Pedestrians are like Rodney Dangerfield. We get no respect. They did a good job plowing the streets for the cars, which means they piled the snow up on the corners, where anybody on foot has to climb a small mountain to get to the road. The problem is often not climbing the snowy mountain, but sliding down the other side and controlling your descent w/o falling on your rear or sliding into traffic.
I have written before about the obvious way the authorities prioritize auto traffic while ostentatiously praising pedestrians. Below – if you look carefully, you see that there is a car in there. Good luck on driving out of that.
This is even the case near the Metro. Presumably some people might be on foot on the roads leading to Metro entrances.
But I have to admit that Washington DC does a relatively better job than Virginia. As you can see from the picture below, they have made a path. Here we have a different problem. Pedestrians tend to walk in front of cars even when the cars have a green light.
I think we have a general disrespect for the law because the law has a general disspect for us. Many drivers in the Washington region don’t seem to understand crosswalks. It is not just because we have a car culture. California is more a car culture than we are but you have to credit drivers in California. They pay attention to cross walks. Many places the “walk/don’t walk” signals require you to push a button and wait a long time. In other places the transitions are too fast. I know of one place where the green turn signal stays on all the time, confusing both drivers and pedestrians.
Above – I just had to include this. It was actually fairly warm in the sun and the guy was snoring loudly. If you look nearby at the bottles, you notice that this guy probably has plenty of antifreeze in his bloodstream anyway. Below is the three-way snowball fight standoff. Something went wrong with my camera settings, which is why we have such “artistry.”
