless like pit their foot-powered luck against the driving skills of soccer mom behind the wheel of an urban assault vehicle with three screaming kids, a ringing cellphone, hot coffee in their lap, and a Mary Kay Cosmetics tackle box by their side!

They need to know that their right-of-way is null and void when they ignore crosswalks and crossing signals. They need to know that their right-of-way is null and void when they dart out in the middle of traffic without a care in the world as to what is out there. And they CERTAINLY need to know that if they’re out jogging and they consciously decide to forgo the concrete sidewalk for the asphalt road that the only “burn” they will experience will be the heat of a car’s transmission as it fries their sorry asses moments after they become ROAD KILL.

Now folks, I’m not saying that it should be open season on pedestrians now, although that’s probably a good idea since it would hammer the message in quickly. And certainly I’m not saying that places that don’t have sidewalks or crosswalks or crossing signals should now be unsafe for people traffic. I AM saying that people need to get their heads out of their asses when it comes to dealing with pedestrians and traffic. I want you to remember that the people behind the wheel are NOT attentive professional drivers, no matter how many years of experience they may have. In way too many cases, you’re dealing with people whose minds are someplace OTHER than on what is right in front of them.

And you CANNOT expect these drivers to stop on a dime just because YOU want to cross the street in front of them! The days when that particular fantasy could happen are pretty much over with. Now it’s back to treating non-pedestrian transportation like you would back in the days of chariots, horse-drawn carriages, and trains.

(Computer – Some timely stuff… maybe some funny stuff… who knows? You never listen to it anyway!)
(Fade Music In – “Mythodea” by Vangelis)

Here’s a quick history lesson, boys and girls: the people who designed the cities and streets and communities that you live in are usually NOT forward-thinking people. They don’t design streets and roads and neighborhoods based on how things will look like in fifty years or even ten years or even NEXT year! They base their designs on the things that are happening at the time.

That’s why you have cities like Boston and New York with super-narrow roads and alleyways and absolutely NO parking for any of these areas. Back in those days, there were no such things as automobiles. Everybody walked. So they created roads that were pretty much for PEOPLE and some horse-drawn vehicles.

That’s also why SIDEWALKS are not commonplace for many new suburban areas. It’s not because they’re not “people-friendly”, but because they know that most people will get around in a car.

Now if you think that should change… guess what you have to do? Right… you have to get involved you’re your local government. Yet another reason why you can’t fob these things off to the special interest groups.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production; all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/“End of Recording”)

[End of program]
------------------------------