Where I live, there’s a law that says all vehicles have to yield for pedestrians at crosswalks. Of course this would be a thing, otherwise crosswalks would only be as good as any part of the road. Despite this, it’s a largely unfollowed rule, to severe degrees. To the extent that me and some friends have a “running gag” (generous way to put it) where some of us bet on who can wait at a crosswalk point and cross the street the quickest without going ahead before cars decided to stop. Tonight I had to wait twenty minutes for a black jeep to stop, the longest I’ve had to wait for years (and side note, I noticed that drivers of certain vehicle types/colors are more likely to stop for you), so I lost that bet tonight if we were doing it.

Some of us have also apparently led drivers to having bad vibes because some of us have used our phones to take extensive video of what’s going on, causing angry drivers (never referring to the ones that do stop for us) to yell that we’re invading privacy. And the response is always something along the line of “what are you going to do, would you really risk exposing yourself just to make a complaint that someone is making a video” before posting them to groups like the main Tumblr road conflict group (such stuff being hidden from there at the moment).

So what’s the longest you’ve ever had to wait to cross the street? And do you notice any etiquette trends like I describe in that one part?

  • @CoderKat@lemm.eeEnglish
    9•9 months ago

    Jeez, where do you live?

    I’m in Canada and have never had to wait even remotely that long in any city I’ve been a pedestrian in. It’s certainly a poorly followed law in that I’ll regularly see people not stop even if they had tons of time, but the majority of drivers do stop. I don’t think I’ve ever waited more than maybe a minute. I’d usually have to wait longer at a light than I would at an uncontrolled intersection or no-intersection crosswalk.

    That said, the most annoying was in Saskatoon, where I went to university. There’s a road going up to the university where there’s a very long stretch with no controlled crosswalks until you get to the very end. I learned to just cross at the end (even if it meant needing to loop back) because crossing at an uncontrolled crosswalk in the middle was annoying. I would have often been on the top part of a T intersection and there were always parked cars, so being seen as trying to cross the road was the challenge there. But even then it usually wasn’t more than a minute and crossing from the other side was a lot easier because it was so much more obvious that you were waiting to cross. It was also a 2 lane road, but usually when one direction stops, drivers in the other lane figure it out.